They Go to Facebook to Follow Their Favorite Musicians, But Predators Await…

The article below is an English translation of an article originally published by the investigative journalism consortium Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (EL CLIP). It is part of the “Innocence at Risk (Inocencia en Juego)” project, a collaboration between Tech Policy Press, Professor Lara Putnam, and EL CLIP, which includes a series of independent reports coordinated by EL CLIP and published in EL CLIP, Chequeado, Crónica Uno, El Espectador, and Factchequeado.

In many Facebook groups, dynamics used by teenagers to meet friends or find boyfriends or girlfriends are exploited by some users who try to contact minors with sexual intentions.

Imagine you are a pre-teen somewhere in Latin America. You pick up your phone and open Facebook. The app suggests you check a group dedicated to one of your favorite bands, because you have already liked the official page of that band. Once in the group, you expect to meet people who share your love for this music. First, you find posts asking who your favorite band member is, or what song you like the best. But soon you start to see posts from people who say they want to talk to you. “If you see your age, comment,” reads a post, along with a list of ages ranging from seven to 21.

You see your age, so you decide to comment. Many people reply telling you they want to add you and chat privately. You add some of them and write to them. Then, in the group, the posts turn more explicit. They no longer ask you to comment if you see your age, but if you see the shape of your breasts or your bottom in a series of images. Other messages promise to “show it to you,” with explicit references to penises, like eggplant emojis, or drawings where a shadow of one or a woman about to give oral sex can be seen. You have already interacted in these groups, you have added friends and chatted with some of them, so you decide to comment on these posts as well. You add some of the people who reply to you and, privately, they can ask you, or even convince you, to send them explicit images of your body.

The American researcher Lara Putnam documented an ecosystem of sexual predation of Latin American minors on Facebook in which she found various patterns of engagement like this one. She published pieces in Wired in 2022 and in Tech Policy Press in 2024 and despite the revelations, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has not made much effort to protect these girls and boys. These articles were the starting point of “Innocence at Risk,” a joint investigation between five media outlets from Latin America and the United States, led by the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism, CLIP. This journalistic collaboration found that these and other practices that are equally dangerous to children continue to exist in these and other Facebook groups that are still available on the platform.

Minors in Facebook

Although Putnam, who acted as consultant to this investigation, reported to Meta the groups she found, as of August 2024 the majority of them continued operating, as our digital investigations could verify. One of the arguments from the researcher to flag these groups was that many of the profiles that commented on the explicit posts claimed to be younger than 13. To be less than 13 years old and open a Facebook account is against the platform’s policies.

Despite this prohibition, a report by Thorn―a non-profit that works to combat the sexual abuse of children―, published in 2021, found that at least 45% of children between the ages of nine and 12 in the United States used Facebook at least once a day.

Specific data about Facebook use by children younger than 13 in Latin America is harder to find. Grooming LATAM―an organization dedicated to the prevention of sexual abuse of minors―carried out a report through 2024 that encompassed about 17,000 anonymous surveys from boys, girls, and teens between the ages of nine and 17, according to which Facebook is only the sixth platform by popularity among those polled (behind WhatsApp, TikTok, Instagram, Roblox, and YouTube). Still, Facebook continues to be the most used social network in the region (among users of any age), with more than 380 million profiles.

In many Latin American countries, a sizable portion of users connects to the internet through mobile data plans in their cellphones, which often come in bundles that offer special deals to access certain web pages (meaning the data used while surfing these pages does not count towards the megabytes or gigabytes offered in the data plan). Often, Facebook is among these pages.

And those surveyed by Grooming LATAM show patterns that may be common among other underage users of this social network. According to their report, three out of every ten minors polled had access to their first mobile device before their ninth birthday. Additionally, four of every ten minors polled chatted with strangers through social media or video games. This figure grows to six out of every 10 in Colombia and five out of 10 in Argentina, Chile, and Peru. Argentina leads the number of polled minors in the region who have received a proposal to be someone’s girlfriend or boyfriend through social media: seven out of every 10. Around 25% of those polled in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia said that they had received requests to send nude or semi-nude pictures.

In 2024, Meta launched, in some countries, special Instagram accounts for teenagers (between 13 and 18 years old) over which parents could have more control, as well as an image verification program powered by artificial intelligence to determine whether someone younger than 13 is trying to open an account.

In response to an inquiry by this journalistic collaboration, a Meta spokesperson confirmed that “people under 13 are not allowed on Facebook,” and added that the company uses “a range of tools to identify, review, and remove underage users” and that Meta will delete their account if they can’t prove they’re 13 or over.” The spokesperson also said that teenage Instagram accounts are not available in Latin America, but said that Meta announced on February 11th they have started to “roll out Instagram Teen Accounts in Latin America, including Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.”

However, the data gathered as part of our investigation show that, at least as of 2024, finding minors under 13 years of age interacting on Facebook was easy: our digital investigations found hundreds of users who claimed to be as young as nine years old.

