From the archive: How Facebook and Instagram became marketplaces for child sex trafficking

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  Hi, I'm Katie McHugh and I am one of the authors of the Guardian Long Read titles

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  How Facebook and Instagram Became a Marketplace for Child Sex Trafficking, which was published in 2023. The piece,

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  which was a two-year investigation, looked at how Meta was struggling to prevent criminals, including

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  child sex traffickers, from using its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, to buy and sell children for sex.

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  The piece looks at how sex traffickers use the platforms to locate, groom, buy and sell children for sex.

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  And to investigate these crimes, we had to take kind of a blanket approach in which we spoke with many,

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  many prosecutors who were investigating and prosecuting crimes against children

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  who highlighted a huge uptick in these platforms being used by the people that they are prosecuting.

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  We delved through court documents, federal court documents of cases of child sex traffickers.

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  And what we found in looking through some of the evidence files were transcripts of people literally discussing

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  the buying and selling of children in especially Facebook Messenger, which is now an encrypted messaging app.

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