“Social media companies need to be held accountable legally for their conscious decisions that promote human trafficking” – Matthew Bergman.
Matthew Bergman, an American liability attorney and founder of the Social Media Victims Law Centre, believes that social media poses a clear and present danger to young people.
He has seen cases of children being groomed by their traffickers into performing sexual acts online and some that have progressed to extreme cases of physical sexual abuse.
Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat are now being used by traffickers to target their potential victims, especially towards children, women and vulnerable people.
In 2023, The Guardian conducted a two-year investigation into how Facebook and Instagram were used for child sex-trafficking. They found that parent company Meta was ‘failing to report or even detect the full extent of what is happening.’
Within the article, they included a gruesome conversation between a trafficker and a customer who wanted to buy a 14-year-old girl.
“We have a number of cases of young girls who are connected with sexual predators through Snapchat’s quick add features,” Bergman told me.
“Typically, the predators utilising Snapchat are aiming to look more approachable and safe in order to develop a relationship with the victim, encouraging them through grooming to engage in sexual behaviours. Then they will blackmail and encourage them to meet in person, whereupon the individual is raped.”
The attorney told me that shame is the key reason why survivors are afraid to reach out for help. When the trafficker encourages their victims to perform an activity, the child will feel embarrassed and blame themselves for doing it. Ultimately, traffickers will see this and blackmail them to get their victims to meet in person.
Bergman believes social media should be taken seriously for the harms it’s committing on young people. He advises for parents to create a safe space for their children to be open about “embarrassing” conversation and to be cautious with their online behaviours.
He also believes there should be an age restriction, like in Australia, for children to access social media. “By 16-years old they are very much in the process of their neurological development,” Bergman said.
Recently, the UK’s House of Lords also voted for a social media ban for under-16’s under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
Matthew Bergman is currently suing social media companies in America for harming children’s mental health.
The Loverboy method
Dr Xavier L’Hoiry, lecturer in Criminology and Social Policy at the University of Sheffield, found that traffickers are more likely to advertise their victims on platforms like Facebook and Adult Service Websites (ASW).
Victims who have been ‘trapped in the sex industry’ have found themselves lured through false job advertisements, social media websites and adult services websites. Since the pandemic, physical trafficking has shifted to online, making it easier for criminals to entrap individuals with less effort.
In November 2025, The Economist reported that individuals like ‘Isabel’ in Latin America were forced into sex work through social media, and her traffickers would use psychological manipulation to control her by threatening to kill her daughter. They found her daughter’s details through Isabel’s online profile.
“Traffickers can control their victims without even necessarily being in the same physical space as them”
Dr Xavier L’hoiry
Another method a trafficker will typically use is ‘Loverboy’, where the predator will start to form an amateur online relationship, hoping to gain their trust and exploit them in different ways. There are other methods, like blackmail or coercion, but ‘Loverboy’ tends to be the most prominent in the digital space.
Dr L’Hoiry told me that once the trafficker manages to obtain sexual images of an individual, they will then start to build a fake profile and advertise them online.
The predator will gather information about the individual to control them. In extreme cases, the victims will sometimes be under their trafficker’s physical control and be forced to endure pictures being taken of them.
Lack of self identifying
It’s hard for practitioners like Dr L’Hoiry to determine the scale of sex trafficking in the UK. He believes there is underreporting in both the media and the law enforcement. He also thinks there are “low rates of self-identification.”
‘Lack of prosecutions can lead to victims feeling unsafe/ withdrawing their statements and can increase the perpetrators’ power over them.’
Teeswide Safeguarding Adults Board
On the UK Gov website, more than 100,000 cases were reported to the police of child abuse and sexual exploitation in 2024, but only an “estimated 7,100 are ‘flagged’ by police as child sexual exploitation.”
In the Every Child Protected against Trafficking 2025 report, they found 61% of child referrals to UK’s National Referral Mechanism (NRM), a governmental system for victims of Modern Slavery, were rejected because it did not meet the established criteria, and 85% of the child refusals were aged between 15-17.
Back in 2023 in the Right for Women report, they wrote ‘It is difficult to estimate numbers, but the Home Office calculated 13,000 in the UK in 2014; and the National Crime Agency identified 1,200 victims in the three month period from April-June 2017 alone.’ There has not been any new data on the sexual trafficking of women published on the UK Gov Website since then.
The Human Trafficking Foundation (HTF) is a UK Parliamentary Party group working to fight modern slavery and human trafficking in the UK. Their purpose is to work with parliament, ensuring that policies that are implemented affect frontline charities and victims.
The foundation has vouched that human trafficking is a hidden and misunderstood crime in all areas of exploitation. The organisation told me that it is in every aspect of our daily lives that go unnoticed. A major shock for the foundation is that they have seen victims in the UK not trusting the support systems put in place to help them.
The HTF has set up a mental health service under the National Referral Mechanism to help survivors of trafficking. They offer 45 days of support by giving them therapy or someone to talk to. The service can still be used after the time limit because they understand that the recovery process for a survivor varies.
Dr L’Hoiry urges that there must be more support systems for victims, and to build their trust for them to come forward and self-identify. He also mentioned that the police can’t push too hard on the suspected victims because they may lose contact with them in the future.
“It would require a cultural shift in society and institutions in how we treat victims of exploitation, trafficking and sexual violence. Which I think would be incredibly difficult to achieve,” he said.
The Act and the accountability
Dr L’Hoiry believes that social media and website platforms should be held accountable for their lack of safeguarding towards women and minors. However, he thinks the UK Online Safety Act 2023 is an extent of safeguarding that the government is trying to implement.
The Online Safety Act was set out to protect children and adults online. It prevents minors from accessing ‘harmful and age-inappropriate content’ and allows digital tools to report problems online. It also protects adults by monitoring harmful content published on major platforms.
“I think it’ll be interesting over the next few years to see how the act is implemented in practice. It has good intentions,” L’Hoiry said.
However, there is more of a concern about trying to tackle the online sexual exploitation. L’Hoiry believes that exploitation will happen regardless of whether or not it happens on social media platforms and websites.
He told me traffickers will find other ways to redirect it elsewhere, and with the advancement of AI, the future looks quite uncertain.
If you have been a victim of sexual exploitation, please contact Victim Support. If you need mental health support, please click here. If you wish to self-identify, please click here.
Featured image by dole777 via Unsplash.