How lawyer mom whipped tech giant Meta

The most eventful week of media lawyer Emma Sadleir’s life may have ended in elation, but her exhausted joy is tempered by the enormity of her looming battle ahead . 

The mother of two children, aged four and five, was the driving force behind precedent-setting court action to shut down anonymous perpetrators disseminating child pornography on social media. 

It began 10 days ago when she and her colleague Rorke Wilson were alerted to more than 30 WhatsApp channels and Instagram profiles soliciting sexual content from minors, uploading it via an anonymous platform and then distributing it to thousands of followers. 

“It was horrific stuff. Comments like ‘her body count [number of people she’s had sex with] is bigger than her age’; ‘she’s f***** a 52-year-old taxi driver so he will take her to school’; ‘this one’s f***** old men for food’; ‘she’s had several abortions’ — and then it states the victim’s name and ‘it’s this kid in this class at this school and here is her Instagram handle’,” Sadleir said. 

She spent the next few days trying to have them shut down, simultaneously watching them to understand the content and warning the perpetrators that what they were doing was a crime and the authorities were after them. 

“The stuff being sent out was traumatic. The victim-blaming for one thing — they brazenly claimed they were doing nothing wrong, they were only exposing the sluttishness of the victims who had nobody but themselves to blame,” Sadleir said. 

“One of the worst things that happened was I got invited into a group chat where pictures of two girls with RIP messages were up. They said it was a tribute because they had committed suicide after their videos went public.

“One person called Brad said, ‘I saw that girl’s video. She was masturbating,’ then he went and shared the video again and showed how it had been seen by 100,000 people. That absolutely traumatised me.” 

Sadleir spent all of Monday night at court, and the rest of the week averaging around two hours sleep while she monitored the content and kept track of the offending accounts. 

“It was an absolute nightmare. He would create a new account and say ‘Look who’s back. I’ll do another drop at 1am so send me your content’, or ‘Follow me and as soon as I get 2,000 followers I’ll put something out’ and then he would put stuff out, tell his followers to come over to Instagram and then shut down the channel,” Sadleir said. The perpetrator would operate through the night, jumping from one platform to another. 

The personal cost to her has been immense. She had to cancel speaking engagements, including one for a large London corporate with a base in Cape Town, and promotion events for her new book — the avenues through which she earns her income.

Her losses were compounded as she had to cancel flights and other arrangements, while she battled to make time for her own children. 

Sadleir’s legal practice, The Digital Law Company (DLC), operates pro bono — she hasn't charged victims, nor has she turned anyone away “because that’s just how my business model works”.

Wednesday was taken up with the contempt application against the social media hosts, which “must have really rattled things” because on Thursday Meta Platforms contacted her at about 4pm to say they wanted to settle. 

Late that evening she left her children, who were asleep on either side of her, to join a hastily called Zoom meeting. 

It’s absolutely shocking. If you are able to create a mechanism for mass distribution, at least monitor it and have systems in place to deal with reports of serious stuff like child porn and bestiality in less than 24 hours — and make sure you have the power to remove stuff

—  Emma Sadleir, media lawyer

“It was 1am and there I was in my gown, hair standing on end, shouting at senior counsel. At about 1am Gilbert Marcus said to me, ‘I look forward to seeing you in court tomorrow in your dressing gown, and I just said, ‘You will be there in your court gown and I will be there in my normal clothes.’ And then there was still some backwards and forwards until we eventually settled at about 2am,” she said. 

By Friday afternoon she was able to enjoy a celebratory glass of bubbles with her team before heading home to her children, a brief rest and then more work that night. 

By yesterday morning, the court-ordered hotline for victims to contact the DLC for assistance, funded by Meta as part of the settlement deal, was already up and running with dozens of messages flowing in. “One has just come in from a dad who says his daughter’s Instagram has just been hacked and been made public. Her name and all her pictures are all still there and now its being filled with pornography and has over 100,000 followers,” Sadleir said. 

By then she had also managed to gain an understanding of the technology to work out  why Meta claimed that while they were able to delete channels the system remained flawed as the content would remain in circulation and could be distributed by those who have access to it. 

“It’s absolutely shocking. If you are able to create a mechanism for mass distribution, at least monitor it and have systems in place to deal with reports of serious stuff like child porn and bestiality in less than 24 hours — and make sure you have the power to remove stuff,” she said. 

“It terrifies me that people say WhatsApp is not social media. It’s the worst of all. A 13-year-old can go into any channel, type in a search like 'horny girls’ and view everything without joining any channels or any record of what they’re looking at.” 

A Saturday afternoon helping out with her daughter’s costume for a play was interrupted by more calls and monitoring of the drama unfolding as Meta Platforms went about shutting down accounts as new ones sprouted and reports of more victims streamed in. 

“This is my life at the moment. My phone is full of porn evidence that I haven't had a chance to file, and I am terrified that my children will pick it up. It’s all new and exciting, but it’s only beginning. The next step will be the forensic investigation to track down who is behind it all.”