Two families sued Meta for wrongful death over their sons’ suicides, alleging that the tech giant had not put adequate checks in place to block sextortion schemes aimed at teenagers on Instagram.
Tricia Maciejewski, of Pennsylvania, and Rosalind and Mark Downey, of Scotland, sued on Wednesday contending their sons were both victims of the same sextortion scam in which a stranger pretends to be a love interest messaging with teenagers online before asking for nude photos. The stranger then threatens to send the images to friends and family of that person unless they send more images or money.
The company that owns Instagram, Meta, has been named as a defendant in at least four other lawsuits over sextortion accusations and claims that Instagram ignored complaints for years.
The families in the latest lawsuit argue that their sons’ deaths “were the foreseeable result of Meta’s design choices and continued refusals to implement reasonable, available and industry-recommended safety features as a result of Meta prioritizing engagement over user safety.”
Two families filed suit against Meta on Wednesday, alleging the company neglected the growing threat of sexual blackmail targeting teens on Instagram after their sons died by suicide. MORE: https://t.co/FG1RUnGzvD pic.twitter.com/Gclf3GtGu9
— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) December 18, 2025
Maciejewski’s 13-year-old son, Levi, died by suicide in 2024 and Downeys’ son Murray at 16 in 2023. Both youths were preyed on in sextortion schemes on Instagram.
The families say that Meta knew that its recommendation system was linking children with potential predators and did not do enough to address the problem.
The plaintiffs cited an internal audit conducted in 2022, after the case was filed, that found Instagram’s “Accounts You May Follow” suggested nearly 1.4 million accounts to teenage users on a single day for potentially engaging with minors in inappropriate ways.
Meta safety researchers advised the company to default all teenager accounts into private settings in 2019, but a year later they declined do so, according to the suit.
In 2021, Meta announced a new policy on teenage and adult direct messaging that it doesn’t follow, the suit alleges, and says the changes were inadequately designed (and only applied to new teenage accounts) rather than serving as a “genuine default setting.”
The families said Meta did not implement full “private-by-default” settings and other safety measures for teenage accounts until late last year, following the deaths of their children.
“Meta’s secret is out. “Meta sat on the sideline for years while Instagram turned into an online hunting ground for predators, and prioritized its profits over the lives of children,” Matthew Bergman, a founding attorney at the Social Media Victims Law Center, representing the families, said in a statement.
‘That deliberate choice to say yes put random friends of strangers in contact with children, risking them losing their sons and daughters while turning Instagram into ground zero for the suicides of young sextortion victims,’ he said. “If they had just listened to the advice that was coming from one, two or three doctors — and taken their own recommendations — we could have saved more lives.”
The company on Wednesday did not specifically mention the allegations in the lawsuit but said it was cracking down on sextortion scammers.
“Sextortion is a despicable crime,” said a company spokesperson in an emailed statement. “We work with the police to support their investigation into the criminals who commit fraud and this takes countless hours of policing for our team and we therefore rely on our users reporting, blocking and sharing stories to help further protect us,” she went on.
“We proactively work to prevent accounts from following teens, and we do not recommend teens in these situations to accounts that may have shown such behavior,” the statement also said. “We also take other precautions, including blurring suspect images that are sent in DMs (direct messages) and reminding our users to not share any content that they would not like to be on the web and alerting our users when someone they are chatting with might possibly be located in a foreign country.”
Meta repeated that it has been offering teenagers under 16 private accounts when they sign up since 2021, even though the lawsuit alleges that the company didn’t automatically do so until last year.
Instagram has made some changes for teenagers in recent years in an effort to curtail sextortion, but the suit argues that they came too late and that Instagram should be held accountable for the two suicides of the two teenagers.
