When the mother of an 11-year-old girl discovered inappropriate Facebook messages from a man in her daughter’s account, she contacted her local police. But the case was soon taken up by undercover investigators in New Mexico’s Justice Department, who were working to understand how child predators operate on the site.
Using a decoy account of another girl, investigators connected with the man, 47-year-old Christopher Reynolds, who soon sent private messages with explicit photographs and talked about penetrating her. By April 2024, investigators had arrested Reynolds and charged him with solicitation of a minor, according to the state Justice Department.
Police have been running similar stings against individuals for years, but the authorities in New Mexico had a bigger target: They were building a case against Meta, Facebook’s parent company, alleging that the company knowingly put children at risk of sexual exploitation and violated state consumer protection laws.
As the case continued, Meta made a startling disclosure in a written response to questions from New Mexico’s lawyers, according to a previously unreported court document. The 47-year-old had had one of his accounts disabled in 2021 when the company discovered he was a registered sex offender — a category prohibited from having Facebook and Instagram accounts. Meta says it doesn’t allow people to skirt bans by creating new accounts, but acknowledged that people deliberately evade its systems, even as they improve. Reynolds operated 15 other accounts, according to the court document.
Two other men, who were prosecuted as part of the investigation, were able to keep on using Meta’s services despite running afoul of the company’s rules. One had limits imposed on his accounts and one of them was found to have violated the rules on nudity and sexual activity on two occasions, according to the filing.
New Mexico’s lawyers have pointed to the men as examples of the holes in Meta’s efforts to keep dangerous people off its services as they present their case to a jury in Santa Fe in what is expected to be a seven-week trial. The state is seeking financial penalties against the social media giant and orders from a judge that it do more to keep children and teenagers safe on its sites. In a complaint that runs 250 pages and includes a warning label on its cover about disturbing images, the state laid out its allegations in stark terms.
“Meta has allowed Facebook and Instagram to become a marketplace for predators in search of children upon whom to prey,” the state alleged.
The case is part of a wave of lawsuits against Meta and other social media firms heading to trial this year — with Meta simultaneously on trial this month in New Mexico and California. States, school districts and families have accused the companies of making products that are dangerously addictive and bad for young people’s mental health. Together the legal actions have the potential to remake how social media is regulated in the United States, with supporters comparing the cases to earlier efforts to hold tobacco and opioid companies accountable in court.
“Child exploitation is a horrific crime,” Meta said in a statement. “We work aggressively to fight it on and off our platforms, and to support law enforcement to arrest and prosecute the criminals behind it. We use sophisticated technology to find and remove child exploitation content from our apps, and have developed a range of tools to help prevent it in the first place — including launching Teen Accounts, which automatically limit who can contact teens, and preventing potentially suspicious adults from finding each other.”
Reynolds pleaded guilty to a charge of child solicitation in October 2024, according to court records. He could not be reached for comment and the lawyer who represented him declined to comment.
The New Mexico case — put together by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez (D) — stands apart for its use of an undercover investigation and focus on how child predators operate on Facebook and Instagram. The state’s lawyers allege that people seeking out children were able to easily evade Meta’s internal watchdogs and safety systems and exploit its friend-recommendation algorithms to surface a steady stream of potential victims.
After one of the state’s undercover personas was shut down, investigators were able to open a new one with the same name and date of birth within five minutes by adopting a new username and phone number, according to the complaint.
In December, Torrez wrote to Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg outlining the changes he wants to see the company make. They included imposing age verification, addressing risks created by encrypted chats, redesigning algorithms that serve up dangerous content and removing “bad actors.”
Meta says it already restricts adults from starting conversations with teenagers who they’re not connected to and has systems that identify accounts with suspicious behavior involving children, and alerts teens when they’re in contact with such accounts.
As the trial gets underway, New Mexico’s lawyers are also expected to turn to internal company records and accounts from insiders to sway the jury. Arturo Béjar, a former Meta engineer, testified in the trial last week about how his own 14-year-old daughter received unwanted advances after creating a public Instagram page.
“The product is very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls,” Béjar said.
When it came to the three men ultimately arrested in New Mexico, Meta had been engaged in a long-running cat-and-mouse game, according to court records. Their behavior across their multiple accounts had triggered the company’s systems — in one case as far back as 2014 — and each had faced some level of discipline that included having inappropriate posts hidden or deleted. The document, which includes responses by Meta from August and October, does not say when the company determined the various accounts were linked nor how it made the connections.
One of the men, who was 52 at the time of his arrest, had repeatedly violated the company’s policies on “adult nudity and sexual activity” and “bullying and harassment.” One of his accounts was shut down in October 2023 after he failed to prove he was an “authentic user,” according to the document. But in 2024, he was still online, and according to investigators, he described in chat messages how he wanted to “rape the underaged persona, make her cry, and get her pregnant.”
Less than two months after Meta disabled one of Reynolds’s accounts in late 2021, another was restricted from sending messages to unconnected accounts for 24 hours. Third and fourth accounts were also subject to some form of restrictions in subsequent years and Meta said it detected violations of policies on violent content in late 2023. Some details of the men’s conduct and the actions Meta took are redacted in the filing, but the company told The Washington Post that its actions included curbing their ability to find teen accounts.
In the spring of 2024, when investigators connected their undercover account with both the 11-year-old girl and Reynolds, he was still on Meta’s platforms and initiated a chat, according to the attorney general’s office. The chat culminated in investigators trying to arrange a meeting with Reynolds at a motel in Roswell, New Mexico. When he didn’t show, police tracked him down and took him into custody.
Meta reported the three men to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children — a law enforcement clearing house — after their 2024 arrests were publicized by authorities in New Mexico, according to the court filing.
Meta says its reports to the center followed legal requirements. (The day before the arrests were announced, President Joe Biden signed a law broadening social media companies’ obligation to file reports with the missing children’s center.)
“How is this possible?” Don Migliori, a lawyer for the state, asked in court last week. He told jurors that Meta’s systems to catch potentially predators were under-resourced and its policies gave users multiple strikes before being held to account.
Meta says that even a single instance of grooming a minor, one of the most serious rule violations, is grounds for an account being removed.
Meta told The Post that it is hard for the company to identify registered offenders without reports from law enforcement. But the company said it now works to identify and close new accounts created by banned offenders and that its ability to enforce bans against people who get back on to its platforms has improved.
The pattern of behavior by the three men is typical, according to experts who have studied the risks children face online. But social media companies have largely avoided the kind of laws and regulations designed to protect children offline, according to Mary Graw Leary, a law professor at Catholic University.
“Embedded into our lives are child protection measures to decrease the access of potential offenders to children,” Graw Leary said. “In the digital world in America it seems that is not in place.”
The New Mexico case and others now working their way through the courts could begin to change that. But Graw Leary said, given the size and riches of the tech companies and their leaders, any punishment would have to be hefty to get them to change course: “When they engage in that cost benefit analysis, it’s going to have to be a significant cost.”
The post He solicited a child on Facebook, even after Meta banned him appeared first on Washington Post.
