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Meta accused of enabling child predators on Instagram and Facebook · Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News

0:11
You are listening to the Hidden Lightness on America Out Loud Talk Radio.
0:14
I'm your host, Jimmy Hinton.
0:16
Folks, I have warned for a long time about the exploitation of children online.
0:23
And it's it's a growing issue.
0:25
It's getting worse.
0:27
It's not getting better.
0:29
In the past 10 years, especially, things have gotten really, really bad.
0:34
And children are being exploited like crazy.
0:38
And that's not even factoring in artificial intelligence.
0:42
That's just online exploitation.
0:47
And finally, there's going to be some accountability.
0:51
At least we hope.
0:54
Beginning on Monday, Facebook, or the parent company Meta is going to be in front of Congress, and this is a really, really big news event.
1:08
They have to answer to years of child exploitation on Facebook and Instagram platforms.
1:19
And there is a lot to talk about here.
1:22
And as people are focused with all eyes on the Epstein files, at the same time, Meta is under scrutiny.
1:32
I mean intense scrutiny.
1:34
As they should be.
1:51
It is complicated.
1:54
It's not as easy as just releasing the files and everything's black and white.
1:59
There is a lot, a lot of lot of stuff to sift through.
2:03
And it's going to take years before people can actually sift through all this and make complete sense of it.
2:11
If they can ever make complete sense of it.
3:28
So Meta, as I as I mentioned, thanks to the attorney general of New Mexico, they're going to be uh going before Congress.
3:39
He filed a lawsuit, and I think that's absolutely fantastic because it puts people on record.
3:49
So Meta will be in court on Monday.
3:52
Opening arguments will uh be brought against them by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torres.
4:00
He filed a lawsuit against Meta, which he's he's accused of exposing children to sexual exploitation and mental health harm.
4:12
The court filing was obtained by Fox Business and attorneys for the state of New Mexico noted that Melia Andris, who worked in child safety roles at Meta from 2017 to 2024, said in an internal email, included in the court filings that sexually inappropriate messages were sent to quote about 500,000 victims per day.
4:43
Day is in all capitals in English markets only.
4:49
Andrus wrote, we expect the true situation is worse.
5:06
We'll get into that article.
5:08
It's excellent.
5:10
But there needs to be accountability.
5:12
I've been warning for years about this.
5:15
Now, this is before my website got hijacked.
5:20
I had my website stolen and scrubbed.
5:22
Uh about I don't know, two months ago.
5:25
So literally everything that I ever wrote, even had it backed up, it's all gone.
5:34
Uh it it stinks.
5:37
But I guess it is what it is.
5:40
It's probably a group of pedophiles who uh didn't like what I was doing, I guess.
5:45
Yeah, they had to have had to have gone to pretty great uh measures to go to that much trouble.
5:52
I talked to my web hosting and they said they've never seen this kind of a hacking before.
5:57
They said it was a very, very sophisticated hacking.
6:01
So at any rate, I wrote about this years ago.
6:04
I mean, years ago, probably 13, 14 years ago now, and I was writing about how Facebook was just beginning to ramp up exploitation of children, and there was very clear evidence of this.
6:21
And I urged parents to not put photographs of their kids, let alone have their kids on Facebook, but I urged parents do not put pictures of your kids on social media.
6:38
And you know, like very, very, very few a hand select few photos is okay if you have it set to your friends only, but when it's public, and parents think that it's cute to put pictures of their kids in the bathtub and you know, things like that.
6:58
Um these pictures get they get downloaded and they get sold constantly.
7:07
And I I uncovered, I mean, their entire websites and YouTube channels that are dedicated to people stealing pictures off of Facebook and Instagram, I mean, of little little kids.
7:23
And the things that they're saying are incredibly grotesque.
7:29
And I just said, Do you really want to exploit your children like that?
7:33
Do you want to expose them to these kinds of perverts because they're out there?
7:38
And there are a lot of them, unfortunately.
7:41
I wish that wasn't the case, but it is.
7:45
But Andrus, this uh person who worked as an investigator, I guess.
7:53
Uh worked for Meta.
7:58
Had a couple interesting things to say here.
8:01
Now keep in mind, Andrus worked for child safety for Meta.
