Snap sued by New Mexico over Snapchat kid sextortion

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.”

The suit calls Snapchat “a breeding ground for predators to collect sexually explicit images of children and to find, groom and extort them.”

New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez, who has a pending lawsuit against Facebook owner Meta for allegedly enabling the sexual exploitation of children, in a statement said, “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.

“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.

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.

“Snap was specifically aware, but failed to warn children and parents, of ‘rampant’ and ‘massive’ sextortion on its platform — a problem so grave that it drives children facing merciless and relented blackmail demands or disclosure of intimate images to their families and friends to suicide,” the suit says.

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