April 2, 2026
Jury finds Meta guilty of failing to protect minors from online sexual exploitation.
On March 24, 2026, a New Mexico jury found Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Occulus) guilty of failing to protect minors from online sexual exploitation. The NMDOJ press release said this:
“The jury’s verdict is a historic victory for every child and family who has paid the price for Meta’s choice to put profits over kids’ safety,” said New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez. “Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew. Today the jury joined families, educators, and child safety experts in saying enough is enough.”
The jury ordered Meta to pay the maximum fine of $5000 per violation. The civil judgment totaled $375 million and was the first of its kind. Forty other states are pursing legal action against Meta.
The very next day in a California civil case, Meta and Youtube were found guilty of negligence. They ruled that the companies operated products that addicted minors and did not warn users of the harms. Evidence revealed in the trial also showed Meta’s own executives knew this too.
What we saw in the courtroom today confirms what parents, researchers, and child safety advocates have known for years: Mark Zuckerberg built a machine designed to exploit children for profit, and he knew exactly what it was doing to them,” said Sacha Haworth, Executive Director of The Tech Oversight Project. “Meta’s own experts were unanimous: every single one agreed that Instagram should ban the beauty filters driving body dysmorphia and eating disorders in young girls, but Zuckerberg ignored them and buried the evidence.
The New Mexico case is especially important because AG Raúl Torrez’s sting operation proved Meta had created a “breeding ground” for sexual predators. Evidence in the case provided by Meta itself showed that over 100,000 children were exploited daily across its platforms. And the company had done nothing meaningful to stop it even when its leadership knew about it…even when one of its own executives raised concerns after his 12 yr. old daughter received unsolicited nude photos to her account.
Background information on this case may be quite helpful for parents to fully understand just how dangerous the Meta platforms are and why minor children should not be on them.
From the New Mexico Department of Justice Press Release announcing the lawsuit, December 6, 2023:
Over the past few months, the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office carried out an undercover investigation of Meta’s platforms, creating decoy accounts of children 14-years and younger. The Office gathered evidence that those platforms have:
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- Proactively served and directed to underage users a stream of egregious, sexually explicit images — even when the child has expressed no interest in this content;
- Enabled dozens of adults to find, contact, and press children into providing sexually explicit pictures of themselves or participate in pornographic videos.
- Recommended that the children join unmoderated Facebook groups devoted to facilitating commercial sex
- Allowed Facebook and Instagram users to find, share, and sell an enormous volume of child pornography;
- Allowed a fictitious mother to offer her 13-year-old daughter for sale to sex traffickers and to create a professional page to allow her daughter to share revenue from advertising.
Mr. Zuckerberg and other Meta executives are aware of the serious harm their products can pose to young users, and yet they have failed to make sufficient changes to their platforms that would prevent the sexual exploitation of children,… Meta fails to remove Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) across its platforms and enables adults to find, contact, and solicit underage users to produce illicit pornographic imagery and participate in commercial sex.
Shockingly, investigators found that certain child exploitative content is over ten times more prevalent on Facebook and Instagram than it is on Pornhub and OnlyFans. [Emphasis added.]
The full complaint can be read here, but many of the images found on Meta’s platforms have been redacted because they were deemed too “graphic and disturbing.”
Some excerpts from the complaint:
Meta is a major facilitator of CSAM and CSEC.” (CSAM stands for Child Sexual Abuse Materials and CSEC Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children.) And Grooming. “Meta has allowed FB and Instagram to become a MARKETPLACE for predators in search of children on whom to prey.” [Emphasis added.]
Meta fails to protect children from online predators, inappropriate content, and exploitation because it lacks basic parental controls and notifications.
1.It doesn’t require that their accounts be linked to their parents.
2.Meta doesn’t address age verification and or limit illicit content that shouldn’t be going to minors.
3.It doesn’t restrict them from being online after hours.
4.It doesn’t require parents be notified when their child is interacting with an adult account, follows a new account, or even accesses illicit content or accounts that have already been flagged.
Meta admits they COLLECT user data and DIRECT ad content toward that user with algorithms. They have created a highly customized marketing strategy targeted to the individual on the platform to keep them on the platform as long as possible.
Meta failed to disclose that their algorithms create what are called “flywheels” or “rabbit holes”.
