How Facebook and Instagram became marketplaces for child sex trafficking
Maya Jones* was only 13 when she first walked through the door of Courtney’s House, a drop-in centre for victims of child sex trafficking in Washington DC. “She was so young, but she was already so broken by what she’d been through,” says Tina Frundt, the founder of Courtney’s House. Frundt, one of Washington DC’s most prominent specialists in countering child trafficking, has worked with hundreds of young people who have suffered terrible exploitation at the hands of adults, but when Maya eventually opened up about what she had been through, Frundt was shaken.
Maya told Frundt that when she was 12, she had started receiving direct messages on Instagram from a man she didn’t know.She said the man, who was 28, told her she was really pretty. According to Frundt, Maya told her that after she started chatting with the man, he asked her to send him naked photos. She told Frundt that he said he would pay her $40 for each one. He seemed kind and he kept giving Maya compliments, which made her feel special. She decided to meet him in person.
Then came his next request: “Can you help me make some money?” According to Frundt, Mayaexplained that the man asked her to pose naked for photos, and to give him her Instagram password so that he could upload the photos to her profile. Frundt says Maya told her that the man, who was now calling himself a pimp, was using her Instagram profile to advertise her for sex. Before long, sex buyers started sending direct messages to her account, wanting to make a date. Maya told Frundt that she had watched, frozen, what was taking place on her account, as the pimp negotiated prices and logistics for meetings in motels around DC. She didn’t know how to say no to this adult who had been so nice to her. Maya told Frundt that she hated having sex with these strangers but wanted to keep the pimp happy.
One morning three months after she first met the man, Frundt says that Maya was found by a passerby lying crumpled on a street in southeast DC, half-naked and confused. The night before, Maya told her, a sex buyer had taken her somewhere against her will, and she later recalled being gangraped there for hours before being dumped on the street. “She was traumatised, and blamed herself for what happened. I had to work with her a lot to help her realise this was not her fault,” said Frundt when we visited
Courtney’s House last summer.
Frundt, who has helped hundreds of children like Maya since she opened Courtney’s House in 2008, says that the first thing she now does when a young person is referred to her is to ask for their Instagram handle. Other social media platforms are also used to exploit the young people in her care, but she says Instagram is the one that comes up most often.
In the 20 years since the birth of social media, child sexual exploitation has become one of the biggest challenges facing tech companies. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the internet is used by human traffickers as “digital hunting fields”, allowing them access to both customers and potential victims, with children being targeted by traffickers on social media platforms. The biggest of these, Facebook, is owned by Meta, the tech giant whose platforms, which also include Instagram, are used by more than 3 billion people worldwide. In 2020, according to a report by US-based not-for-profit the Human Trafficking Institute, Facebook was the platform most used to groom and recruit children by sex traffickers (65%), based on an analysis of 105 federal child sex trafficking cases that year. The HTI analysis ranked Instagram second most prevalent, with Snapchat third.
Grooming and child sex trafficking, though often researched and discussed together, are distinct acts. “Grooming” refers to the period of manipulation of a victim prior to their exploitation for sex or for other purposes. “Child sex trafficking” is the sexual exploitation of a child specifically as part of a commercial transaction. When the pimp was flattering and chatting with Maya, he was grooming her; when he was selling her to other adults for sex,he was trafficking.
Though people often think of “trafficking” as the movement of victims across or within borders, under international law the term refers to the use of force, fraud or coercion to obtain labour, or in the buying and selling of non-consensual sex acts, whether or not travel is involved. Because, under international law, children cannot legally consent to any kind of sex act, anyone who profits from or pays for a sex act from a child – including profiting from or paying for photographs depicting sexual exploitation – is considered a human trafficker.
Meta has numerous policies in place to try to prevent sex trafficking on its platforms. “It’s very important to me that everything we build is safe and good for kids,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder, wrote in a memo to staff in 2021. In a statement responding to a detailed list of the allegations in this piece, a Meta spokesperson said: “The exploitation of children is a horrific crime – we don’t allow it and we work aggressively to fight it on and off our platforms. We proactively aid law enforcement in arresting and prosecuting the criminals who perpetrate these grotesque offences. When we are made aware that a victim is in harm’s way, and we have data that could help save a life, we process an emergency request immediately.” The statement cited the group director of intelligence at the charity Stop the Traffik, who is former deputy director of the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, who has said “millions are safer and traffickers are increasingly frustrated” because of their work with Meta.
