Snapchat’s design features make it a preferred platform for sex offenders targeting children, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday by New Mexico against Snap, the company that operates the popular social media app.
An undercover state investigation found that Snapchat created “an environment in which predators can easily target children through sextortion schemes and other forms of sexual abuse,” Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a news release.
Sextortion is a growing crime that involves someone posing as a peer coercing minors into sending explicit images or videos of themselves and then threatening to distribute the material unless they are paid. The scam has led to numerous teen suicides, the attorney general noted.
“Snap deceived users into believing that photos and videos uploaded to their platform would disappear, but predators can permanently capture this content and have created a virtual repository of child sexual images that are traded, sold and stored indefinitely,” Torrez said.
The New Mexico Department of Justice has uncovered a vast network of dark web sites that share stolen, nonconsensual sexual images from Snap, with more than 10,000 records linked to Snap and child sexual abuse content in the last year alone, it said. That includes information related to children under the age of 13 being sexually assaulted, the agency said.
Investigators created a fake Snapchat account for a 14-year-old girl named Heather, through which they found and exchanged messages with predatory accounts, including ones named “child.rape” and “pedo_lover10,” the state said.
In October last year, Alegandro Marquez pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 years in prison for raping an 11-year-old girl he met through Snapchat, the lawsuit and state officials said.
Snap said it is reviewing the complaint and will respond in court.
“We work diligently to find, remove and report malicious actors, educate our community and give teens, as well as parents and guardians, tools to help protect themselves online,” a Snap spokesperson said. The company has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to increase safety, the spokesperson said.
According to the complaint, more than 20 million American teenagers use Snapchat and half of the country’s teenagers use the app every day.
New Mexico filed an application in December a similar costume against Meta-platforms and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
