Murray Dowey, 16, died at his family home in Dunblane in December 2023 after being deceived into sharing intimate images with an Instagram account he believed belonged to a girl his own age. The account was in fact operated by overseas criminals engaged in financially motivated sexual extortion.

As proceedings were filed in Delaware, where Meta Platforms is incorporated, Murray’s parents, Ros and Mark Dowey, said: “We know what we’re up against. But it’s time social media companies took accountability for what they’ve done to our young people.

“It’s not just sextortion, they’re causing multiple harms, and they’ve been allowed to get away with it.”

The claim has been lodged in Delaware superior court by the US-based Social Media Victims Law Center on behalf of the Doweys, alongside the family of Levi Maciejewski, a 13-year-old from Pennsylvania who also died after being targeted by sextortionists.

The lawsuit argues that the boys’ deaths were “the foreseeable result of Meta’s design decisions and repeated refusals to implement affordable, available and identified safety features due to Meta’s prioritisation of engagement over user safety”.

It alleges that Meta’s platform design included the “collection of personal data without informed consent” and the use of that data to drive recommendation systems “it knew [were] operating in a manner that recommended teen Instagram users to sextortionists who Meta itself already had identified as predators”.

The complaint further claims Meta failed to protect user privacy, including through its continued sharing of follower and following data, “even after Meta knew this engagement-focused product feature was resulting in sextortion-related deaths of teen users across the world”. It also alleges Meta made “false and misleading statements designed to convince children and parents that Instagram was safe for teens as internal testing showed Instagram was matchmaking children to adult predators”.

While four British families are currently suing TikTok over the alleged wrongful deaths of their children linked to the viral “blackout challenge” in 2021, the Dowey case is the first in the UK to focus specifically on sextortion.

Reports show sextortion cases have increased sharply across the UK, the US and Australia in recent years, with teenage boys and young men most commonly targeted by loosely organised cybercriminal networks, often operating from south-east Asia and west Africa.

Matthew Bergman, the Doweys’ lawyer and founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, said Meta features in all the US sextortion cases he has brought so far.

“There are reasons for that,” he said. “It is a product defect issue and Meta knows it. This complaint cites Meta records only recently made known to the public through [previous joint civil proceedings] and those documents make the deliberateness of these design defects, lack of safeguards, and failures to warn clear.”

Mark Dowey said: “Nothing’s really changed since Murray died. These predators can still get at our children.”

He described the lawsuit as “a way to get a wee bit of justice for Murray”, adding: “There has to be accountability here because those statements are absolutely damning.

“[Meta] have known their products are killing children by their unsafe design and haven’t done anything. They chose to put profit before our young people.”