New Mexico AG sues Snapchat

New Mexico's attorney general has filed a lawsuit accusing the owners of the social platform Snapchat of promoting illicit sexual material involving children and facilitating "sextortion" and the trafficking of children, drugs and guns.

The 164-page complaint against Snap Inc., filed Wednesday in state District Court, accuses the company of violating the state's Unfair Practices Act by designing its product to be addictive to young users, failing to impose significant age-verification mechanisms, promoting harmful content and using algorithms that make it easier for abusers to connect with minors and access child sex abuse material among other things.

"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," Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement Thursday. "Snap has misled users into believing that photos and videos sent on their platform will disappear, but predators can permanently capture this content and they have created a virtual yearbook of child sexual images that are traded, sold, and stored indefinitely."

The platform's assertions images disappear after a period of time lull users into a false sense of security, the lawsuit says, which encourages minors to send sexually explicit images, thereby making them targets for sophisticated predators who troll the internet with the intent of using such images for blackmail or to buy, trade and sell.

The complaint also alleges the platform makes it easy for users to buy and sell weapons and drugs and cites studies that link social media use to anxiety, depression and other mental health disorders in teens.

According to a statement from the New Mexico Department of Justice, which Torrez heads, an undercover investigation "revealed a vast network of dark web sites dedicated to sharing stolen, nonconsensual sexual images" from Snapchat.

Undercover investigators found many Snapchat accounts that openly captured, circulated and sold child sex abuse material directly on Snapchat's platform are connected to each other through the platform's recommendation algorithm, the statement says.

Investigators also "set up a decoy Snapchat account for a 14-year-old named Heather, who found and exchanged messages with these dangerous accounts," according to the Department of Justice.

Torrez filed a similar lawsuit, which is still pending, last year against Facebook parent company Meta.

Several pages of the complaint are redacted, presumably to protect the identity of victims. However, the complaint also details specific instances in which Snapchat has been used to commit crimes in New Mexico, including a 2018 case in which a basketball coach at Pecos High School used multiple profiles on Snapchat to "threaten, coerce, and manipulate at least four victims" ages 14 to 16 to send him "sexually explicit photos and videos and engage in sexual acts."

The complaint seeks a court order declaring the company's "unreasonable and unlawful conduct" a public nuisance, prohibiting Snap from continuing it and ordering the platform to abate the nuisance as well as "disgorgement of profits and data that were unjustly obtained." The state is also asking the court to impose civil penalties of $5,000 for each violation of the Unfair Trade Practices Act and order the company to reimburse the state for the costs of the litigation.

In an email Thursday, a spokesperson said Snap shares Torrez's concerns about user safety, "particularly for our younger users."

"We have been working diligently to find, remove and report bad actors, educate our community, and give teens, as well as parents and guardians, tools to help them be safe online," the email said. "We understand that online threats continue to evolve, and we will continue to work diligently to address these critical issues."

The spokesperson said Snapchat was working to keep young people safe and had "invested hundreds of millions of dollars in our trust and safety teams over the past several years, and designed our service to promote online safety by moderating content and enabling direct messaging with close friends and family."