‘Kids have hours, not days’: Parents of sextortion victims tell Meta their lagging report times need to change

MARQUETTE, Mich. (WJMN) — Families of sextortion victims shared their stories alongside a national organization for a Day of Action on Tuesday, criticizing Meta for their lagging reporting times amid surging cases.

“Sextortion” refers to the crime where an online predator tricks someone, especially children, into sending sexually explicit photos and then threatening to distribute them while demanding money.

On Tuesday, ParentsTogether Action (PTA), an advocacy group representing 3 million families, hosted several family members of sextortion victims to highlight their experiences and the human cost of the crime.

To frame the issue, a spokesperson for PTA said a recent study estimated that 1 in 17 children have been victims of sextortion and that reports of sextortion scams have gone up 323% in the last two years, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

Over the same time period, the PTA spokesperson said Meta’s time for reporting instances of sextortion to the NCMEC has gone from a couple days to nearly two months.

“Every day of delay in reporting makes it harder to hold anyone accountable for these crimes. It is another day a child is potentially being deprived of the support to get them out of a dangerous situation,” said Shelby Knox with PTA.

This comes just over a week before two men are set to be sentenced for their role in the exploitation of Marquette teen Jordan DeMay, who took his own life due to pressure from a sextortion scheme in 2022 .

The Nigerian men convicted of the crime were the first suspects to ever be extradited from a foreign country for the crime, and the first to be convicted .

DeMay’s mother Jennifer Buta shared their story on the call, and said during the investigation after Jordan’s death, Meta’s policies could have shut down their chance for justice.

“Law enforcement went to Meta for a transcript of the conversation, and even though they filed under emergency procedures because these people were actively contacting another child asking for money, it was denied,” said Buta. “They had to go back and resubmit to get that paperwork and see what actually happened to Jordan.”

Buta also criticized comments she had heard from the leader of Meta. “I heard Mark Zuckerberg loud and clear say with proper parenting, children don’t need restrictions. And that made my veins burn. The reporting process is flawed, it’s taking up to a couple of months. This is happening in hours to children. They don’t have a couple of months, they have a couple of hours.”

Mary Rodee, a parent from New York, spoke about how she lost her 15-year-old son in a similar situation to DeMay.

“As a mom, I don’t want a single other parent in this world to experience what I do every day. We need industry-wide regulation, including bills like the Kids Online Safety Act,” said Rodee. “We need Meta to dedicate real energy and resources to stop enabling sextortion with their tools and platforms – they can’t just ask kids to stop this.”

PTA spokesperson Shelby Knox asked the public to sign onto a petition addressed to the CEO of Instagram , asking the company to proactively monitor their platform for patterns of sextortion and report instances to the NCMEC within 72 hours, as well as disabling accounts suspected of being used to operate a sextortion scheme.

In a Senate hearing at the beginning of the year, Zuckerberg claimed Meta has made “26 million reports, which is more than the whole rest of the industry combined.”

Since then, Instagram has rolled out new tools to help protect young people from sextortion, and said they had removed 63,000 accounts based in Nigeria they said were targeting people for sextortion scams.

In Michigan, State Rep. Jenn Hill (D-Marquette) introduced “Jordan D’s Law,” a package of bills that if passed, would codify punishments for offenders and mandate collaboration between school districts and law enforcement agencies to implement educational policies on the law.

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