8:08
Andrew said, I think nowhere in the history of humanity could you have a secret conversation with 1,000 people.
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I'm actually scared of the ramifications here.
8:21
And that's a great point.
8:22
You can literally send group messages or or private messages.
8:27
You can slide into the DMs of a thousand people.
8:33
You can cast a wide net, and that's exactly what these abusers are doing.
8:38
They cast a very wide net, and you don't even have to be good at at uh at abuse.
8:44
You don't have to be good at hiding it.
8:47
Because these children typically don't say anything, they don't report.
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The abusers know that.
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That's why it makes it very easy to exploit them, and they'll send out you know, a thousand different people, a thousand different individuals.
9:06
And they'll just do that until they get a bite.
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And they find somebody that's uh that's easy to groom.
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And so Andrews is 100% right here.
9:18
There's nowhere in the history of mankind ever that you can have a secret conversation with a thousand people.
9:30
She noted issues with age verification on the platform.
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She wrote in an email that it's quote, a chicken and egg problem.
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Our proactive detection and metrics use age gating.
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So if the age prediction is wrong, we don't find them.
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However, our investigators have given feedback that almost every time they encounter an age liar on Instagram in a child's safety call.
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Context, the age prediction is incorrect.
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And she put in parentheses, it aligns with the age they falsely claim to be.
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So this is really fascinating to me and frightening.
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And it's that the age prediction is wrong almost every single time.
10:22
So there are kids, and I see them.
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I know, I know a couple of them.
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I know a couple parents whose kids are on Facebook with the blessing of the parents.
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But that doesn't make it okay.
10:37
But there are kids who are way under the age of 13, who are on Facebook.
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They have no business being on social media.
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And they're not allowed.
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They're not permitted.
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You have to be, I think Meta is 13 years old, you have to be to create an account.
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Which personally, I just I think that's too young.
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So it's up to the parents.
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I mean, we really really have to guard everything that our kids do.
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In the digital age that we live in, it's way too easy, and we're making it way too easy for for people to exploit children.
11:15
The platforms make it easy.
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The parents make it easy.
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They put a uh they put a phone into the hands of their kids.
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There's no supervision.
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The kids spend hours and hours on the phones.
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God knows what they're doing, what they're searching, what they're looking up.
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I mean, do the parents check the history?
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Do they check routinely?
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Do they check apps?
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Do they check for hidden apps?
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You know, do they do a deep search into the phone?
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Chances are good that that is rarely done by parents.
12:03
So Meta, of course, is uh pushing back against this.
12:08
A meta spokesperson told Fox Business, the number discussed in this 2020 email exchange does not refer to individual victims or incidents of child exploitation.
12:19
The measurement technology we used at the time used an overly wide and cautious set of criteria, and as a result, counted many benign interactions.
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This number significantly reduced after we refined and improved our measurement technology.
12:38
Well, according to Andrus, the measurement technology, it doesn't work.
12:48
So this is um really interesting.
12:51
And of course, Meta's gonna push back against this.
12:54
So the Meta spokesperson said since 2020, we've introduced a range of new measures to help reduce potential grooming and inappropriate interactions with children, including preventing adults from starting private chats with teens they're not connected to, and using improved behavioral signals to identify potentially suspicious actors and preventing them from finding and following teens.
13:22
No offense, but I don't take a whole lot of comfort in that.
13:32
I've talked to parents.
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I've seen I know how easy it is for these kids to be exploited.
13:38
And for these quote, safety measures that Meta puts in place, it's so easy to override them.
13:46
Uh very easy.
13:50
So there are definitely ways to uh get into the inbox, the direct messages of these teenagers and even younger than teens.
14:01
Now notice how meta says teenagers, but I know for a fact there are a lot of kids on Facebook that are not yet teens.
14:10
So it's very interesting.
14:12
You know, they say teenagers because Meta has an age restriction that you have to be at least 13 to be on Meta.
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So of course they're using that terminology.
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They're not going to say kids.
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They're very intentional about how they use their language because they know that words matter.
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And they know that they're facing a giant right now.
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I mean, they're in hot water.
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The company said it takes a quote comprehensive approach to ensuring teens have age-appropriate experiences on meta platforms.