Furthermore, according to the aforementioned Meta policies, “restrictions on the display of sexual activity also apply to illustrated and digitally created content.” Many of the images used in the groups that were found by this investigation could cross that line. They, again, continue to be available on the platform.

Boyfriends and Boybands

In her 2022 piece, Putnam found groups in which users were looking for underage boyfriends or girlfriends. In particular, she focused on one group named “Buscando novi@ de 9,10,11,12,13 años” (Looking for boyfriends or girlfriends of 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 years of age), which reached over 9,000 members. This group, however, was one of the few to be deleted after being flagged. Using Facebook’s search engine, Putnam was able to find other similar groups both in Spanish and Tagalog (one of the languages spoken in the Philippines).

In her 2023 report, the researcher focused on several Facebook groups centered around Los Picus, a Mexican boyband formed by three Mexican preteens and children. These groups, which appear to have no connection to the band, continue to be available but have been taken over by spam posts which include sexually explicit content and possible scams. Some of the posts include drawings of two people who seem to be having sex (no genitals appear), while others make use of the images from the singers of Los Picus to impersonate and sexualize them with messages such as “where would you kiss me?”. Other posts offer prizes to children under 13 years old. One post, for instance, reads: “niñas de 7 8 9 10 11 12 años que quieran ganar premios mandar solicitud de amistad” (“7 8 9 10 11 12 year-old girls who want to win prizes, send me a friend request”). Along with the text, images of cellphones, watches, bicycles, and makeup kits are included.

To carry out the investigation, journalistic partners made advanced searches using CrowdTangle, a tool Meta offered researchers and journalists to search posts on its platform. The query was made before the tool was deprecated―with no comparable tool made available afterward―on August 14th, 2024. The objective of the search was to find messages posted in public Facebook groups between March 2022 and August 2024, which followed a similar pattern.

Searching by keywords in Spanish such as “age” and a list of numbers (corresponding to ages from seven to 17), “I show it to you,” “girls which are you,” “if you like older men,” “where would you kiss me,” or “I do pass it” (a code to convey that the user is willing to share explicit images and videos), we found almost 21,000 posts.

Not every post found consisted of practices that could result in sexual abuse to minors online. Messages that request some reaction to the phrase “if you see your age” have been published on Facebook since at least 2012 and have gone viral in recent years, when they have been used in all sorts of posts. For example, some stores’ digital profiles published posts asking their followers to reply if they saw their age so they could offer discounts on their products. An analysis of the data, however, allowed us to find worrisome online behavior patterns.

Some of the groups in which messages from our 21,000-post database were published were fan groups of other musicians. Among the most popular ones were groups dedicated to Soy Pau, a Mexican singer and influencer, who, in several songs and videos presents herself as Tony Picus’s girlfriend, one of the members of Los Picus. Other groups are dedicated to Joshua Xavier Gutiérrez, “Xavi,” a Mexican-American corridos singer; Peso Pluma, a Mexican singer; Shakira and Karol G, Colombian singers; and BTS, one of the most famous K-Pop groups.

Most of these groups display the same dynamics seen in groups dedicated to Los Picus; messages asking about age, messages offering to “show it,” messages asking “which one are you?” accompanied by images with drawings of bottoms and breasts of different sizes, and messages with double entendre emojis. In all of these posts people who claim to be underage leave comments. Some of these users say they are under 13 years old.

Similarly to the groups dedicated to Los Picus, the content of these groups changed gradually from posts dedicated to the artists they were named after, to messages seeking sexually explicit engagement. In some cases, the groups turned into pornographic spam, with publications exclusively dedicated to sexual images (albeit not entirely explicit, so they can avoid being deleted by Facebook).

Through our research, we found several groups dedicated to seeking friends, boyfriends, or girlfriends as well. We also found groups whose names reference “funny phrases” or other seemingly harmless subjects, like phone wallpapers. These groups mimic the patterns described above, but here, with the additional subtext of being in a group where users are explicitly looking for romantic relationships.

As stated above, the messages we searched for did not always involve sexual content. But we did review, one by one, the Facebook groups that featured the keywords the most. We found that four out of the five groups in which these phrases appeared the most (whose names we will not publish here so as to not publicize them) were indeed taken over by sexually explicit messages. These groups were initially dedicated to the singer Xavi, to wallpapers, to interesting phrases, and BTS, but these themes are no longer featured in the groups’ posts.

The Posters

Out of our database sample, we reviewed the 150 posts that had the greatest number of comments (each one of them obtained between 15,843 and 791 replies). We focused on the posts that garnered sexually explicit conversations or that asked about the ages of the users who replied. We investigated the Facebook profiles of the users who posted them. We found several patterns in these users as well.

Most of these profiles have in common that they have many friends and followers on Facebook. A sizable portion of them have over 1,000 friends or followers. That is the case, for instance, of eight profiles from Arab countries (Egypt, Kuwait, and United Arab Emirates), which although they have messages in Arabic in their profiles, publish in Spanish in the analyzed groups. Additionally, in their friends list, there are a large number of Latin American profiles.

