The Sting That Exposed How Meta Endangers Kids

In a windowless room in Albuquerque, a small team of New Mexico investigators created a fake Facebook account for a 13-year-old girl to target a child predator. They made posts of her losing her last baby tooth and starting her first day of 7th grade. To their surprise, Facebook funnelled adults to the account by the thousands – men who began trying to groom, solicit, and sexually harass a person they believed was an underage girl.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez says this was the moment when he realized “there is a very, very serious problem inside of this company and on these platforms.” He launched a lawsuit against Meta, which led to the first successful verdict for child safety against a social media company. Question Everything executive producer Robyn Semien visited New Mexico to attend parts of the trial and hear from AG Torrez and his team how they took on Mark Zuckerberg, and what this victory, along with a second decision still to come, could mean for the future of social media. 

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questioneverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

Guests: 

• New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez

Please support the organizations that support this show:

• Go to https://zbiotics.com/QUESTION and use QUESTION at checkout for 15% off any first-time orders of ZBiotics probiotics.
• Get 15% off OneSkin with the code QUESTION at https://www.oneskin.co/QUESTION  #oneskinpod
• Don’t sleep on @ultrapouches. New customers get 15% Off with code INSERTCODE at takeultra.com! #UltraPouches #ad
• Ground News is a platform that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias, and break free from algorithms. Go to GroundNews.com/QUESTION to get 40% off the unlimited Vantage plan.

Question Everything is a weekly investigation into how the truth gets buried, distorted, and denied -- and the ways people are fighting to make it matter again.

Hosted by Brian Reed, of S-Town and This American Life.

Winner of the Webby Award, Ambie Award, and a Signal Special Achievement Award for pushing "the boundaries of the medium."