14:46
This includes, for example, using technology to estimate someone's age based on their activity, allowing people to report accounts they think might be underage.
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If we think someone may be misrepresenting their age, or they are trying to change their age in a way that will impact the protections we enable, providing the option to use facial age estimation technology from Yody or providing an ID.
15:16
These steps help us provide teens with safer experiences online, like the automatic protections offered by Instagram teen accounts.
15:26
Don't buy it, folks.
15:29
I'm telling you, the best protection, and I know I sound like an old fogy, but I don't care.
15:36
The best protection is to not have your teens on or your kids.
15:43
I'll say kids because we're we're going to younger than teens.
15:50
None of them should be on social media.
15:55
And that's not just my opinion.
15:57
That's based on horrific things that I've seen.
16:00
I've seen case after case after case.
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I've consulted with churches, I've I've talked to parents whose kids' lives have been absolutely destroyed by social media.
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And exploitation that takes place on social media.
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The best thing to do is to not have your kid on the platform in the first place.
16:21
Oh, but that's not fair.
16:23
That's my kid needs.
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They need to stay connected to other friends.
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Trust me when I say there are plenty of other ways to stay connected to friends.
16:34
They don't need to be on social media.
16:39
It's such a superficial thing anyway.
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And when kids are um trying to figure out who they are, they're at a stage in life where they're trying to figure out who they are.
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It just opens up a whole world that you really don't want to open up to your kid.
16:56
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19:54
Meta finally has to answer to the exploitation of children.
20:00
This has been going on, I mean, since the very beginning, but it's really gotten out of hand.
20:06
With AI, I've been stoning this alarm too for a long time.
20:10
Um AI generative AI is really getting out of control too, because you can now use artificial intelligence to take any person's face, including children, though they claim that there are safety measures in place where that can't take place, but we know this to be true.
20:34
I've covered plenty of stories here.
20:38
They're taking children's faces or just uh a full-body picture of a fully clothed young child, and they're turning them into nudes, and they're very realistic.
20:52
And they're also sex tortion schemes.
20:55
Here's another article that just popped up that's uh, you know, uh similar article to articles that I have pulled up here.
21:03
Meta sued after teen boys, plural, after teen boys' suicides.
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Families claim tech giant ignored sex tortion schemes.
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I mean, there they're just dozens and dozens and dozens of these kinds of stories.
21:22
This happens every single day.
21:27
And uh what's heartbreaking to me, and a little bit infuriating to be honest, is that we don't have all the information for the Epstein files, right?
21:41
And everybody is just so focused on the Epstein files, and not only are they focused on the Epstein files, but they've already drawn their own conclusions.
21:51
Everybody, everybody instantly became an expert overnight.
21:55
I'm saying that sarcastically.
21:57
Everybody became an expert.
21:59
They all know exactly what Donald Trump was doing, right?
22:03
It's all about Donald Trump.
22:05
I see very, very few people mentioning people who are actually implicated in in the files.
22:14
And it's all about Donald Trump and how awful of a uh human he is.
22:19
People have already come up to their own conclusions, and as I mentioned this week, it doesn't do any justice to the victims.
22:28
The victims are who we need to be focused on.
22:32
Now I want to contrast that a little bit with what's going on with Meta because we have fairly definitive evidence that this kind of stuff is going on all the time.
22:42
We have people working on the inside who are saying, I've seen the masses of children that are being exploited.
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You know, 500,000 kids a day.
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They're being sexually exploited.
22:58
And of course, meta comes back.
23:00
Oh, no, no, nothing to see here.
23:04
You know, I I don't think this is going on.
23:07
You know, we have metrics in place, and uh, we can identify these sorts of things, and we can shut them down.
23:16
Well, it's not that cut and dry.
23:21
The case in New Mexico is just one of several that are facing meta right now.
23:26
It's also facing a case in California state court that begins on Monday regarding whether Instagram harmed a woman's mental health, fueling her depression, and suicidal health.
23:43
I don't know what they mean by suicidal health.
23:45
That's you can't keep up with all the um sensitive ways to talk about it.
23:54
And it is, I'm not poking fun here.
23:56
It's a very sensitive thing to talk about, but suicidal health just seems like a very strange way to put that.
24:04
Um there's nothing healthy about about suicide.
