SALT LAKE CITY, UT—Attorney General Reyes has joined Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin and a coalition of 25 other state attorneys general on a letter to Meta demanding that Instagram stop monetizing child exploitation content.
“New information has emerged about Instagram’s blatant disregard for child safety, even after Meta has claimed to have implemented safeguards to stop child sex abuse material or CSAM on its sites,” said Attorney General Reyes. “We can no longer trust that Meta is listening to its own internal watchdogs or following through on its touted safety systems to protect children from predators.”
According to The Wall Street Journal in an article on February 22, Meta’s own staff raised alarms after Instagram enabled those running ‘parent-managed minor accounts’ to profit by providing ‘pin-up style photos of children’ to male subscribers who were ‘often overt about sexual interest’ in children. Worse, Meta actively promoted child-modeling subscriptions to ‘likely pedophiles.’ On the same day, The New York Times similarly reported that men in online chatrooms frequently praised ‘the advent of Instagram as a golden age for child exploitation.’
“Over the past decade, Attorney General Reyes has led the fight against human trafficking and child exploitation. His passion has ignited government leaders across the globe to understand the many different faces of these horrific crimes,” said Missy Larsen, Utah’s Statewide Coordinator for Child and Family Safety. “The fact that 26 states are fed-up with Meta’s inability to prioritize children over profits offers hope to the millions of children and families in the world who have been, or are at risk of, being victimized.”
Arkansas Attorney General Griffin sent the letter to Meta. In addition to Attorney General Reyes, the attorneys general of the following states also signed on to the letter: Arkansas, Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.
