Parents of sextortion victim sue Meta for alleged wrongful death | Meta

The parents of a 16-year-old boy who committed suicide after falling victim to an Instagram blackmail ring are suing Meta for the wrongful death of their son, in the first such case in the UK.

Murray Dowey died at the family home in Dunblane in December 2023 after he was tricked into posting intimate photos to an Instagram account. He thought she was a girl his own age, but it turned out they were overseas criminals sexually blackmailing for financial reasons.

Speaking as the lawsuit was filed in Delaware, where Meta Platforms is involved, Murray’s parents Ros and Mark said: “We know what we’re dealing with. But it’s time for social media companies to take responsibility for what they’re doing to our young people.”

“This isn’t just sextortion, they’re causing multiple harms and they’re allowed to get away with it.”

The lawsuit was filed in Delaware Supreme Court by the US-based Social Media Victims Law Center on behalf of the Doweys as well as the family of 13-year-old Levi Maciejewski from Pennsylvania, who was also a victim of blackmail.

It states that the boys’ deaths were “the foreseeable result of Meta’s design decisions and Meta’s repeated refusal to implement affordable, available and defined security features due to prioritizing interactivity over user safety.”

These design flaws include “collecting personal data without informed consent” and using that data to program recommendation products, according to the complaint. [were] It operates in a way that recommends young Instagram users to blackmailers whom Meta has already identified as predatory.”

The lawsuit alleges Meta’s “failure to protect user privacy, including continuing to share Follower and Following data…despite Meta’s knowledge that this engagement-focused product feature resulted in the sexual harassment-related deaths of young users worldwide.”

It also alleges that Meta “made false and misleading statements designed to convince children and parents that Instagram was safe for teens, while internal testing showed that Instagram was pairing children with adult predators.”

Four British parents are suing TikTok, alleging the wrongful deaths of their children as a result of a viral “blackout challenge” attempt in 2021, marking the first case in the UK to center on the crime of sextortion. Cases have risen sharply in the UK, US and Australia in recent years; Adolescent boys and young men often fall victim to loosely organized cybercrime gangs based in southeast Asia and west Africa.

Earlier this year, the Guardian reported that children aged 11 to 13 were targeted for the first time as criminals behind extortion attempts widened their networks further in a bid to ensnare victims.

Matthew Bergman, the lawyer of the Dowey family, who founded the Social Media Victims Law Center in 2021, said that Meta has been involved in all US-based blackmail cases he has filed to date.

“There are reasons for this. This is a product defect issue and Meta knows it. This complaint refers to Meta records that were recently made public. [previous joint civil proceedings] “And these documents make it clear that these design flaws were intentional, that safety precautions were not taken, and that no warning was given.”

Mark Dowey, reflecting on the two years since his son’s death, said: “Nothing has really changed since Murray died. These predators can still reach our children.”

As well as fighting to hold Meta to account, Ros and Mark regularly speak out about the dangers of sextortion in the hope of raising awareness among parents and young people.

Ros said: “As a parent with first-hand experience of how devastating flaws can be, you have a duty to warn other parents. You think your children are safe looking at pictures on Instagram but they’re not.”

Mark said the lawsuit was “a way to get some justice for Murray.” “There has to be accountability here because these statements are absolutely damning. [Meta] They knew their products were killing children because of their unsafe design, and they did nothing about it. “They chose to put profit before our youth.”

Instagram, which has previously condemned sextortion as a “horrific” crime, rolled out new security features in October 2024, including preventing screenshots or screen recordings of disappearing images and videos, specifically to protect children from scammers.

Speaking about the new features, Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of security, said: “We’ve added built-in protections so parents don’t have to do anything to protect their teenagers.

“However, this is the type of hostile crime where no matter what protections we have in place, these extortion scammers will try to evade them.”

Meta has been approached for comment.