24:09
There's just not.
24:12
So I don't know if this woman took her life.
24:14
It's it's unclear from this article.
24:17
Uh, but meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is experienced uh expected rather to testify during the California trial that starts on Monday.
24:29
So the judge aims to conclude that by the end of March.
24:33
And I think the Zuckerberg's gonna, he's gonna be spending a lot of time in court.
24:37
So you better get comfortable sitting in a courtroom.
24:44
The case was uh the California case was also brought against Alphabet's Google, which is the parent company of YouTube.
24:53
A Google spokesperson told Fox Business that the allegations against YouTube are quote, simply not true.
25:04
Uh quote, providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work.
25:13
Well, I've seen the kind of garbage that's on YouTube constantly.
25:19
And even if you get a kid account on YouTube, YouTube kids.
25:26
There was all kinds of videos.
25:27
Uh you can look up articles about the kinds of stuff that was snuck into YouTube kids, including full-on nudity and things that the algorithms didn't catch.
25:41
And people put it in there to exploit kids, and probably some people just because they thought it was funny.
25:48
But there was uh very foul language, there was full nudity.
25:53
That kind of stuff happened on YouTube kids.
25:57
So, you know, AI is it's good and bad.
26:03
I mean, it's uh it's not moral.
26:06
You know, AI can be used for good, it can be used for bad.
26:09
It is being used for good, and it is being used for bad, but it's not perfect, it's not gonna catch all these things.
26:17
The algorithms cannot catch all of these things, or at least it's proved that it can't.
26:24
Not yet.
26:25
Maybe it will one day, but as of right now, absolutely 100%.
26:29
If you think that your kids are safe by going on YouTube kids, if you think that your kids are safe because you have some parental controls in place on social media, you're absolutely fooling yourself.
26:42
I promise you that.
26:47
So uh this will get very interesting with these lawsuits.
26:54
Other social media platforms, including TikTok and Snap were originally part of the suit, though they settled with the plaintiff plaintiff before the trial.
27:06
That's kind of interesting.
27:07
They settled out of court, they didn't uh that tells me that either one, they didn't want to spend the expense, didn't want the expense of going through court, which I doubt.
27:20
I think they have enough money that uh that's not the issue.
27:25
Or there are a lot of demons in the closet that they didn't want to come out, and I think that's more likely what happened.
27:32
So TikTok and Snap settled out of court.
27:36
Facebook and Facebook and YouTube are going to court currently.
27:47
Lawyers for the woman who brought the suit, a 20-year-old identified as KGM, aim to show the social media companies were negligent in designing the apps and failed to warn the public about the risk.
28:05
The jury may consider awarding her damages for pain and suffering, and could also impose punitive damages.
28:15
So it's hard to tell again from this report.
28:18
Um journalism, no offense, but it's not what it used to be.
28:23
Sometimes it's really hard to follow the flow of thought in these articles.
28:28
I assume that that's the woman that they were talking about that's uh that's doing YouTube and Alphabet's Google.
28:40
Uh the one that they said her suicidal health suffered, whatever that meant.
28:46
I assume this is the same woman, but I could I could be wrong here, so don't quote me on that.
28:52
I will link to the article.
28:54
You can read the full article uh in the in the show notes here.
28:58
But here's the original article from the New York Post about Meta.
29:03
Meta researcher warned execs that 500,000 kids per day were targeted by creeps on Instagram, Facebook, bombshell docs.
29:17
A top meta researcher warned the company's executives that there could be as many as 500,000 cases of online sexual exploitation per day on Facebook and Instagram, according to explosive documents that were unsealed on the eve of a landmark jury trial.
29:39
I I do want to clear up one mistake that I made.
29:42
I I I think I mistakenly said at the beginning of the show that Meta was going to go before Congress.
29:48
Uh, that's not the case.
29:50
These are state cases here.
29:51
So it's a New Mexico state case and a California state case.
29:57
So opening arguments begin Monday in New Mexico.
30:01
And uh also opening arguments begin Monday in California.
30:07
Those are two separate state cases against Meta.
30:12
Uh Mark Zuckerberg's social media giant is being accused of exposing kids to the quote twin dangers of sexual exploitation and mental health harm.
