I am a professor of Latin American history and Director of the Civic Resilience Initiative of the Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security at the University of Pittsburgh. I am also a mother of four: my older children were born and raised in Costa Rica, where we lived for nearly a decade and I taught at the main public university. In my research, I study various phenomena related to social media. In 2022, I published an account of my failed efforts to get Facebook to remove public Spanish-language groups in which children were being openly targeted for online sexual exploitation in Wired.
Eventually, in the months after publication, those specific groups disappeared. However, in 2023, I stumbled into a new set of public groups permeated by the same type of content. These were framed as fan groups for the Mexico kid hip-hop trio Los Picus. I wrote an initial report on the phenomenon in Tech Policy Press last January.
In this update and extension of that work, I report that the scope of the problem is far greater than I had initially found, encompassing multiple different fandoms and many dozens of public Facebook groups with over two and a half million members. Groups that center around popular celebrities, such as YouTube stars Mau McMahon and Karla Bustillos and the child members of their household; Phoenix, Arizona-born teen entertainer Xavi; and K-Pop stars, become host to what appears to be child predation.
The groups I have identified likely represent just a fraction of the problem. In addition to my own research, over the past few months, five journalists in Spanish-language news organizations in Latin America, coordinated by the investigative journalism consortium El CLIP, looked into these phenomena. Today, they published their reports in El CLIP, Chequeado, Crónica Uno, El Espectador, and Factchequeado. Their reporting indicates that this problem extends to even further Facebook groups—many not associated with any fandom, but rather branded as places to discuss teen issues— that the legislation in the countries investigated is often insufficient to deal with this sort of digital grooming, and that Meta collaborates too little with local authorities to try to curb this behavior.
In this report, I use the fact that posters in these Facebook groups sometimes ask participants to post their age and country of origin to provide rough quantitative data on the regional spread of stated ages and national origin. Numerous accounts in these groups identify themselves as children from Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, with others from across the hemisphere. Accounts identifying as children as young as 7 and 8 are present, and 10, 11, and 12-year-olds are common.
Towards the end of this report, I look in detail at some of the interactions in comments within these—again, fully public—groups to describe some forms of emotional luring and manipulation that very young Spanish-speaking Facebook users are apparently subject to.
We presented a range of questions to Meta about these phenomena. A Meta spokesperson responded with a statement and provided a link to Meta’s proactive steps to address these and similar phenomena:
Child exploitation is a horrific crime. We work aggressively to fight it on and off our platforms and to support law enforcement in its efforts to arrest and prosecute the criminals behind it. Our policies prohibit child exploitation, inappropriate interactions with children, and the sexualization of minors; these rules apply globally, in different languages, including English and Spanish, and across each of our platforms. While predators constantly change their tactics to evade detection, our global teams and tools work to identify and quickly remove violating content.
Please note that the report below contains disturbing descriptions and screenshots of posts and interactions involving accounts identifying as children. These images have been edited to remove any information that could be used to identify a particular account or user identity.
