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Using Facebook and Instagram, Meta has estimated that about 1,00,000 children are sexually harassed online every day, according to a report by The Guardian.
Legal filings include several allegations against the company based on information the New Mexico attorney general's office received from presentations by Meta employees.
The records inform about an incident in 2020 when the 12-year-old daughter of an Apple executive was solicited through Instagram's messaging product IG Direct.
According to the publication, a Meta employee said, "This is the kind of thing that pisses Apple off to the extent of threatening to remove us from the App Store."
Another Meta employee had said that his daughter had been solicited through Instagram and his efforts to fix the problem were ignored.
The latest filing in the lawsuit was initiated by the New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez’s office on 5 December, alleging 'Meta’s social networks have become marketplaces for child predators'.
Torrez has accused Meta of enabling adults to find, message and groom children, with the company denying the claims saying that the effort "mischaracterises our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents".
Issuing a statement in the filing, Meta said, "We want teens to have safe, age-appropriate experiences online, and we have over 30 tools to support them and their parents. We’ve spent a decade working on these issues and hiring people who have dedicated their careers to keeping young people safe and supported online."
According to the publication, a 2021 internal presentation on child safety was referenced in the lawsuit, a slide of which stated that Meta is “underinvested in minor sexualisation on IG, notable on sexualised comments on content posted by minors. Not only is this a terrible experience for creators and bystanders, it’s also a vector for bad actors to identify and connect with one another.”
Concerns over child safety were highlighted, with Meta saying that it has taken "significant steps to prevent teens from experiencing unwanted contact, especially from adults".
An investigation by the publication was followed in the New Mexico lawsuit which revealed how Meta is failing to report or detect the use of its platforms for child trafficking.
The investigation also showed how private messaging services like Messenger and Facebook are used by traffickers to communicate for buying and selling children.
Meta received widespread criticism for introducing end-to-end encryption for messages on Facebook and Messenger.
Child safety experts argued over the encryption as it obstructs efforts to rescue child sex-trafficking victims and their prosecution.
Encryption hides the contents of a message from everyone except the sender and the receiver by converting them into unreadable cyphers.