International
New Mexico sues Meta, Mark Zuckerberg for facilitating child sex trafficking
From LifeSiteNews
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez concluded that Facebook and Instagram have become ‘prime locations’ for sexual predators to trade child pornography and ‘solicit minors for sex.’
New Mexico’s attorney general filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, for facilitating child sex trafficking as well as the distribution of child sex abuse material.
Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a career prosecutor who has specialized in internet crimes against children, concluded after his office’s months-long investigation that Meta’s social media platforms are “not safe spaces for children, but rather prime locations for predators to trade child pornography and solicit minors for sex.”
The New Mexico Office of the Attorney General found that Meta “directs harmful and inappropriate material” at minors and “allows unconnected adults to have unfettered access to them,” despite the fact that Meta is capable of both identifying these users as minors and “providing warnings or other protections against” the harmful material. Worse, such material “poses substantial dangers of solicitation and trafficking.”
According to the lawsuit, the investigation found that, “[s]pecifically, with accounts clearly belonging to children,” Meta has:
Proactively served and directed them to a stream of egregious, sexually explicit images through recommended users and posts – even where the child has expressed no interest in this content;
Enabled adults to find, message, and groom minors, soliciting them to sell pictures or participate in pornographic videos;
Fostered unmoderated user groups devoted to or facilitating Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC);
Allowed users to search for, like, share, and sell a crushing volume of child sexual abuse material (CSAM);
Allowed, and failed to detect, a fictional mother offering her 13-year old for trafficking, and solicited the 13-year old to create her own professional page and sell advertising.
Investigators reported Meta accounts showing sexually explicit depictions of children but found that about half of a sample of the reported content was still available days before they filed a lawsuit. Removed content often reappeared, or Meta recommended “alternative, equally problematic content to users,” the investigators found.
While a search for pornography on Facebook was “blocked and returned no results,” the same search on Instagram returned “numerous” accounts depicting pornography, nudity, pedophilia, and sexual assault.
Remarkably, according to the lawsuit, “certain child exploitative content” is 10 times more common on Facebook and Instagram as compared to the notorious pornographic website PornHub and the “adult content” platform OnlyFans.
The investigators’ findings underscore the growing problem not only of child sex trafficking but of “porn-made pedophiles,” a phenomenon testified to by child protection expert Michael Sheath. These are “people who were not initially attracted to children” but whose brains have been “rewired by compulsive porn consumption to be attracted to children, often because they escalate to increasingly extreme content as their porn addiction progresses,” in the words of Jonathon Van Maren.
The Unherd article “How porn breeds paedophiles” shares what Sheath learned as a probation officer trying to understand male sex offenders.
“Eventually, these men would reveal how they operated. Many of the men talked about mainstream, free and legal porn having been a gateway to the illegal stuff, and some went on to create porn themselves, which, of course, requires children to be abused,” he explained.
The findings of the New Mexico AG’s office have been corroborated by a two-year investigation by The Guardian, which found that Meta is failing to “prevent criminals from using its platforms to buy and sell children for sex,” as minors are being advertised for sex trafficking on Instagram, and Facebook is also being used to facilitate such trafficking.
In fact, according to the Guardian report, several pension and investment funds that own Meta stock sued the company in March for failing to act on “systemic evidence” that its platforms are facilitating sex trafficking and child sexual exploitation.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Newt Gingrich
In an amazing show of courage, Vice President J.D. Vance offered an intervention for some of our European allies.
That is the best way to think of the two historic speeches he made in France and Germany last week.
In Paris, Vice President Vance pledged the United States would do whatever it takes to lead the world in the development of Artificial Intelligence. He went on to assert that Europe’s automatic response to regulate technological change rather than adapt to it was doomed to fail.
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Vance warned the Europeans that the Trump administration would retaliate to protect American high-tech companies from being fined and regulated by the European community.
