New Mexico attorney general Raúl Torrez is suing Snapchat’s parent company for sharing child sexual abuse material on the social-media platform and facilitating sextortion, in which adults coerce minors into sharing explicit images to extort financial or sexual favors from the underage victims.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Santa Fe, alleges Snapchat is “a breeding ground for predators to collect sexually explicit images of children and to find, groom and extort them,” thanks to the app’s failure to verify the ages of users. Snapchat, which allows photos and videos to disappear after 24 hours, has become the “predominant forum” for such illicit activities, the suit states. It also asserts that Snap has facilitated the trafficking of children, guns, and drugs.
The new suit is the product of a months-long undercover investigation, during which the New Mexico Department of Justice found more than 10,000 records involving Snap and child sexual abuse material on the dark web in the last year, Torrez announced among the state department’s primary findings. The records included images and videos of minors under the age of 13 getting sexually assaulted.
New Mexico officials concluded Snapchat is the largest source of such material from its extensive investigation of various dark-web sites.
“Snap has misled users into believing that photos and videos sent on their platform will disappear, but predators can permanently capture this content and they have created a virtual yearbook of child sexual images that are traded, sold, and stored indefinitely,” Torrez said.
Undercover investigators also discovered many Snapchat accounts that shared sexually explicit material or engaged in sextortion can be found easily via the app’s recommendation algorithm. The New Mexico DOJ then set up a fake account of a 14-year-old girl to exchange messages with obvious sexual predators, whose account usernames included “child.rape” and “pedo_lover10.”
The in-built Snap Map even enables predators to find and potentially meet children in real life.
Despite its past statements indicating otherwise, Snap knows its unique features are potentially dangerous for younger users, the suit argues. In fact, New Mexico’s complaint accuses Snap of repeatedly making false statements “regarding the safety and design of its platforms” that contradicted its own internal findings.
“Snap was specifically aware,” the suit reads, “but failed to warn children and parents, of ‘rampant’ and ‘massive’ sextortion on its platform — a problem so grave that it drives children facing merciless and relentless blackmail demands or disclosure of intimate images to their families and friends to suicide.”
Snap will respond to the New Mexico attorney general’s claims in court after carefully reviewing the complaint, a spokesperson told National Review. “We share Attorney General Torrez’s and the public’s concerns about the online safety of young people and are deeply committed to Snapchat being a safe and positive place for our entire community, particularly for our younger users,” the Snap spokesperson said.
“We have been working diligently to find, remove and report bad actors, educate our community, and give teens, as well as parents and guardians, tools to help them be safe online,” he added. “We continue this work in collaboration with law enforcement, online safety experts, industry peers, parents, teens, educators and policymakers towards our shared goal of keeping young people safe online.”
Earlier this year, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel testified before Congress about how his company has been working to “proactively detect these bad actors on our service and seek to intervene before the conversation can escalate to extortion.” Spiegel boasted that his team typically acts “within 15 minutes” to prevent sextortion after first receiving reports of harassment or sexual content from its user base. He disclosed that of the 690,000 instances of child sexual abuse material that Snap reported in 2023, 1,000 arrests were made.
New Mexico is also pursuing litigation against Meta for encouraging child sexual exploitation on its Facebook and Instagram platforms. Torrez made significant progress in the case this year after Meta’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit was denied.
New Mexico intends to hold both social-media parent companies “accountable for prioritizing profits over children’s safety,” the Democratic attorney general said.