Investigations into child exploitation on meta platforms lead to the arrest of three men

new York
CNN
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An investigation into the potential dangers of Meta’s platforms by New Mexico’s attorney general has led to the arrest of three men accused of attempted child sexual abuse.

The arrests came after a months-long investigation by the attorney general’s office into the risks of child sexual exploitation on Facebook and Instagram. That investigation also formed the basis of a lawsuit filed against Meta in December, accusing the tech giant of creating a “breeding ground” for child predators.

Meta has defended itself against the claims in the lawsuit, saying the company offers dozens of safety tools for children and parents.

As part of the investigation, the Attorney General’s Office created several fake Facebook and Instagram profiles in which they posed as children. The lawsuit alleges that they were sent sexually explicit content and, in some cases, solicited other users to send pornographic content of themselves.

The fake child accounts were also allegedly contacted and solicited for sex by the three adult men from New Mexico whose arrests were announced Wednesday by the attorney general. Two of the three men were arrested at a motel where they allegedly believed they were meeting a 12-year-old girl based on their conversations with the decoy reports.

“This is (Meta-CEO) Mark Zuckerberg’s fault,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a news conference announcing the arrests Wednesday. “This is the fault of a company that has extraordinary resources and has consistently chosen to put profits ahead of the interests of children.”

A Meta spokesperson told CNN: “Child exploitation is a terrible crime and we have spent years developing technology to combat it and help law enforcement investigate and prosecute the criminals behind it.”

“This is an ongoing battle as determined criminals evolve their tactics across platforms to evade protections,” the spokesperson said. “We leverage advanced technology, hire child safety experts, report content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and share information and tools with other companies and nonprofits to help eradicate predators across the many platforms they use .”

News of the arrests could contribute to Meta – like other social media companies – coming under increasing scrutiny when it comes to the safety of young users on its platforms. Lawmakers, parents and online safety advocates, as well as several separate lawsuits, have raised concerns about the meta-platforms’ impact on teens’ mental health, body image and overall well-being. In January, Zuckerberg apologized to families who said their children had been harmed by social media use during a Senate committee hearing on online child safety.

In January — after the Torrez lawsuit was filed and before the Senate hearing — Meta rolled out additional parental controls features, including updating teens’ default privacy settings to prevent people they don’t follow from sending them messages, including others Teenager. The move came after Meta in 2021 banned adults over 19 from sending unfollowed messages to teenagers.

The company also said in December that it had introduced technology to proactively detect and disable accounts with suspicious behavior and that it had formed a child safety task force.

But Torrez said during Wednesday’s press conference that the arrests underscore the ongoing, real risks to children posed by Meta’s platforms.

One of the New Mexico men arrested this week, 52-year-old Fernando Clyde, allegedly added one of the attorney general’s fake children’s Facebook accounts as a friend and initiated a conversation in February. “During the conversation, Fernando sent pictures of his genitals and talked to her about sex,” according to a press release from the attorney general’s office.

Clyde is charged with one count of solicitation of a child under 13 by means of an electronic communications device and one count of attempted criminal sexual penetration of a minor. The second man, 29-year-old Marlon Kellywood, faces the same charges. Attorneys for Clyde and Kellywood could not immediately be reached for comment.

The third man, 47-year-old Christopher Reynolds, was arrested and charged with one count of child solicitation of a child under 13 using an electronic communications device after police received a tip from a mother who was allegedly sending messages to her 11-year-old had received it. According to the Attorney General’s Office, investigators then befriended him through the fake child account, and Reynolds initiated a conversation and sent sexually explicit messages. Reynolds’ attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“The deception accounts these suspects engaged in reflect the experiences that children can and do have on these platforms,” Torrez said in a press release. He added that the research suggests “the use of Meta’s social media platforms not only endangers children in the virtual world, but more importantly, they are spaces that sexual predators actively use, to hunt, groom and bully children in the real world.”