30:23
Uh, end quote, through creepy messages, sex tortion schemes, and human trafficking.
30:32
Uh the result, the state claims is a teen social media crisis that has led to anxiety, depression, self-harm, and increasing suicides.
30:43
This is pretty serious, folks.
30:45
You know, I don't, and believe me, you can tell I'm serious today.
30:49
Uh, you know, a lot of times I joke around, but this is not a joking matter.
30:55
I mean, when when when young kids feel like there's no other option than to take their own life, we've got to take that very seriously.
31:08
And to know that their mental health is declining so badly, and that they're this is happening in the privacy of their lives, where parents are unaware, then one day they wake up and their child is gone forever.
31:25
This is not okay.
31:28
And that's why I say it's so much safer to just keep your kids off social media.
31:34
It's such a cesspool.
31:36
And my kids talk about this too.
31:38
They say that uh, you know, they they see kids who are being bullied on on social media.
31:43
They talk about it.
31:45
And you know, my my kids all say the same thing.
31:49
They're like, we're so glad that we don't have to worry about that kind of crap.
31:54
You know, uh, and and I'm not saying my kids are perfect.
31:59
I'm not saying that that they're not uh exposed to other kinds of dangers.
32:05
I'm not saying that.
32:06
You know, I think that's a naive approach to say that just because your kids are not on social media, they're not exposed to other kinds of dangers because they are.
32:15
There are all kinds of dangers out there.
32:19
But my point is we don't want to speed up that process.
32:23
We don't want to make it exceptionally easy for our kids to be exploited, and that's exactly what social media does.
32:32
It's this pressure to be somebody other than you're you're not.
32:36
It's this pressure, especially for girls to look good, to look sexy, to uh to look mature and uh you know, to expose themselves, and that's how that's how they get attention, that's what they learn.
32:52
You know, that's how they get attention.
32:55
And it really opens up the door to exploitation.
33:01
Because trust me, there are a lot of people out there who are going to pressure them to do sexual acts to uh to to give photos and videos and things like that.
33:15
There's a lot of pressure out there.
33:19
So we need to be aware.
33:20
We can't be naive and say, oh, well, you know, Meta has they have safeguards in place.
33:27
Or to naively think, well, that would never happen to my kid.
33:33
It happens all the time.
33:36
And according to this whistleblower, it happens by the hundreds of thousands every single day.
33:43
And I I agree.
33:45
I agree with Mela Andris.
33:49
I think the number, I think those are probably conservative numbers.
33:54
Based on my background with uh with child sexual abuse and doing training, I I think those numbers are conservative.
34:04
And I wish I didn't have to say that, but it's it's it's so true.
34:10
These people are everywhere.
34:12
And we've created avenues that create a path of least resistance, and that's exactly where abusive people are going to go.
34:20
They're gonna go to the path of least resistance.
34:23
Well, where's that path of least resistance?
34:25
What's social media?
34:26
You cast a net of a thousand private messages out to kids.
34:34
Even if you can exploit one percent of the thousand that you sent messages to.
34:42
That's that's that's a lot.
34:45
It's way too many.
34:49
So again, Andres said we expect the situation is worse.
34:53
That was in a 2020 email, according to court records.
35:00
In another chilling message, according to the New York Post.
35:05
Andrus noted that the massive user bases of Facebook and Instagram have effectively handed predators a tool to target kids on a scale that was previously unimaginable.
35:19
She wrote, I just think nowhere in the history of humanity could you have a secret conversation with a thousand people.
35:26
I'm actually scared of the ramifications here.
35:31
And I don't think she's being a drama queen.
35:33
I don't think she's, you know, some people are gonna say, well, she's just a woke feminist or whatever.
35:41
I don't think so.
35:44
I think seeing the things that she saw behind the scenes probably caused her to lose a lot of sleep.
35:52
She saw the conversations.
35:56
There were people who did test runs in the background.
36:02
Uh the this article mentions that.
36:05
There are people that set up fake accounts.
36:09
Right here, test accounts set up by state investigators were allegedly bombarded with adult sex content and outreach from alleged child predators, including, quote, pictures and videos of genitalia and an offer of a six-figure payment to star in a porn video, the lawsuit claims.
36:34
These are kids.
