New Mexico Attorney General Sues Snapchat to Protect Children from Sextortion and Exploitation

SANTA FE, NM (KFOX14/CBS4) — New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez announced Thursday that the New Mexico Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, Inc., to “protect children from sextortion, sexual exploitation and harm.”

In the lawsuit, the New Mexico Department of Justice alleges that Snapchat’s policies, short-lived content availability and Snapchat’s recommendation algorithm create an ideal environment for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and child sexual exploitation to flourish.

“Our undercover investigation revealed that Snapchat’s harmful design features create an environment where predators can easily target children through sextortion schemes and other forms of sexual abuse,” said AG Torrez. “Snap has deceived users into believing that photos and videos sent on its platform will disappear, but predators can permanently capture this content, creating a virtual yearbook of sexual images of children that are traded, sold, and stored indefinitely. 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.”

In recent months, the New Mexico Department of Justice has been investigating Snap’s platforms.

Some of the key findings in the complaint against Snap include:

Due to its design features, Snapchat is a primary platform that criminals use to conduct sextortion. Sextortion, one of the fastest-growing crimes targeting young people, often occurs when a predator poses as a peer of the victim and coerces a minor into sending explicit images or videos of themselves, then threatens to distribute the private material unless the minor pays the predator. Tragically, sextortion has led to countless teen suicides.
Sextortion is so common and easy for predators to perform on Snapchat that criminals are distributing sextortion scripts that offer manuals for victimizing minors. While these sextortion scripts are publicly available, these scripts “have not yet been blacklisted by . . . Snapchat” and are “actively used against victims today.”
Snapchat is a primary social media platform for sharing CSAM. Parents report that their children share more CSAM on Snapchat than on any other platform, minors report having more online sexual interactions on Snapchat than on any other platform, and more victims of sex trafficking are recruited on Snapchat than on any other platform.
An undercover investigation conducted by the New Mexico DOJ uncovered a massive network of dark web sites dedicated to sharing stolen, non-consensual sexual images from Snap — finding more than 10,000 records related to Snap and CSAM in the past year alone, including information relating to minors under the age of 13 being sexually abused. Snapchat was by far the largest source of images and videos among the dark web sites examined.
Undercover investigators from the New Mexico Department of Justice discovered that many Snapchat accounts that captured, distributed and sold sexually abusive material directly on Snapchat’s platform were connected to each other through Snapchat’s recommendation algorithm.
As part of the undercover investigation, the New Mexico DOJ set up a fake Snapchat account for a 14-year-old named Heather, who found and exchanged messages with these dangerous accounts, including accounts with the names “child.rape” and “pedo_lover10,” among others that were even more explicit. Several of these accounts attempted to coerce the underage persona into sharing CSAM.
Snap has designed its platform specifically to be addictive to young people, which has led to depression, anxiety, sleep deprivation, body dysmorphia and other mental health issues for some users.
Snapchat is one of the most popular social media platforms for teens in the United States. In fact, over 20 million teens in the U.S. use Snapchat, and half of all teens in the U.S. use Snapchat every day.

In short, the New Mexico Department of Justice accuses Snapchat of “(endangering) the health and safety of New Mexico’s youth.”

One example cited in the 2023 complaint involves Alejandro Marquez, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 years in prison for raping an 11-year-old girl he met on Snapchat.

The complaint further alleges that Snapchat’s unique qualities, namely the fact that photos and videos shared on the app disappear, give young users a false sense of security.

In reality, the NM DOJ alleges, these features attract predators who “easily, covertly, and permanently capture explicit content.”

The New Mexico Department of Justice also takes issue with Snapchat’s failure to identify users, which allows minors unfettered access to illegal and inappropriate content, while Snapchat “regularly” promotes sexually explicit material and predator profiles.

Finally, the New Mexico Department of Justice said Snap and its leadership “misled the public about the security of the platform,” citing congressional testimony and a 2024 Super Bowl ad that claimed the app is “more private” and “less permanent” than its competitors.

The New Mexico Department of Justice’s lawsuit comes months after it successfully filed a lawsuit against Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, which also accused the company of “facilitating the sexual exploitation of children.”

The New Mexico Department of Justice has developed and compiled resources for teens and parents to protect themselves and their families from the threats of social media platforms. Resources can be found here.