TN AG Skrmetti Champions Child Safety by Holding Big Tech Accountable During Consumer Protection Week
NASHVILLE – This National Consumer Protection Week, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti took a series of actions to hold Meta Platforms, Inc., accountable and to protect Tennessee children and consumers.
On Monday, March 4, Attorney General Skrmetti joined a coalition of 27 state attorneys general in sending a letter to Meta demanding that Instagram stop monetizing child exploitation content.
According to media reports, Meta’s own staff raised alarms after Instagram enabled those running “parent-managed minor accounts” to profit by providing “pin-up style photos of children” to male subscribers who were “often overt about sexual interest” in children. Additional reporting alleged that Meta actively promoted child-modeling subscriptions to “likely pedophiles” with one outlet reporting that men in online chatrooms frequently praised “the advent of Instagram as a golden age for child exploitation.”
On Tuesday, March 5, General Skrmetti joined a bipartisan coalition of 41 attorneys general in sending a letter to Meta addressing the recent rise of Facebook and Instagram platform account takeovers by scammers and frauds. Account takeovers are when bad actors break into a user’s account and change passwords, effectively hijacking the account and blocking out the rightful owner.
Attorney General Skrmetti and the bipartisan coalition are calling on Meta to thoroughly review data security practices for protecting its users’ accounts from being unfairly locked out or taken over by scammers.
These actions come after Attorney General Skrmetti filed suit in October 2023 against Meta alleging that its Instagram platform causes mental health harms to its young users.
If you would like to share your experience regarding the harmful effects of social media on children, please fill out this form provided by the Tennessee Attorney General’s Division of Consumer Affairs (DCA). If you have additional consumer related concerns, please contact DCA at (615) 741-4737 or toll free inside Tennessee at (800) 342-8385.
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