Florida AG Calls on Mark Zuckerberg to Testify before Human Trafficking council

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify before the Statewide Council on Human Trafficking discussing predators exploiting his social media applications to solicit victims in a press release released on Tuesday. A recent poll of Florida law enforcement agencies found that Meta owns 53% of the social media sites that have been used to assist human trafficking since 2019.

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody has requested that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attend before the Statewide Council on Human Trafficking on Monday to explain how Meta is being used to enable sex exploitation and human trafficking.

Moody said so while revealing what she called the “stunning” and “disturbing” results of a statewide study that discovered Meta platforms are being used by human traffickers to conduct crimes more than any other social media platforms.

It appears to be a first-of-its-kind statewide inquiry and request.

Since 2019, more than half of all documented instances of social media platforms being used in Florida cases of human trafficking have involved Meta platforms, according to a new state inquiry. Incorporated among them are Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

Florida Attorney General’s Office

“Before launching new products or wasting time preparing for a cage match that will likely never happen, Zuckerberg should be working to make Meta’s existing platforms safer for users and to prevent vulnerable people from being forced into illicit sex work,” Moody said Monday when announcing the results of a state investigation. “The findings of our statewide survey and other reports make it clear that Meta platforms are the preferred social media applications for human traffickers looking to prey on vulnerable people. Zuckerberg needs to immediately turn his attention to this public safety threat and testify to our council about what Meta is doing to prevent its platforms from being used to assist, facilitate or support human trafficking.”

The Florida legislature commissioned the formation of the Statewide Council on Human Trafficking. The 15-member group, led by Moody, collaborates with law enforcement to combat human trafficking and issues yearly reports on the issue.

The council was tasked with looking into the frequency with which social media platforms were being used to help, facilitate, or encourage human trafficking in Florida after the state legislature approved HB 615 in 2022, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law. The council made its initial findings public on Monday after presenting them to the lawmakers in January.

These conclusions come from a survey that was distributed to 80 law enforcement organizations, including 67 sheriff’s offices and a number of police departments. 32 organizations responded with 376 reports totaling 376 human trafficking investigations since 2019. The majority, 271, concerned the use of social media to aid human trafficking. The majority of these, 146 of them, included Meta applications.

Moody also sent a letter to Zuckerberg on Monday requesting him to appear before the council to explain what Meta’s plans are “to stop human traffickers from using its platforms to advance this horrific crime.”

She’s requested Zuckerberg respond by September 5 at the latest or else. On October 2, the council will meet again. He has not yet commented on the situation, but his business has been defending itself against numerous lawsuits for many years that were brought up in connection with the same issue.

Meta “has long faced accusations that its platforms are a haven for sexual misconduct,” Reuters reports.

It’s currently being sued by hundreds of plaintiffs, including parents, school districts, and pension and investment funds that own stock in Meta.

The most recent lawsuit filed by the Employees’ Retirement System of the State of Rhode Island alleges that Meta’s leadership and board haven’t protected their fiduciary interests because they’ve ignored “systemic evidence” of crimes against children being allegedly committed using its platforms.

According to the complaint, Meta’s executives and directors specifically deny preventing the use of Facebook and Instagram to aid sex trafficking and child sexual exploitation. This leads to “the only logical inference that the board has consciously decided to permit Meta’s platforms to promote and facilitate sex/human trafficking,” according to the complaint.

Both Meta and Facebook have vigorously defended themselves in court, including at the Texas Supreme Court, where they lost.

In 2021, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that victims of sex trafficking could sue Facebook despite it using Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act as a defense.

Justice Blacklock said the justices “do not understand section 230 to ‘create a lawless no-man’s land on the Internet’ in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking.” The court’s ruling also points out that “Congress recently amended section 230 to indicate that civil liability may be imposed on websites that violate state and federal human-trafficking laws.”

According to a 2022 Federal Human Trafficking Report found that from 2019 to 2022, Facebook was the most popular social media site for luring potential victims. Facebook and Instagram accounted for 60% of the recruitment for human trafficking on the top 10 platforms examined in the report.

According to a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s 2022 CyberTipline report by Electronic Service Providers, over 27 million, or 85%, of incidents reported were from Meta platforms.