But over the past two years, through interviews, survivor testimonies, US court documents and human trafficking reporting data, we have heard repeated claims that Facebook and Instagram have become major sales platforms for child trafficking. We have interviewed more than 70 sources, including survivors and their relatives, prosecutors, child protection professionals and content moderators across the US in order to understand how sex traffickers are using Facebook and Instagram, and why Meta is able to deny legal responsibility for the trafficking that takes place on its platforms.
While Meta says it is doing all it can, we have seen evidence that suggests it is failing to report or even detect the full extent of what is happening, and many of those we interviewed said they felt powerless to get the company to act.
The survivors * * *
Courtney’s House sits on a quiet residential street on the outskirts of Washington DC. Inside, Frundt and her team have tried to make the modest two-storey house feel like a family home, with comfortable sofas and photos on the mantlepiece. Frundt, who was herself trafficked as a child in the 1980s and 90s, is now one of Washington DC’s most experienced and respected anti-trafficking advocates. Warm and ferociously protective of the children in her care, she is contracted by the city’s child protection services to identify trafficked children going through the court system, and she regularly attends court hearings for the youth in her care. She also helps train the FBI and local law enforcement sex-trafficking units on how to spot traffickers on online platforms, including Instagram. “When I was trafficked long ago I was advertised in the classified sections of freesheet newspapers,” Frundt told us. “Now my youth here are trafficked on Instagram. It’s exactly the same business model but you just don’t have to pay to place an ad.”
The children who are referred to Frundt, usually by the police or social services, have been sexually exploited and controlled: by a boyfriend, a pimp, a family member. Some of them are as young as nine. Almost without exception, they have childhoods scarred by sexual abuse, poverty and violence. This makes them perfect targets for sexual predators. “They are all looking for love and affirmation and a sense that they mean something,” said Frundt.
Almost all the young people who come to Courtney’s House are children of colour. They are, Frundt said, battling stereotypes that pressure them to become sexualised too early and make them vulnerable to traffickers. A 2017 study by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality found that adults typically regard Black girls as less innocent and more knowledgable about sex than their white peers. The same study showed that Black girls are often perceived to be older than they are.
Most of the time, Frundt says, the children who come to Courtney’s House are still being trafficked when they walk through the door. Even in cases where they have escaped their exploiters, she said, explicit videos and photos of them often continue to circulate online. Traffickers will lock victims out of their accounts, preventing them from taking down images posted to their profiles.
When we asked Frundt if she could show us examples of young people in her care who she says are currently being trafficked on Instagram, she pulled out her phone and scrolled through post after post of explicit images and videos of girls as young as 14 or 15. Most of the photos and videos seemed to have been taken by someone else. Frundt said that these posts were being used as a way of advertising the girls for potential sex buyers, who would send a direct message to buy explicit content or to arrange a meet up.
At one point, our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of five teenage girls. They had come back from school, and they gathered around the kitchen table, chatting and playing music on their phones while Frundt served them casserole. After they had eaten, we asked if we could talk to them about their experiences: had any of them been sexually exploited on social media or had explicit videos or pictures posted of them?
They glanced at each other and burst out laughing. Yes, they said, of course. All the time. One girl said she felt that “nobody at Instagram cares, they don’t care what’s posted. They don’t care shit about us.”
Frundt claims that she is constantly asking Instagram to close accounts and take down exploitative content of kids in her care. “I even have law enforcement calling me up asking, ‘Tina, can you get Instagram to do something?’. If Ican’t get Instagram to act, what hope is there for anyone else?”
When we put these concerns to Meta, a spokesperson said: “We take all allegations and reports of content involving children extremely seriously and have diligently responded to requests from Courtney’s House. Our ability to remove content or delete accounts requires sufficient information to determine that the content or user violates our policies.”
Frundt says that in 2020 and 2021 she had discussions with Instagram about conducting staff training to help prevent child trafficking on its platforms. She says the training didn’t go