VIRGINIA, USA — Attorneys General from 27 different states have signed a letter calling on Meta to stop monetizing child exploitation and to ban child modeling accounts.
Among those to sign the letter is Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares.
"The day you give a child an iPhone or smartphone without any parental controls is the day your child's innocence dies," Miyares said.
He told WUSA9 that as a father to three school-aged children, he has strong feelings about kids and access to social media.
"If you don't have safeguards, it is like dropping your kids off in a high crime area where you know there's bad actors about and driving away," he told WUSA9.
The letter references articles written by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times in February.
The reporting alleges a connection between pedophiles and "parent-run child accounts" on Instagram.
"The New York Times article indicated that in chat rooms these pedophiles are openly bragging that Instagram is this golden age of child exploitation," Miyares said.
“Meta’s negligence and lack of proper safeguards only aids and abets child exploitation. Even after Meta employees alerted leadership that its algorithms promoted images of minors to users who had demonstrated pedophilic or predatory interests on its platforms, the company failed to take any real action or ban the monetization of underage accounts,” he said.
He said if Meta does not comply, the Commonwealth is fully prepared to take them to court.
"The message is, clean up your act or this is gonna be one more aspect that you're gonna have to defend in court," he told WUSA9.
A spokesperson for Meta sent WUSA9 the following statement Friday night:
Instagram requires everyone to be at least 13 years old to create an account. Accounts that represent someone under that age must be actively managed by a parent or manager, who is responsible for the content posted and can decide to delete the account at any time. Anyone can control who is able to tag, mention or message them on Instagram as well as who can comment on their account. On top of that, we prevent accounts exhibiting potentially suspicious behavior from using our monetization tools and we plan to limit such accounts from accessing subscription content.
They also shared that this list of tools and resources that they say they've developed to help teens have safe, positive experiences, and give parents simple ways to set boundaries for their teens.
To read the letter, click here.