As Meta reportedly scrambles this week to deal with a ban on its acquisition of a Singapore-based AI startup, hundreds of thousands of sexual exploitation cases linked to the company bloom each day, according to one expert.
That revelation came out earlier this year during the landmark trial in New Mexico against Meta, parent company to social media platforms Facebook and Instagram. According to The New York Post, the state’s lawyers cited an internal email in which Malia Andrus (who held child safety-related roles at Meta from August 2017 to October 2024) wrote that around 500,000 victims per day “in English markets only” were targeted with sexually inappropriate messages.
“We expect the true situation is worse,” Andrus said in a June 2020 email cited by the Post.
Sexually inappropriate messages can be part of enticement schemes that involve an individual or individuals “communicating with someone believed to be a child via the internet with the intent to commit a sexual offense or abduction,” the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children explained. Enticement is a broad category that includes sextortion.
From 2021 to 2023, the number of online enticement reports increased by more than 300%, the NCMEC said. In 2024, the organization received more than 456,000 reports of online enticement.
For example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s field office in Philadelphia, Penn., has warned the public about a cybercrime ring called “The Community” that targets teens and young adults through social media and gaming sites. Andrew Klopfer, assistant special agent for cyber programs in the FBI’s Philadelphia office, said “there’s an encouragement to commit acts of violence that are videotaped, sexual assaults that are videotaped, animal cruelty that’s videotaped.”
“It’s a very pervasive problem and here in Michigan we’ve had some young adolescents commit suicide because of the aggressive nature of the perpetrators who are extorting our youth,” Cheyvoryea Gibson, special agent in charge of the FBI in Michigan, told reporters last March. He also said that the FBI was also concerned about cases that were not being reported due to victims being ashamed or other factors.
Gibson said that predators will often stalk victims and form a bond with them over a shared interest before requesting sexually explicit photos. Facebook and Instagram’s massive user bases have basically handed predators a tool for targeting children, Andrus said in another message cited by the Post.
“I just think, nowhere in the history of humanity could you have a secret conversation with 1,000 people,” she wrote. “I’m actually scared of the ramifications here.”
Last December, Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health noted that the “rapid advancement and adoption of artificial intelligence,” has also “contributed to an explosion in the creation and distribution of child sexual abuse material.” Audacy has reported on a case of a teen taking their own life after developing a relationship with a chatbot as well.
Meta purchased Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup with links to China, for $2.5 billion and “quickly moved to “integrate the new technology into its systems,” according to the Wall Street Journal. However, the outlet reported this week that China banned Meta’s acquisition of Manus on national security grounds. Now, Meta is “preparing to have to unwind its transaction,” the WSJ said.
While Audacy previously reported on Meta’s announcement that it restricts teen Instagram accounts to filter out content above PG-13 with help from AI, sometimes that method doesn’t work. Haley McNamara, executive director and chief strategy officer of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, said in an op-ed published Tuesday in The Hill that she doesn’t think Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is doing enough to prevent exploitation of children facilitated by its platforms.
“Under Zuckerberg’s leadership, Meta has consistently prioritized growth and profit over the safety of children,” she said. “Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp have become breeding grounds for child sexual abuse, grooming, sextortion, and sex trafficking.”
McNamara said that Instagram alone recommended 1.4 million potentially dangerous adults to teens in a single day, that Meta had a 17-strikes policy before suspending accounts flagged for engaging in sex trafficking and that Meta’s AI chatbot was intentionally built with guidelines permitting “romantic or sensual” conversations with minors.
“I am personally familiar with Meta’s approach to child safety. I was deposed as an expert witness in the recent landmark New Mexico lawsuit against Meta for facilitating child sexual exploitation,” McNamara said. “For years, different Meta platforms have been named to our organization’s Dirty Dozen List of mainstream contributors to sexual exploitation. In my deposition, I shared my years of experience trying to engage with Meta – how we repeatedly warned about the dangers children faced on its platforms, how dangerous design features were left in place and how parents were misled to believe that bullying was the only real risk their kids may face.”