Flywheels are sophisticated “positive feedback loops that build momentum, increasing the payoff of incremental effort.” The AI algorithms make it appear that “good things you do lead to more good things ‘just happening’.” Rabbit holes are similarly designed to keep kids on the platform by directing them to similar content.
BUT the Meta algorithms all share a FATAL FLAW. They do not distinguish between good and bad content –what is permissible and what is not. The algorithm does not know “right from wrong.” THEREFORE, if a young user clicks on a certain type of content—whether accidentally, out of curiosity, or intentionally—the algorithm will recommend more of that type of content.
And remember how we were told “Pizzagate” was fake news? New Mexico Investigators discovered a massive presence of “Pizza” accounts providing access to child porn everywhere on the platform. “Cheese pizza” is a well-known pedophile code for child sexual abuse. Many of those accounts were listed in the complaint.
This is not the first time Facebook has been accused of harm. The Wall Street Journal published a long form series called The Facebook Files years ago which documented serious problems.
Back in 2014, Facebook was caught conducting a one week online “research” experiment in 2012, to see if they could “change” the mood of its users by controlling or suppressing the content they saw. They did this to almost 700,000 Facebook users without their knowledge. X user Nav Toor posted about it on March 26, 2026. You can read some of the published research about the experiment here and here. But as summarized by Nav Toor:
“In 2012, Facebook secretly altered the emotions of 689,003 people without telling a single one of them.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a peer reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The lead author worked at Facebook. The experiment was real. The results were published. And almost nobody remembers.
Here is what Facebook did to you.
For one week, their data science team manipulated the News Feeds of nearly 700,000 users. One group had happy posts from their friends quietly removed. The other group had sad posts removed. Then Facebook sat back and watched what happened to these people.
The people who stopped seeing happiness became sadder. They started writing darker, more negative posts. The people who stopped seeing sadness became happier. Their language shifted to match.
Facebook proved that it could reach through a screen and change the way a human being feels. Without a conversation. Without a touch. Without the person ever knowing it was happening to them.
When the study went public, the world erupted. The journal issued a formal Expression of Concern. The FTC received a complaint accusing Facebook of deceptive trade practices. Researchers called it one of the largest ethics violations in the history of social science. Governments demanded answers.
Facebook’s defense was four words. “You agreed to this.” Buried in the Terms of Service was one line about “research.” That was consent. For a psychological experiment on 689,003 human beings.
Now here is the part that should make you feel sick. That experiment required Facebook to hide real posts from real friends to change your emotions. It took an engineering team weeks to design. It affected 689,003 people for one week. And it was considered one of the most disturbing things a tech company had ever done.”
He went on to rightly call out how AI platforms like Google, Gemini and ChatGPT are doing the same thing. They generate emotional content, answers and information based upon your search history 24/7. What you see is just as filtered, just as suppressed and just as targeted and nobody seems to be doing anything about it.
We must recognize that technology like Meta and search engines like Google do not answer to you but to shareholders. They DESIGN their products for extended engagement and consumer growth. They want “hooked” users coming back for more and more and more.
And ideological CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg use their influence to shape public opinion toward mindsets and outcomes they support. It was Zuckerberg who spent over $350 million placing “ballot boxes” all over the country for the 2020 election. Many of them were not properly secured or monitored, and much evidence has been compiled showing how these boxes were regularly “stuffed” with ballots from people with clear assignments. If you have not seen Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules, you may wish to watch it and decide for yourself.
Parents, be vigilant about what your children have access to and how much time they are spending on these apps. Spend personal time interacting with them. Encourage them to come to you immediately if they are uncomfortable in any way with people, content or chat groups they encounter. Please visit our website for more information. You will find practical tools to help start and continue these conversations with your own children.
Get them off their devices and back to reading printed books and hanging out in-person with their friends.
And stay tuned for more. New Mexico is not finished with Meta yet. According to their press release:
The NMDOJ’s final claim against Meta will be heard via a bench trial that is scheduled to begin on May 4th. During the bench trial, the NMDOJ will argue its public nuisance case and seek injunctive relief that requires Meta to pay additional damages and make specific changes to its platforms and company operations, including enacting effective age verification, removing predators from the platform, and protecting minors from encrypted communications that shield bad actors.