“This was known,” said lawyer Matthew Bergman, the lead attorney on the case. “This was not an accident. This was not a coincidence. This was a foreseeable consequence of the deliberate design decisions that Meta made. 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.”
Two families have filed a lawsuit against Meta, claiming their children committed suicide after falling victim to so-called sextortion schemes—schemes attorneys now say are on the rise, and which often target teenagers and other young, vulnerable users.
According to NBC News, the families—one from Pennsylvania, and another from Scotland—say that their teenage sons committed suicide under similar circumstances.
In both incidents, the boys were contacted by strangers posing as potential romantic interests. The conversations gradually turned sexual. Once apparent mutual interest was established, the children were encouraged to send explicit photographs. Upon receiving the images, the scammers demanded payment, threatening to send the pictures to the boys’ friends and family members if they refused to comply.
“We know what we’re up against,” said Ros and Mark Dowey, the Dunblane, Scotland-based parents of 16-year-old Murray Dowey, who took his life in December 2023. “But it’s time social media companies took accountability for what they’ve done to young people.”
“It’s not just sextortion,” the couple said, “they’re causing multiple harms, and they’ve been allowed to get away with it.”
The Guardian notes that the lawsuit was filed earlier this week in Delaware Superior Court by the Social Media Victims Law Center on behalf of the Dowey family, as well as the family of Levi Maciejewski, a 13-year-old from Pennsylvania who was also a victim of sextortion.
Both deaths, the lawsuit asserts, were “the foreseeable result of Meta’s design and decisions and repeated refusals to implement affordable, available and identified safety features due to Meta’s prioritization of engagement over user safety.”
Attorneys for the two families say that Meta’s own internal communications show that the company was more than aware of how its platforms were being misused by cyber-criminals and sexual predators. Meta, for instance, allegedly knew that its product designs led to the “collection of personal data without informed consent.” Some of this information was relegated to program recommendation products that Meta knew, or should have known, were “operating in a manner that recommended teen Instagram users to sextortionists who Meta itself already had identified as predators.”
“This was known,” said lawyer Matthew Bergman, the lead attorney on the case. “This was not an accident. This was not a coincidence. This was a foreseeable consequence of the deliberate design decisions that Meta made. 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.”
In response to the lawsuit, Meta said that it is actively working to combat sextortion schemes; it did not, however, comment on the parents’ claims.
“Sextortion is a horrific crime,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “We support law enforcement to prosecute the criminals behind it, and we continue to fight them on our apps on multiple fronts.”
“We work to prevent accounts showing suspicious behavior from following teens and avoid recommending teens to them,” Meta said. “We also take other precautionary steps, like blurring potentially sensitive images sent in DMs and reminding teens of the risks of sharing them, and letting people know when they’re chatting to someone who may be in a different country.”
Although Meta said that it began implementing more intensive security and privacy options for young teenagers in 2021, the lawsuit claims that most protections didn’t really begin taking effect until 2024.
Bergman, who is also the founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, said there are “reasons” that Meta has been named as a defendant in every U.S.-based sextortion case that his organization has filed to date.
“There are reasons for that. It is a product defect issue and Meta knows it. This complaint cites Meta records only recently made known to the public through [previous joint civil proceedings] and those documents make the deliberateness of these design defects, lack of safeguards, and failures to warn clear,” Bergman said.
Sources
Meta sued after teen boys’ suicides, families claim tech giant ignored ‘sextortion’ schemes
Parents of sextortion victim sue Meta for alleged wrongful death
Two families sue Meta over teens’ deaths by suicide, citing ‘sextortion’ scams
Join the conversation!