Warning: This article includes descriptions of self-harm.
The families of two teenage boys who died by suicide filed a lawsuit Wednesday against Meta, alleging that the tech company has ignored the rising danger of sexual blackmail schemes targeting teens on Instagram.
The families, who are from Pennsylvania and Scotland, said in the lawsuit that their boys fell victim to the same type of “sextortion” scam thousands of miles apart: A stranger contacts a teen on Instagram pretending to be a romantic interest, solicits nude or intimate photos and then threatens to share the images with friends and family unless the teen shares more or pays an extortion fee.
The lawsuit is the latest attempt to hold Instagram accountable for what some users say are lethal scams that take place on its platform. Meta, which owns Instagram, is facing at least four other sextortion-related lawsuits that claim that Instagram is a defective product and has been negligent by not dealing with a sextortion problem for years.
The lawyers behind the latest suit said they plan to draw on a newly available trove of internal corporate records from Meta to bolster their case.
“This was known,” Matthew Bergman, the families’ lead lawyer, said in an interview. “This was not an accident. This was not a coincidence. This was a foreseeable consequence of the deliberate design decisions that Meta made. Their own documents show that they were very aware of this extortion phenomenon, and they simply chose to put their profits over the safety of young people.”
In a statement Wednesday, Meta did not directly address the claims in the lawsuit but said it was working to fight sextortion scammers.
“Sextortion is a horrific crime. We support law enforcement to prosecute the criminals behind it, and we continue to fight them on our apps on multiple fronts,” the company said.
Meta said that, since 2021, it has placed teens younger than 16 into private accounts when they sign up for Instagram, although the lawsuit disputes that and says the company did not automatically do so until 2024.
Meta added in its statement: “We work to prevent accounts showing suspicious behavior from following teens and avoid recommending teens to them. We also take other precautionary steps, like blurring potentially sensitive images sent in DMs and reminding teens of the risks of sharing them, and letting people know when they’re chatting to someone who may be in a different country.”
While Instagram has instituted some design changes for minors in recent years to attempt to address extortion, the lawsuit argues that the changes came too late and that Instagram should be held responsible for the two teens’ deaths.
Teenagers’ treatment at the hands of social media companies — and of Instagram in particular — has become a major flashpoint in society. A movement has sprung up of parents who say Instagram and other apps contributed to their children’s suicides or exploitation, and members of Congress are investigating Meta’s AI chatbots over child safety concerns. Last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told parents who were in the audience at a Senate hearing on child online safety that he was “sorry for everything that you have all gone through” and that Meta would “continue doing industry-leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things that your families have had to suffer.”
This month, Australia became the first country to ban people under 16 from social media.
The lawsuit stems from two deaths: Levi Maciejewski, from Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, who died last year at age 13; and Murray Dowey, from Dunblane, Scotland, who died in 2023 at 16.
Tricia Maciejewski, Levi’s mother, said in an interview that, until his death, she did not think it would be possible for a total stranger to be able to message a teenager on Instagram.
“What I thought was that their app was safe for children, because that’s what it says in the app store,” she said. “They’re children using these products, so there should be safeguards in place to protect them.”
The lawsuit accuses Instagram of “matchmaking children to adult predators.” It is seeking damages for pain and suffering, as well as punitive damages.
Sextortion scams have become a growing threat in recent years, with thousands of victims — primarily boys — nationwide, according to an FBI alert last year. The FBI has blamed criminals in West Africa and Southeast Asia for operating the schemes. And at least 36 teen boys have died by suicide after being victimized by financial sextortion, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Both Levi and Murray began using Instagram at young ages, according to the lawsuit. Levi was 13 when he joined, Instagram’s minimum age, and had been on the app less than 48 hours when he was targeted for blackmail and died, his mother said. Murray started on Instagram when he was 10, apparently avoiding the age requirement set out in the app’s terms of service in a somewhat common practice, according to his family.
No one has been charged in either death. The FBI and Scottish authorities did not respond to requests for comment, and it’s not clear if they have open investigations into the scammers who targeted the boys. In Levi’s case, the scammers were demanding that he pay $300, his mother said, citing information she said she learned from investigators who searched his phone after his death.
Murray was the “peacemaker” of his family and “the glue that held it together,” the lawsuit says. He was passionate about sports and guitar and had been watching television with family hours before an Instagram message from an extortionist sent him into a spiral, according to the suit.
Levi was a “firecracker” who used to go on football recruiting trips with his dad, a college coach, and was two days into eighth grade when he died, his mother said.
“He was right on the verge of a beautiful, beautiful life. So, I’m pretty angry,” she said. “I get angry for his brother and his classmates and his future that he got robbed of.”
