Snap Sued by New Mexico Attorney General Over Child Predator ‘Sextortion’

The New Mexico Attorney General has filed a lawsuit against Snapclaiming that the design and algorithmic recommendations of social media app Snapchat “openly promote and encourage illegal sexual material involving children and facilitate sextortion and the trafficking of children, drugs and weapons.”

“Snap misled users into believing that photos and videos sent on its platform would disappear, but predators were able to permanently capture this content and created a virtual yearbook of sexual images of children that were trafficked, sold, and stored indefinitely,” Attorney General Raul Torrez said in a statement.

“Through our lawsuit against Meta and Snap, the New Mexico Department of Justice will continue to hold these platforms accountable for prioritizing profit over child safety,” Torrez said.

Torrez previously filed a lawsuit against Meta, the owner of Facebook, because he claims the social media platform also enables the sexual exploitation of children.

In May, a New Mexico judge denied Meta’s request to dismiss the lawsuit.

CNBC has reached out to Snap for comment on Torrez’s lawsuit, which was filed in the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe County.

The lawsuit alleges that Snap “repeatedly made statements to the public about the security and design of its platforms that it knew were untrue” or that were contradicted by the company’s own internal findings.

The New Mexico Department of Justice, which Torrez heads, conducted an investigation in recent months that found a “massive network of dark web sites dedicated to sharing stolen, nonconsensual sexual images from Snap” and that “in the past year alone” there were more than 10,000 records related to SNAP and child sexual abuse material, the department said.

– Additional reporting by Josephine Rozzelle