Then, Vance went to the Munich Security Conference. It is the annual meeting of European leaders concerned about defense and threats to peace. The Vice President shocked the Europeans by launching a frontal assault on the decay of their political system.
As Vance put it:
“But while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense, the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values — values shared with the United States of America.”
He then went through a litany of specific complaints about the behavior of different European countries. They ranged from failing to control immigration, suppressing free speech, and Brussels seeking to control and define futures of independent countries such as Hungary and Romania.
The leading French newspaper, Le Monde (their equivalent of the New York Times) asserted that the American Vice President was declaring “ideological war on Europe.”
Le Monde was right. The European elites have been decaying for at least two generations. They hide behind their privileged status and take ideological positions that feel good but are destructive. Europe’s failures are devastating for most everyday Europeans.
I have personal knowledge about this. I have a Ph.D. in Modern European History – and I have lived in France, Germany, Belgium and Italy. As a young Army dependent, we were living in France when the French Army came back from Algeria, killed the French Fourth Republic and brought back General Charles de Gaulle to establish the Fifth Republic.
It is now the longest serving non-royal government in French history.
The European elites value each other’s opinions more than they value serving the people of Europe. The European elites live in a fantasy world of green policies that destroy industries and jobs, welfare policies which destroy the work ethic, and immigration policies which undermine the popular culture. They simply hope for a peaceful world without a strong military.
Meanwhile, state enforced speech codes protect Islamic extremists at the expense of local citizens.
The result has been a steady decline of European culture, economic development, and defensive capacity.
The Afghan Islamist who wounded more than two dozen people and killed a mother and her two-year-old daughter with a car two days before the supposed security conference signals the willful avoidance of reality at the heart of the elite European worldview.
To be clear, I admire European civilization. I believe America is far stronger and safer if Europe is healthy and capable of growing and defending itself.
I hope vice president Vance’s intervention at least starts European elites thinking about what must be done to revive their continent.
For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com. Also subscribe to the Newt’s World podcast.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Mariane Angela
FBI Director Kash Patel made his first statement as director after he was sworn in Friday, with a challenge to the media and a promise of sweeping reforms within the bureau.
Patel began his speech by expressing gratitude towards his supporters, then transitioned into a detailed breakdown of his upcoming plans for the FBI. He also turned to the press and directed any criticisms towards himself to protect his team from the media’s scrutiny.
“I know the media is in here, and if you have a target, that target is right here. It is not the men and women at the FBI. And everything you possibly can [say] about me that’s fake, malicious, slanderous, and defamatory, keep it coming, bring it on, but leave the men and women of the FBI out of it,” Patel said.
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“I promise you the following: There will be accountability within the FBI and outside of the FBI. And we will do it through rigorous constitutional oversight starting this weekend.”
JUST IN: FBI Director Kash Patel makes first statement as FBI director, says accountability is coming to the FBI *this weekend.*
🔥🔥
“I know the media’s in here. And if you have a target, that target’s right here. It’s not the men and women at the FBI.”
“You’ve written… pic.twitter.com/nwBUjQXAel
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 21, 2025
With Attorney General Pam Bondi by his side, Patel said the public can expect a fair and just system under their leadership.
“For those of you who think that there’s going to be a two-tier system of justice, not with Attorney General Bondi, there’s a singular system of justice for all Americans, and there will be accountability,” Patel added. “The reason that this mission is so important is simply the following: 100,000 people last year raped [and] 100,000 people died of CCP fentanyl overdose in heroin [and] 17,000 homicides. Violent crime is out of control.”
Patel was confirmed as President Donald Trump’s new FBI director on Thursday afternoon. The Senate approved his nomination with a close vote of 51-49, despite Democratic lawmakers’ attempts to postpone the confirmation.
Patel, previously the chief of staff to the secretary of Defense during Trump’s first term, gained notoriety for his criticism of the Mueller investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. The newly confirmed FBI director also criticized the misuse of surveillance powers, advocating for the establishment of a “24/7 declassification office.”
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