The families allege that Instagram was a uniquely vulnerable place for teens for years because of its then-default privacy settings: Lists of the accounts that a teenager followed and of the accounts following them were public by default for some teenagers until 2024, giving criminals information they could use for blackmail. For a time, Instagram also allowed teens to accept direct messages from strangers.
Instagram announced in 2021 that it would default some teens to private settings, but those changes applied only to those aged 13-15 and only to new accounts, not existing ones. The new lawsuit also alleges that the 2021 announcement was a half-measure, with younger teens seeing only a “preselected option on a screen” rather than a true default setting.
Now, after years of outside experts calling for change, teen accounts including existing accounts are private by default, according to the company.
In October, Instagram took its restrictions for teens a step further, announcing a series of changes that included restricting access to certain adult accounts that regularly share age-inappropriate content.
But, the lawsuit argues, those overhauls came too late for the many teens who had already been targeted in sextortion schemes.
“Meta knew that children were dying after being sextorted by adult predators because of Meta’s tools,” the lawsuit says.
Maciejewski called Instagram’s recent changes “a beautiful smoke screen” and said she does not trust the company now to act in the best interests of teens.
“They told me it was safe for my 13-year-old, too. So would I trust them? Now? Absolutely not,” she said.
The lawsuit cites what it calls internal corporate records from Meta to bolster its argument. According to the suit, the existence of various company “studies, reports, emails and other records” recently became known because of other lawsuits that Meta is fighting nationwide. Those lawsuits include sprawling multidistrict litigation in federal court in Oakland, California, in which school districts and other local governments accuse Meta and other social media companies of developing dangerous and addictive products. Meta and the other companies deny wrongdoing in the case.
The actual corporate records remain sealed to the public under a court order, but their existence is a matter of public record. And details from the records, including quotations, began to trickle out last month in court filings in the Oakland case.
Now, Bergman says he is ready to use the records — including research documents and other communications from as far back as 2019 — as ammunition in the sextortion case.
Relying on the internal records, the lawsuit says there were years of internal debate within Meta over whether to make teen Instagram accounts private-by-default. On one side of the debate, favoring default privacy, were corporate teams that covered policy, legal affairs, communications, privacy and well-being, while on the other side was the growth team, responsible for expanding the business, according to the lawsuit.
Bergman said the growth team opposed privacy-by-default for teen accounts and dominated internal decision-making.
“There were people of conscience working for Meta that were trying their level best to sound the alarm bell of what these platforms were doing, but time and time again, the concerns for public safety gave way to the imperative of corporate profit,” Bergman said.
Meta for years has been the subject of scrutiny from lawmakers, outside experts and former employees over whether it valued engagement and growth over safety.
Citing the internal records, the lawsuit quotes Meta employees, including an unnamed member of the growth team, saying that safety improvements would “lead to a potentially untenable problem with engagement and growth.” The context of the quotes, though, is impossible to know without seeing the full records.
Again citing internal records, the lawsuit says that a private-by-default setting for teens would have eliminated 5.4 million unwanted interactions a day over Instagram direct messages. It also says, citing internal Meta survey results from 2021, that 13% of 13- to 15-year-olds reported receiving unwanted sexual advances on Instagram in the past seven days, overwhelmingly from strangers.
Last month, Meta said in a statement to Time magazine that plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Oakland court case were using “cherry-picked” quotes from the company’s internal records and that Meta stood by its record in trying to protect teens.
The two families are represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center, a law firm that Bergman founded in 2021 in Seattle after taking on asbestos lawsuits earlier in his career. The firm has sued other tech companies, including TikTok and Snapchat’s parent company, over alleged harms in cases that are still pending. The law firm has also sued Meta before over sextortion-related deaths, including in three cases that are pending in state court in Los Angeles.
The new lawsuit was filed in state court in Delaware, where Meta is incorporated.
The location is potentially important because Delaware falls within the jurisdiction of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where recent case law is more welcoming to claims against tech companies than in other judicial circuits. Last year, a 3rd Circuit panel ruled that the mother of a 10-year-old girl who died in a “blackout challenge” (in which users are dared to choke themselves until they pass out) could move forward with a lawsuit against TikTok. The appellate judges turned aside the company’s argument that a federal law known as Section 230, which provides tech platforms that host content posted by others wide-ranging legal protections, barred a lawsuit. That case is pending. TikTok has denied wrongdoing.
Maciejewski said she believes Instagram has been offering a defective product, akin to companies that over the years have made unsafe automobiles, playground equipment or car seats.
“We’ve been adults long enough to have seen car seats malfunction, and there is an instant recall, right?” she said. “It is everywhere for people to see, because parents aren’t going to put their kid in that seat, knowing that there’s any fraction of a chance that it could be harmful to their child.”
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or chat live at 988lifeline.org. You can also visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional support.