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Two families have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Meta over the suicides of their sons, arguing that the tech giant has failed to provide proper safeguards to prevent extortion schemes against teens on Instagram.
Tricia Maciejewski of Pennsylvania and Rosalind and Mark Downey of Scotland filed a lawsuit Wednesday, saying their sons fell for the same extortion scheme in which a stranger messages a teen on social media and poses as a romantic interest before asking for nude photos. The stranger then threatens to share the images with friends and family unless the victim shares more images or sends money.
Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, is facing at least four other lawsuits related to sextortion, alleging that Instagram ignored complaints about the scheme for years.
The families in the latest lawsuit allege that their sons’ deaths were “the foreseeable result of Meta’s design decisions and repeated refusals to implement affordable, available and identified safety features due to Meta’s prioritization of engagement over user safety.”
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Two families have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Meta over their sons’ suicides. (Matt Cardy/Getty Images/Getty Images)
Maciejewski’s 13-year-old son, Levi, died by suicide in 2024, and the Downeys’ 16-year-old son, Murray, took his own life in 2023. Both teenage boys were victims of extortion schemes on Instagram.
The families allege that Meta knew its recommendation system was connecting children to potential predators and that the company failed to adequately address the problem.
Prosecutors cited a 2022 internal audit that found Instagram’s “Accounts You May Follow” tool suggested 1.4 million accounts in a single day for teen users who may have engaged in inappropriate interactions with minors.
Meta-security researchers recommended in 2019 that the company keep all teen accounts in private settings, but the company declined to do so a year later, the lawsuit said.
In 2021, Meta announced new restrictions on direct messaging between teens and adults they don’t follow, but the lawsuit states that the changes were incorrect and only applied to new teen accounts rather than representing a “true default.”
Levi Maciejewski, 13, and Murray Downey, 16, were victims of extortion schemes and died by suicide. (Getty Images / Getty Images)
The families said Meta didn’t implement full private-by-default settings and other safeguards for teen accounts until late last year, after the deaths of their children.
“Meta’s secret is out. Meta knew for years that Instagram was a hunting ground for predators, but still chose to protect the engagement metrics on children’s lives,” Matthew Bergman, founder and attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, which is representing the families, said in a statement.
“That conscious decision to link random strangers to children has cost families their sons and daughters, making Instagram the epicenter of sextortion-related youth suicides,” he continued. “If they had chosen to follow their own internal recommendations, they could have saved countless lives.”
The company did not directly address the claims in the lawsuit on Wednesday, but emphasized that it is working to stop sextortion scammers.
“Sextortion is a heinous crime,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “We support law enforcement agencies in prosecuting the criminals behind them, and we continue to fight them on multiple fronts through our apps.”
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Meta said it was working to stop sextortion scammers. (Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images / Getty Images)
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“We work to prevent accounts that exhibit suspicious behavior from following teens and prevent teens from being recommended to them,” the statement said. “We are also taking other precautions, such as blurring potentially sensitive images sent in DMs and reminding teens of the risks of sharing them, and letting people know when they are chatting with someone who may be in another country.”
Meta reiterated that it has given teens under 16 private accounts upon sign-up since 2021, despite the lawsuit alleging the company didn’t do this automatically until last year.
Instagram has made a number of changes for teens in recent years aimed at reducing sextortion, but the lawsuit argues that the changes came too late and that Instagram should be held responsible for the suicides of the two teens.
