A senior Meta researcher alerted company executives that as many as 500,000 minors could be targeted daily by online predators on Facebook and Instagram, according to internal documents unsealed ahead of a major New Mexico trial.
The New York Post reports that the explosive documents were made public as opening arguments are set to begin Monday in a lawsuit filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez (D) against the social media giant. The state accuses Meta of exposing children to sexual exploitation and mental health harm through inappropriate messages, sextortion schemes, and human trafficking.
According to court records, Malia Andrus, who worked in child safety-related positions at Meta from August 2017 to October 2024, sent an internal email in June 2020 warning about the scale of the problem. She estimated that approximately 500,000 victims per day in English-speaking markets alone were being targeted with sexually inappropriate messages.
“We expect the true situation is worse,” Andrus wrote in the email cited in pretrial documents.
In another message, Andrus expressed concern about how the massive user bases of Facebook and Instagram had given predators unprecedented access to potential victims. “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.”
The New Mexico lawsuit is one of several legal challenges Meta faces this year regarding child safety on its platforms. Last week, a separate trial began in California accusing Meta and Google-owned YouTube of fueling social media addiction in young users.
Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a watchdog organization, called the multiple trials a “split screen of Mark Zuckerberg nightmares.” Haworth stated: “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. The world is watching, Meta’s reckoning has arrived, and the consequences have just begun.”
New Mexico officials claim their investigation uncovered disturbing details about conditions on Meta’s platforms. Test accounts created by state investigators were allegedly flooded with adult sexual content and contacted by suspected child predators. The lawsuit claims these accounts received pictures and videos of genitalia and even an offer of a six-figure payment to appear in pornographic videos.
Additional emails from Andrus criticized Meta’s age-verification systems as inadequate. She reportedly warned that the tools designed to keep underage users off Instagram were easily circumvented. “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.
In a statement to Breitbart News, a Meta spokesperson said:
The number discussed in this 2020 email exchange does not refer to individual victims or incidents of child exploitation. The measurement technology we used at the time used an overly wide and cautious set of criteria, and as a result counted many benign interactions. This number significantly reduced after we refined and improved our measurement technology. Since 2020, we’ve introduced a range of new measures to help reduce potential grooming and inappropriate interactions with children – including preventing adults from starting private chats with teens they’re not connected to, and using improved behavioral signals to identify potentially suspicious adults and preventing them from finding and following teens.
The state’s legal filing emphasized Andrus’s extensive knowledge of Meta’s handling of online sexual abuse issues, noting she served on a “Groomers Taskforce, which examined adult predators who solicited minors.” The filing also stated: “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.”
Before the trial, Meta’s attorneys attempted to exclude several topics from proceedings, including the company’s AI chatbots, research surveys about harmful effects on mental health, and details from New Mexico’s undercover investigation. However, the judge rejected these requests during pretrial hearings.
Meta has responded by accusing Torrez of running an “ethically compromised investigation into Meta that knowingly put real children at risk.”
Read more at the New York Post here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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