New Mexico has sued Snapchat owner Snap and accused its policies as well as design features of facilitating the distribution of child sexual exploitation material. New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez said that a months-long investigation was conducted, which found that Snapchat was a primary platform for sextortion, in which a predator pressurises a minor to send explicit photos or videos and then threatens to distribute it to a wider public unless they offer more sexual content or money. According to a Reuters report, a Snap spokesperson said that the company is reviewing the complaint and it would respond to the same in court.
The spokesperson added that the company has invested about hundreds of millions of dollars into its trust and safety teams and would continue working with law enforcement, online safety experts, and other groups.
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Allegations Against Snap
Torrez in a statement said, “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.”
During its investigation into Snapchat, the state’s Department of Justice created a fake Snapchat account under the name Heather, a 14-year-old. This account interacted with another account named “child.rape” and several others with explicit titles.
The investigators also discovered 10,000 records tied to Snapchat and child sexual abuse material on dark websites. They reported that Snapchat was “by far the largest source of images and videos among the dark web sites examined.”
In December, New Mexico filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms with similar claims, accusing the company of not adequately safeguarding children from sexual abuse and exploitation.