36:38
These are kids.
36:40
Now they were test accounts.
36:42
The abusers don't know that.
36:45
But to their knowledge, these are kids.
36:49
They're offering money, six-figure payment for these kids to star in a porn video.
36:58
This is sick.
37:00
Absolutely disgusting.
37:03
So I think Meta's going to be hard-pressed to deny that these things are actually happening on their platform.
37:09
Because it's out in the open now.
37:12
And what I like about this going to court is that it's going to be public record.
37:18
So if the media stops its fixation on President Trump and actually reports on things that are actually hurting thousands, hundreds of thousands of kids, we might actually get somewhere.
37:33
Well, we're coming up on another break already.
37:36
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37:59
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39:01
Well, did you see Google quietly updated AI principles removing its pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance?
39:10
A promise they agree to in 2018.
39:13
Well, the American people have seen Google's track record question.
39:19
An untrustworthy player in the AI race.
39:26
Now is our time.
39:29
America outloud news.
39:32
Liberty and justice for all.
39:56
Here's reading from a New York Post article.
39:58
New Mexico's
40:00
Lawsuit is one of several legal battles Meta faces this year and will seek to shine a light on safety lapses that have caught the attention of U.S.
40:09
lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
40:13
Last week, a bellwether trial accusing Meta and Google-owned YouTube of fueling social media addiction and young users began in California with hundreds of victims' families and school districts as plaintiffs.
40:30
Elsewhere, the FTC, Federal Trade Commission, appealed its loss in the major antitrust lawsuit seeking a breakup of Meta.
40:44
The multiple trials accusing Meta of exposing children to harm are quote, a split screen of Mark Zuckerberg nightmares, according to Sasha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, which is a watchdog group.
41:10
Just as the world watched courtrooms hold big tobacco and big pharma accountable, we will for the first time see big tech CEOs like Zuck take the stand.
41:22
The world is watching.
41:24
Meta's reckoning has arrived, and the consequences have just begun.
41:30
So again, I do hope and pray that justice is served.
41:38
And I know you can never put a dollar amount on the amount of children that have been harmed and continue to be harmed.
41:46
You can't put a dollar amount on that.
41:49
You can't say, well, we're, you know, we're just going to settle out of court.
41:53
Or we're going to force Meta to pay up.
41:56
There has to be more.
41:58
There has to be accountability.
42:00
There has to be some kind of safety measures that are put in place where Meta's not just saying, and Google and you know, uh, YouTube and TikTok and whoever, where they're not just saying that they have these safety measures in place.
42:16
I really think that state and federal officials are going to hold their feet to the fire and they're going to say, no, no, no, no.
42:26
Like this, there's way too much evidence that this stuff is happening just way, way, way, way too often.
42:34
Again, the test accounts that were set up by state investigators were bombarded with adult sex content, outreach from alleged child predators, asking for pictures and videos of genitalia in other emails, detailed and pretrial findings.
42:59
And it's ripped the age verification tools meant to keep underage users off Instagram, warning that they were easily fooled.
43:10
Quote, our investigators have given feedback that almost every time they encountered an age liar on Instagram in a child safety context, the age prediction is incorrect almost every time.
43:29
I mean, this is absolutely incredible.
43:35
Here's what a meta spokesperson said, and this shows you how callous they are, how insensitive they are.
43:44
Right?
43:44
Like whoever is in charge of the PR department, they're absolutely ruthless.
43:51
Listen to the statement by a meta spokesperson.
43:54
While New Mexico makes sensationalist, irrelevant and distracting arguments.
44:02
We're focused on demonstrating our long-standing commitment to support young people.
44:06
Can you imagine being a parent of a child who committed suicide?
44:12
Can you imagine being a parent, one of these parents that your kid was a targeted victim of a child sexual predator?
44:22
Can you imagine hearing this statement from Meta?
44:24
Wow, New Mexico makes sensationalist, irrelevant, and distracting arguments.
44:32
We're focused on demonstrating our long-standing commitment to supporting young people.
44:37
You want to talk about poking the bear.
45:01
The spokesperson went on.
45:04
For over a decade, we've listened to parents, worked with experts and law enforcement, and conducted in-depth research to understand the issues that matter most.
