Robyn Cory’s daughter Kristen was 15 when she was allowed to open her own Instagram account. “We thought we’d been responsible and done everything we could to make it safe,” says Cory. Months later, Kristen disappeared from the family home after being groomed on Instagram’s direct message service by a criminal gang, who then sold her for sex on the streets of Houston.
Her daughter never recovered from her ordeal, Cory says. Kristen returned home but has since gone missing after being trafficked again. Her mother does not know if she is still alive.
Cory blames the gang who trafficked her daughter for destroying her life. She also blames Instagram, which she believes played a critical role in her daughter’s sex trafficking.
“If Instagram didn’t exist, this wouldn’t have happened to my daughter,” she says. “Instagram is why it was so easy [for these people] to do this.”
This week, Mark Zuckerberg, who has amassed a fortune estimated at $139bn (£109bn) as the founder of Meta – which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp – was told he had “blood on his hands” at a combative US Senate judiciary committee hearing, entitled Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis.
He later turned to face parents who had gathered for the congressional hearing, some of whose children had died after sexual exploitation and harassment, and apologised for what they had gone through.
Cory has no time for Zuckerberg’s apology. “He could stop all the harm happening on his platforms if he chose to,” she says. “Words are not sufficient – he needs to act.”
She says that her daughter was a “normal, happy kid” before she was targeted by a criminal gang running prostitution rings in Houston city centre in 2019.