New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez ripped Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta over a new PG-13 rating system for Instagram that the company claims will protect young users from online harm – calling it a “dangerous promotional stunt”.
Torrez blasted Meta over allegedly “false claims” about its new safety features in letter addressed to Zuckerberg and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, a copy of which was exclusively obtained by The Post.
“Meta’s misappropriation of the PG-13 label suggests a level of oversight that does not exist on the platform — making this announcement a dangerous promotional stunt that lulls parents into a false sense of security about the risks their children face when they use Instagram,” Torrez wrote in the letter.
The letter follows a bombshell civil lawsuit filed by Torrez in New Mexico state court, which accuses Meta of failing to protect kids from adult sex content and alleged child predators. The high-profile case heads to trial on Feb. 2.
In October, Meta announced that teens on Instagram would automatically be placed in accounts with safety filters “guided by PG-13 movie ratings.” The company said teens would be shielded from posts with “strong language, certain risky stunts, and additional content that could encourage potentially harmful behaviors, such as posts showing marijuana paraphernalia.”
Torrez pointed out that the Motion Picture Association, which has overseen the film rating system for the last six decades, had “called Meta’s misuse of the PG-13 label ‘literally false, deceptive, and highly misleading.’”
“It is deeply alarming that Meta has chosen to continue its dangerous public relations campaign despite MPA’s demands that Meta stop misleading parents,” Torrez wrote.
“In reality, the MPA’s thorough rating and review system is inconsistent with a platform driven by recommendation algorithms that steer children towards harmful content, and enable predators to hunt, groom, and victimize minors,” he added.
The New Mexico attorney general demanded that Meta stop marketing its teen accounts as “PG-13” and “actually implement meaningful safety protections for children,” including implementing age verification and “addressing harmful algorithms that proactively serve dangerous content.”
In a statement to The Post, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said, “We strongly disagree with these allegations and we’re proud of the progress we’ve made.
“The only promotional stunt is this letter, which is littered with factual errors and misrepresentations and deliberately designed to distract from the meaningful changes and built-in protections we’ve introduced to help keep young people safe online,” Stone added.
Fairplay for Kids, an online watchdog group focused on child safety, said in a September report that its tests showed only one in five of the safety features associated with Meta’s teen accounts program was effective.
Initially filed in late 2023, New Mexico’s lawsuit alleges that Meta and Zuckerberg have repeatedly misled the public about the effectiveness of their safety tools. Zuckerberg is named as a defendant alongside Meta in the case.
According to the lawsuit, New Mexico state investigators set up test accounts on Instagram and Facebook for four fictional children using AI-generated photos that purportedly portrayed children aged 14 or younger.
The test accounts were bombarded with adult sex content and outreach from alleged child predators, including “pictures and videos of genitalia” and an offer of a six-figure payment to star in a porn video, the lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit claims that Meta’s recommendation algorithm has fueled a marketplace that connects “pedophiles, predators, and others engaged in the commerce of sex and allow[s] them to hunt for, groom, sell, and buy sex with children and sexual images of children at an unprecedented scale.”
