A top Meta researcher warned the company’s executives that there could be as many as 500,000 cases of online sexual exploitation per day on Facebook and Instagram, according to explosive documents that were unsealed on the eve of a landmark jury trial.
Opening arguments begin Monday in New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez’s case in state court, which accuses Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant of exposing kids to the “twin dangers of sexual exploitation and mental health harm” through creepy messages, “sextortion” schemes and human trafficking.
The result, the state claims, is a teen social media crisis that has led to anxiety, depression, self-harm and increasing suicides.
Ahead of the trial, 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 creeps targeted “~500k victims per DAY in English markets only” with sexually inappropriate messages.
“We expect the true situation is worse,” Andrus said in a June 2020 email, according to court records.
In another chilling message, Andrus noted that the massive user bases of Facebook and Instagram have effectively handed predators a tool to target kids on a scale that was previously unimaginable.
“I just think, nowhere in the history of humanity could you have a secret conversation with 1000 people,” she wrote. “I’m actually scared of the ramifications here.”
New Mexico’s lawsuit is one of several legal battles that Meta faces this year – and will seek to shine a light on safety lapses that have caught the attention of US lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Last week, a bellwether trial accusing Meta and Google-owned YouTube of fueling social media addiction in young users began in California, with hundreds of victims’ families and school districts as plaintiffs. Elsewhere, the FTC last month appealed its loss in the major antitrust lawsuit seeking a breakup of Meta.
The multiple trials accusing Meta of exposing children to harm are a “split screen of Mark Zuckerberg nightmares,” according to Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a watchdog group.
“These are the trials of a generation; just as the world watched courtrooms hold Big Tobacco and Big Pharma accountable, we will for the first time see Big Tech CEOs like Zuck take the stand,” said Haworth. “The world is watching, Meta’s reckoning has arrived, and the consequences have just begun.”
New Mexico’s case has been closely watched in part because of the garish details that arose during its probe of Meta’s practices.
Test accounts set up by state investigators were allegedly bombarded with adult sex content and outreach from alleged child predators, including “pictures and videos of genitalia” and an offer of a six-figure payment to star in a porn video, the lawsuit claims.
In other emails detailed in pretrial filings, Andrus allegedly ripped the age-verification tools meant to keep underage users off Instagram, warning that they were easily fooled.
“Our investigators have given feedback that almost every time they encounter an age liar on IG (in a child safety context) the age prediction is incorrect (aligns with the age they falsely claim to be),” Andrus wrote, according to court documents.
A Meta spokesperson said the internal discussions cited in the filings took place as part of an active effort by the company to protect kids.
“While New Mexico makes sensationalist, irrelevant and distracting arguments, we’re focused on demonstrating our longstanding commitment to supporting young people,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “For over a decade, we’ve listened to parents, worked with experts and law enforcement, and conducted in-depth research to understand the issues that matter most.”
Andrus, who left Meta in 2024 and now works in an online safety role for an OpenAI, did not return a request for comment.
The state argued Andrus has deep knowledge of Meta’s handling of the online sex abuse problem because she worked extensively on the internal research, including serving as a member a “Groomers Taskforce, which examined adult predators who solicited minors.”
“Ms. Andrus also commented on Meta’s failure to adequately invest in child safety, the misleading nature of some of its publicly reported child safety metrics, and the (undisclosed) immaturity of Instagram’s child safety measures,” the state’s filing said.
Ahead of the trial, Meta’s attorneys tried to block any mention of several sensitive topics – including the company’s AI chatbots, research surveys detailing the harmful effects of its products on mental health and details of the bombshell undercover operation that New Mexico investigators conducted to reveal instances of online sex abuse.
Judge Biedscheid ultimately rejected the requests during pretrial hearings.
Elsewhere, internal documents showed that Zuckerberg signed off on allowing minors to use Meta’s AI chatbot companions even after safety staffers warned that they could be used for romantic or sexualized conversations. Reuters was first to report on the documents.
Torrez has aggressively criticized Zuckerberg ahead of the trial. As The Post reported in December, he called Instagram’s implementation of a PG-13 rating system to shield kids from illicit content as a “dangerous promotional stunt that lulls parents into a false sense of security.”
Meta has fired back, accusing Torrez of making claims that are “littered with factual errors and misrepresentations” and ignoring the company’s progress in improving guardrails for kids.
