The long read: Our two-year investigation suggests that the tech giant Meta is struggling to prevent criminals from using its platforms to buy and sell children for sex
aya Jones* was only 13 when she first walked through the door of Courtney’s House, a drop-in centre for victims of child sex trafficking in Washington DC. “She was so young, but she was already so broken by what she’d been through,” says Tina Frundt, the founder of Courtney’s House.
Frundt, who has helped hundreds of children like Maya since she opened Courtney’s House in 2008, says that the first thing she now does when a young person is referred to her is to ask for their Instagram handle. Other social media platforms are also used to exploit the young people in her care, but she says Instagram is the one that comes up most often.
The children who are referred to Frundt, usually by the police or social services, have been sexually exploited and controlled: by a boyfriend, a pimp, a family member. Some of them are as young as nine. Almost without exception, they have childhoods scarred by sexual abuse, poverty and violence. This makes them perfect targets for sexual predators. “They are all looking for love and affirmation and a sense that they mean something,” said Frundt.
At one point, our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of five teenage girls. They had come back from school, and they gathered around the kitchen table, chatting and playing music on their phones while Frundt served them casserole.
US court documents provide a graphic insight into how these platforms can be used. In one case prosecuted in Arizona in 2019, Mauro Veliz, a 31-year-old who wasof a child, exchanged messages on Facebook Messenger with Miesha Tolliver, who also received jail time for sex trafficking. Tolliver told Veliz that she had one girl available for sex, and photographs of two more, before saying that the girls were aged 17, 16 and 14.
According to Goldworm, while his investigations involved every social media platform, Meta platforms were the ones he encountered most often. Six other prosecutors in several different states told us that, in their experience, Facebook and Instagram are being widely used to groom children and traffick children.
“I think everyone could do more,” Shehan says. “The volume of child sexual abuse material and volume of trafficking [being reported] is like apples and oranges.” According to Shehan, one further reason for this disparity, beyond the differing legal requirements, is technological. “Child sexual abuse material is that much easier to detect. There are so many technology tools that have been developed that allow for the automated detection of that crime.
Hany Farid is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who helped invent the PhotoDNA technology that Meta uses to identify harmful content. He believes Meta, which is currently valued at more than $500bn, could do more to combat child trafficking. It could, for instance, be investing more to develop better tools to “flag suspicious words and phrases on unencrypted parts of the platform – including coded language around grooming,” he said.
Walker’s managers would pass on such cases to Meta to decide if action should be taken against the user. In some cases, Walker claims: “Months would pass and then the automatic bot would send me an email saying it was closing this case, because nobody’s taken action on it.” She added: “I would cry to my manager about [the children I saw] and how I want to help. But it felt like nobody would pay attention to these horrible things.
Former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen speaking at a Senate hearing on consumer protection, product safety and data security in Washington DC in 2021.that seem to support the moderators’ claims. These documents, which numbered thousands of pages, detailed how the company managed harmful content. In one memo from the Haugen leak, the company states that “Messenger groups with less than 32 people should be treated with a full expectation of privacy”.
The debate around section 230 has become highly polarised. Those who want section 230 amended say that the legal safe harbour it has provided for internet companies means they have no incentive to root out illegal content on their sites. In anpublished in the Wall Street Journal in January, President Biden spoke out in favour of the section’s reform. “I’ve long said we must fundamentally reform section 230,” he wrote, calling for “bipartisan action by Congress to hold big tech accountable.
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