A coalition of 27 state attorneys general have issued a letter to Meta demanding that Instagram immediately stop monetizing child exploitation content and prohibit child-modeling accounts altogether.
“Meta’s negligence and lack of proper safeguards only aids and abets child exploitation. Even after Meta employees alerted leadership that its algorithms promoted images of minors to users who had demonstrated pedophilic or predatory interests on its platforms, the company failed to take any real action or ban the monetization of underage accounts,” Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares.
In The Wall Street Journal article, Meta’s own staff alerted leadership that new paid subscription features on Facebook and Instagram were being misused by “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. Meta allegedly 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.”
In addition to Miyares, the attorneys general of the following states signed 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, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
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Rebecca Barnabi