45:15
Now, I can tell you from firsthand experience.
45:19
I've experienced this kind of callousness directly from Meta.
45:23
I reported glaring issues.
45:26
I took screenshots.
45:28
It was when messenger kids first came out.
45:33
Messenger kids from Meta.
45:36
You know, it's a way for kids to connect with kids, which in theory, that's great.
45:41
Great.
45:42
They can message each other.
45:44
You know, it's kind of a form of texting, and they can send pictures and things like that, which, in my opinion, is wildly dangerous.
45:56
Because to my knowledge, there was no way to monitor the pictures, at least back at the time.
46:03
I don't know what it's like now.
46:04
I haven't looked at it for years.
46:08
But I worked with an adult friend of mine, and we set up fake accounts that were children's accounts.
46:18
And I showed how easy it was to exploit these children.
46:22
And I said, I I created an account pretending to be my kid.
46:28
I set it up.
46:29
My kid didn't even know that I set this account up.
46:33
Same with the other parent.
46:35
I said, but but assume that the other account was actually set up by a kid.
46:42
So you have one set up by a kid, and you have one set up by a parent pretending to be a kid.
46:49
And so the one kid thinks that they're talking to their friend when in fact they're actually talking to the friend's parent, unbeknownst to them.
47:01
Now just assume for a second that the kid's friend, the kid's friend's parent is a child sexual predator.
47:16
That puts a child in direct contact with a child predator.
47:24
And there is absolutely no way for Meta to verify.
47:28
None.
47:29
Zero.
47:32
And then you can imagine, because I know how predators think.
47:39
You can imagine where those conversations go.
47:42
I've seen them.
47:43
I've seen evidence.
47:44
I've talked to victims.
47:47
I know how that process works.
47:52
And eventually you that that adult, the sexual predator would exploit that child.
48:00
They would get photographs or they would get uh videos or they would get something that exposes that child.
48:09
And then those images are there forever.
48:11
They're out uh in the internet forever.
48:15
Oftentimes those photos are sold or traded, they're they're shared with other predators.
48:24
That's a whole nother another conversation for another day.
48:29
You know, what do they actually do with these photos?
48:31
A lot of people just assume that they keep them for themselves.
48:35
That's in fact rarely the case.
48:39
You know, James talks about this in um in his gospel, Peter talks, or not gospel in his letter.
48:46
Peter talks about it in 2 Peter.
48:49
I believe Peter's the one who says that they're insatiable for sin.
48:54
They just can't get enough.
48:58
And he's talking about predators, by the way, sexual predators.
49:04
They have these insatiable appetites, they don't stop, they can't stop.
49:09
They need more.
49:11
They need something more enticing.
49:13
So they'll they'll take the pictures that they have, they'll trade them, and oftentimes they'll use the dark web.
49:22
They'll trade them in exchange for other gruesome, more gruesome images.
49:29
I mean, it's it's really a sick world, and a lot of parents put their heads in the sand because they don't want to hear it, they don't want to hear this kind of stuff.
49:36
And they're like, oh no, I don't want to hear about it.
49:39
If that kind of stuff goes on, well, it's not happening to my kid, and I just don't want to hear about it.
49:43
It's too gross, it's too hard to listen to.
49:48
Where does that position your kid?
49:52
Because you don't want to talk about it, you don't want to think about it.
49:57
Where does that put your kid?
49:59
Puts your kid in.
50:00
A very vulnerable position.
50:02
We've got to be proactive.
50:06
You know, these predators don't go away.
50:08
It's not like we cross our fingers and just hope that they they go away.
50:11
They don't.
50:13
And they're everywhere.
50:16
So again, I'm going to read this statement from this spokesperson from Meta.
50:21
I I can't believe, I mean, I can.
50:24
I'm using that as a metaphor.
50:26
Um, I just can't believe the callousness.
50:34
Just a lack of any kind of respect or regard for kids.
50:37
Let me read this again.
50:39
While New Mexico makes sensationalist, irrelevant, and distracting arguments.
50:45
We're focused on demonstrating our longstanding commitment to supporting young people.
50:52
That's crazy.
50:55
That's crazy talk.
50:59
Andus, who left Meta in 2024 and now works in an online safety role for OpenAI did not return a request for comment.
