Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody is demanding that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explain the alleged high volume of human trafficking across Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta platforms after a recent report revealed that pedophiles are using the metaverse to sexually exploit children.
As reported by Fox News, Moody on Monday sent a letter to Zuckerberg, “inviting the CEO to speak with Florida’s Statewide Council on Human Trafficking on what preventative measures, if any, the tech giant is taking to end human trafficking on sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.”
Moody mocked Zuckerberg for accepting Elon Musk’s cage-match challenge before he got down to the business at hand.
Before launching new products or wasting time preparing for a cage match that will likely never happen, Zuckerberg should be working to make Meta’s existing platforms safer for users and to prevent vulnerable people from being forced into illicit sex work.
The findings of our statewide survey and other reports make it clear that Meta platforms are the preferred social media applications for human traffickers looking to prey on vulnerable people.
Zuckerberg needs to immediately turn his attention to this public safety threat and testify to our council about what Meta is doing to prevent its platforms from being used to assist, facilitate or support human trafficking.
In a related news alert, Moody’s office said:
To meet the statutory objective set by the state legislature, the council worked with law enforcement agencies to review instances in which social media may have been used to facilitate human trafficking. The findings show more than half of all reported instances of social media platform use in Florida trafficking cases, since 2019, involved Meta platforms–Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.
According to the 2022 Federal Human Trafficking Report, Facebook was the top platform used in recruitment of human trafficking victims from 2019-2022. Facebook and Instagram combined to make up 60% of the top ten platforms included in the study.
Additionally, major social media sites self-reported increases in suspected child sexual abuse materials, including child sex trafficking incidences. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s 2022 CyberTipline Reports by Electronic Service Providers, more than 27 million, or 85%, of the incidents reported were from Meta platforms.
Nevertheless, a Meta spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the company prohibits all forms of human exploitation.
We prohibit all forms of human exploitation in no uncertain terms, and we work aggressively to fight these abhorrent crimes on and off our platforms.
The claims in this press release inaccurately depict our efforts to remove this kind of illegal activity and work with law enforcement so that the criminals behind it can be arrested and prosecuted.
Sure they do. While I can’t prove what Meta has done or hasn’t done to remove sex trafficking content from its platforms, I can speak to Zuck being far more concerned over the years with suppressing conservative content (I’ll just leave that there) and most recently, censoring content that runs prior to Democrat government fabrications. (See: Wuhan origin of COVID-19) — and he’s done a damn good job of doing so.
Nevertheless, while the spokesperson assured Fox that Meta “will continue to inform and partner with the state attorneys general on these critical matters,” they didn’t say whether Zuckerberg would respond to Moody’s letter by the Sept. 5 deadline.
Responding and responding honestly are entirely different propositions.
The Bottom Line
To be crystal clear, I’m not suggesting Meta intentionally turns a blind eye to human trafficking on its platforms, much less condones traffickers using its social media sites. That said, it does occur to me that as uncannily effective as Zuck’s algorithms have been in rooting out conservative content and content challenging Democrat narratives, I’d think they’d be able to do the same with traffickers.
Just a thought.