New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez claims in a new lawsuit against the app’s owner Snap that Snapchat is the app of choice for criminals targeting children for sextortion or child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
The lawsuit accuses Snap of violating New Mexico law prohibiting unfair practices and public nuisances based on design elements such as “disappearing” information, as well as allegedly failing to police predators. “Snap misleads users into believing that photos and videos sent on its platform will disappear,” Torrez said in a statement. “But predators can capture this content permanently, creating a library of child sexual images. Like a virtual almanac that can be traded, sold and stored indefinitely.”
Torrez’s office conducted an undercover investigation similar to the previous investigation into Mehta and similarly charged him with creating a “predator market.” As part of the investigation, Torrez’s office created a decoy Snapchat account that appeared to belong to a 14-year-old named Heather. According to the Attorney General’s Office, the account sent messages such as “child.rape” and “pedo_lover10” to other Snapchat profiles, several of which tried to convince the decoy to share the CSAM.
The attorney general said Snap’s claims that its app is “more private” and “less persistent” than other social media apps are misleading. While the app’s disappearing message feature may lead children and teens to believe their photos are ephemeral, the attorney general claims they are easily and often captured by predators. Torrez’s office said more than 10,000 records related to Snap and CSAM were discovered on the dark web in 2023, adding, “Snapchat is the largest source of images and videos on the dark web investigated to date.”
Torrez is repeating a strategy that has been successful so far in the lawsuit against Meta, targeting the design of the Snapchat product and thereby (theoretically) avoiding some thorny issues about speech. Torrez said Snapchat’s design features, including disappearing messages and a “quick add” button that let predators message minors, helped make it “a primary platform used by criminals for sextortion.” In the lawsuit against Meta, the judge said the complaint could not be dismissed on the basis of Section 230, a legal shield that protects technology platforms from liability for the speech of their users.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals also recently achieved a legal victory in a lawsuit based on misleading product claims. It allowed a lawsuit against Yolo, an anonymous messaging app based on Snapchat, saying the app falsely promised to expose accounts that harassed users.
In the Snap lawsuit, Torrez asked the court to order the company to cease alleged violations, pay fines and return any improper profits. Snap did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