51:12
And my guess is probably because she's going to be called as a direct witness in this lawsuit.
51:21
The state argued Andris has deep knowledge of Meta's handling of the online sex abuse problem because she worked extensively on the internal research.
51:33
Including serving as a member of a quote groomers task force, which examined adult predators who solicited minors.
51:44
Telling you folks, this stuff is out there.
51:46
These people are out there.
51:56
Absolutely crazy.
51:57
It's frightening.
51:58
I don't mean to uh put the fear of God in you, but man, we need to be awake.
52:03
We need to be aware.
52:05
So if you're listening and your kids are on social media, you better get a really tight grip on what kind of content they they produce and consume.
52:20
How much time they spend on their device.
52:25
Dig into their private messages.
52:27
Well, I can't do that.
52:28
It's it's their privacy, it's their life.
52:31
If they're a minor living under your roof, you absolutely can and should get into their private messages.
52:40
You have every right to do so.
52:45
You have every responsibility to do so.
52:50
You better be checking those messages.
52:54
We're just a safer bet.
52:56
Get them off of social media altogether.
53:00
You know, they don't need to be dancing and shaking.
53:05
I just was talking to somebody the other day, and they were talking about hey, do your kids twerk.
53:14
No, my young kids don't twerk.
53:18
Get the heck out of here.
53:21
Do my kids twerk.
53:23
It's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
53:27
Now, this is the kind of stuff that's going on.
53:32
You know, it it it's frightening.
53:35
But this has become it's become so mainstream now.
53:38
And the left really has pushed this kind of stuff.
53:41
You know, the whole self-exploration, finding out who you are.
53:46
Nobody really has any definitive identity.
53:50
We're all just kind of in this melting pot, trying to figure out who we are, and you know, we have gender fluidity and um sexuality is is very fluid.
54:03
And uh, you know, you you can be gay one minute and buy the next minute and non-binary and binary and uh asexual and pansexual, and like it's just so pushed onto our kids.
54:21
The amount of pressure and the amount of garbage that's taught in the schools, we really need to be paying close attention, and if you dissent, you're the one who's crazy.
54:36
They're like, oh my goodness, you're abusive to your kid because you you teach them that they shouldn't be sexually exploring at the age of 10 and 11.
54:47
I mean, this is insanity.
54:49
Look at some of the books that have been pulled from libraries at schools, kindergarteners learning about I won't use the language here, but all kinds of sexual acts, very explicit material, and the parents who bemoaned it, they were painted as lunatics, abusive.
55:13
They're not teaching their kids about culture and acceptance.
55:20
So this shouldn't surprise us.
55:22
I mean, this stuff has been pushed on us for a very long time, but I think it's all coming to a head.
55:29
And that, my friends, is the good news.
55:32
That's the hidden lightness.
55:35
It's that parents and thank God attorneys general are not gonna, they're they're not gonna keep tolerating this.
55:44
And they're filing lawsuits, and I think there's gonna be a very big force and a show of force against these big companies, these big companies that think that they're too big to fail.
55:58
This is all gonna be out in the public.
56:00
Pay attention to what happens next week.
56:03
Pay very close attention.
56:04
I'm sure you're gonna have to look this up.
56:07
You have to go out of your way to look it up because this is not gonna be in the mainstream news.
56:13
All things are um Donald Trump and Epstein files right now.
56:20
But to me, this is possibly a bigger story than the Epstein files, at least right now.
56:29
You know, the amount of victims just hard to comprehend.
56:35
You know, Epstein, you're talking about thousands of victims.
56:38
Here, you're talking about hundreds of thousands.
56:43
So it'll be interesting to see how Meta responds and uh what the outcome of these lawsuits are, but pay close, close attention and more importantly, in fact, most importantly, pay attention to what your child is doing online.
57:04
Folks, you can find more out about my show and get all the latest podcasts if you go to the menu navigation bar at America Outloud.news under our shows or schedule.
57:12
You'll be in the know.
57:14
There is a hidden lightness that shines inside of all of us.
57:17
When there's so much darkness that envelops the world, remember that it doesn't take much light to expose that darkness and to ultimately inspire other people.
57:25
Be an inspirer.
57:27
Join me in being a light.