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The New Mexico attorney general filed a lawsuit against Snap, alleging that its social media app Snapchat’s design and algorithmic recommendations “openly foster and promote illicit sexual material involving children and facilitate sextortion and the trafficking of children, drugs, and guns.”
“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,” Attorney General Raul Torrez said in a statement.
“Through our litigation against Meta and Snap, the New Mexico Department of Justice will continue to hold these platforms accountable for prioritizing profits over children’s safety,” Torrez said.
Torrez previously sued Meta, the owner of Facebook, alleging that the social media platform also enables sexual exploitation of children.
In May, a New Mexico judge denied Meta’s request to dismiss that suit.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez discusses the nexus of public safety, mental health and adverse child experiences during a news conference following a summit in Albuquerque, N.M., Friday, Nov. 3, 2023.
Susan Montoya Bryan | AP
CNBC has requested comment from Snap about Torrez’s lawsuit, which was filed in the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe County.
The suit alleges that Snap “repeatedly made statements to the public regarding the safety and design of its platforms that it knew were untrue,” or that were contradicted by the company’s own internal findings.
New Mexico’s Department of Justice, which Torrez leads, in recent months conducted an investigation that found that there was a “vast network of dark web sites dedicated to sharing stolen, non-consensual sexual images from Snap” and that there were more than 10,000 records related to SNAP and child sexual abuse material “in the last year alone,” the department said.
The suit alleges violations of New Mexico’s unfair trade practices law.
– Additional reporting by Josephine Rozzelle