Another point in common is that most of the profiles we reviewed had posted in more than one of the analyzed groups, usually repeating the same message with which they asked other group members to share their ages.

An extreme instance of this is a Venezuelan user we found who not only published in several of these groups, but who is also the administrator and moderator of several of them. Four of the Venezuelan profiles we found in our database belong to this same user. We also found two more profiles that belong to this same user. In one of them, he impersonates a teen girl. Another one of the Venezuelan profiles, which appears to belong to an underage girl, claims to be the girlfriend of the person behind the six mentioned profiles. Three of these profiles, as well as his alleged girlfriend’s profile, showed up 15 times in our analysis of the 150 posts with more comments.

Another user responded with a “Hello” to a female user who claimed to be nine years old. His profile has a picture of an adult male with tattoos.

Other profiles appear to be looking for clicks as well. In one of the cases, a page that goes by the name Mia Violet, which commented in the groups, uses images of attractive women (both pictures and illustrations) to channel engagement to a profile with the name Andrés Chavarría, who claims to be a musician and to send people to a Spotify account and a YouTube account (in which songs are no longer available). We contacted Chavarría through Facebook but had gotten no response by the time of this publication.

The vast majority of the profiles we found post content related to sentimental relationships that range from bragging about the relationship they have with their partner to feeling sorry for themselves because they cannot find a loyal partner or someone who values the things they are looking for. These messages appear to be posted to signal a user who is interested in speaking about relationship issues and loneliness.

In a couple of other cases, users offer phones, bicycles, or free toys “if you see your age.” It is not clear if this is a mere scam or if these users want to establish sexual contact with the people who reply.

This journalistic collaboration contacted Meta with many questions about the phenomena we encountered in these groups. Meta asked us for a list of group examples, which were almost immediately removed from the platform.

However, in their response to our questions, Meta did not specifically mention these groups or these trends. In their response, a Meta spokesperson said that: “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.”

This spokesperson also linked to information about how Meta combats sexual predators on its platforms.

The Risk of Grooming

These online trends leave minors exposed to grooming which is, as Grooming Argentina put it in an interview with this journalistic collaboration, “sexual exploitation and abuse of girls, boys and teenagers through digital channels, done by adults who are looking to establish contact with sexual intentions.”

“I would say Facebook is completely to blame for allowing this to happen,” said Alexander Delgado, Director of Public Policy of the non-profit Protect All Children From Trafficking (PACT), in an interview with this collaboration. Delgado said that what frees companies like Facebook from any responsibility [in the US] is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which made the conscious use of internet services (which eventually included Facebook and other social networks) to broadcast obscene materials to minors illegal, but which also made platforms not legally responsible for the acts of their users.

“That is why they are immune; they don’t have to achieve security through moderation,” explains Delgado.

Minors who interact with people they don’t know in the Facebook groups we have mentioned could be at a “high risk” of becoming sex trafficking victims, as Austin Greenshaw, a psychiatrist at the Cook Children’s Psychiatry Clinic in Texas, told this collaboration in an interview. Greenshaw explained that he can’t speak to investigations or problems involving minors in Latin American countries, but he did say that he has seen in many of his patients that “sometimes their first exposure to that risk is social media or the internet.”

Delgado told this collaboration that the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime could establish the first international standards to “protect minors online.” One of the issues that this convention would address is sextortion, which is, according to the FBI, when “young people believe they are communicating with someone their own age who is interested in a relationship or with someone who is offering something of value,” but whose real interest is in acquiring explicit images or videos of them. “After the criminals have one or more videos or pictures, they threaten to publish that content, or they threaten violence, to get the victim to produce more images.” This is a growing problem, according to Delgado. In the U.S., Delgado and PACT are advocating for the enactment of the SHIELD Act, which would “penalize the distribution of sexually explicit private images, or online nudes.”

“So we really need to legally ban the threat of distributing those private images, because that is where exploitation happens,” said Delgado.

Other experts warn that crime has become more complex in recent years. “Pedophilia has found in new technologies a vehicle for contact and proximity with our girls, boys, and teenagers,” explained Hernán Navarro, Executive Director of Grooming Argentina, to this collaboration. According to this specialist, the mechanisms have evolved significantly, especially with the arrival of Artificial Intelligence, which allows people to “fabricate” a victim’s nudes to then threaten them.

The risks that teens and pre-teens face in these Facebook groups are huge. However, Meta has done little to take measures to protect their youngest users, while most Latin American laws are either non-existent or not adequate to face this challenge.

Innocence at Risk is a journalistic investigation that reveals the risks of online sexual abuse faced by minors in Latin America on Facebook and other social networks. Led by the Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP), in alliance with Chequeado (Argentina), Crónica Uno (Venezuela), El Espectador (Colombia), Factchequeado and Tech Policy Press (United States).