Our firm has just filed a lawsuit against Meta, alleging that the tech company has ignored sextortion schemes that target teens on Instagram.
This lawsuit represents two teens, 16‑year‑old M.D. from Dunblane, Scotland, and 13‑year‑old L.M. from Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who tragically died as a result of being victimized by sextortion schemes on Instagram.
It came out in newly unsealed documents that Meta knew as early as 2019 that Instagram exposed children to predators.
“This was known,” Matthew Bergman, the family’s lead lawyer, said in an interview. “This was not an accident. This was not a coincidence. This was a foreseeable consequence of the deliberate design decisions made by Meta. Their own documents show that they were very aware of this extortion phenomenon, and they simply chose to put their profits over the safety of young people.”
The internal documents showed that Meta was aware of Instagram’s “Accounts You May Follow” feature, which actively connected adult strangers to children. The total number of children exposed to adult groomers worldwide is unknown, but expected to be substantial.
The court filings also revealed other alarming statistics:
- Meta repeatedly rejected researcher recommendations to default teen accounts to private, which would have prevented 5.4 million unwanted direct messages daily.
- In 2019, 3.5 million profiles engaged in “inappropriate interactions with children” via Instagram DMs.
- In 2022, Instagram recommended 1.4 million teens to potential predators in a single day.
- Internal surveys found 13 percent of 13–15‑year‑olds received unwanted sexual advances on a weekly basis.
“Meta’s secret is out,” said Matthew P. Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center. “For years, Meta knew Instagram was a hunting ground for predators, yet chose to protect engagement metrics over children’s lives. That conscious decision to connect random strangers to children has cost families their sons and daughters, turning Instagram into the epicenter of sextortion‑related youth suicides. Had they chosen to follow their own internal recommendations they could have saved countless lives.”