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The New Mexico legal professional common has filed a lawsuit towards Snap, alleging that the design and algorithmic suggestions of its social media app Snapchat “openly foster and promote illicit sexual material involving children and facilitate sextortion and the trafficking of children, drugs, and guns.”
The swimsuit 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 Raúl Torrez, who has a pending lawsuit towards Facebook proprietor Meta alleging the corporate allows the sexual exploitation of kids, in an announcement Thursday mentioned, “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 mentioned.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez discusses the nexus of public security, psychological well being and adversarial youngster experiences throughout a information convention following a summit in Albuquerque, N.M., Friday, Nov. 3, 2023.
Susan Montoya Bryan | AP
has requested remark from Snap about Torrez’s lawsuit, which was filed within the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe County.
The swimsuit alleges that Snap “repeatedly made statements to the public regarding the safety and design of its platforms that it knew were untrue,” or that have been contradicted by the corporate’s personal inner 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 relentless blackmail demands or disclosure of intimate images to their families and friends to suicide,” the swimsuit says.
New Mexico’s Department of Justice, which Torrez leads, in latest months performed an investigation that discovered that there was a “vast network of dark web sites dedicated to sharing stolen, non-consensual sexual images from Snap” and that there have been greater than 10,000 data associated to SNAP and youngster sexual abuse materials “in the last year alone,” the division mentioned.
The swimsuit alleges violations of New Mexico’s unfair commerce practices legislation.
— Additional reporting by Josephine Rozzelle
