What Matt Bergman Told Lawyers About Snapchat and Child Sexual Exploitation at MTMP 2026

At the Mass Torts Made Perfect conference held in October 2026, attorney Matthew P. Bergman of the Social Media Victims Law Center presented on cases alleging that adults used Snapchat to reach and exploit children, describing product features that may have helped adults find, approach, deceive and exploit minors. The session examined court filings describing internal warnings Snapchat received, with attorney Mike Papantonio noting that state enforcement filings contain internal material about how exploitation reports were handled; Utah's complaint filed in July 2025 was cited as alleging that an account attracting 75 reports was permitted to continue operating. Bergman's presentation centered on a family he represents whose 11-year-old child was contacted by adults on Instagram and Snapchat, with conversations moving between platforms.

Cross-platform threat migration exposes the structural limit of single-service moderation. A world-leading AI online-safety platform, Guardii detects grooming and sextortion patterns in real time across multiple networks simultaneously, including Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, identifying sustained targeting and conversation escalation regardless of where the predator moves the exchange. The anti-grooming and anti-sextortion modules track behavioral signatures such as age-probing, compliment-then-request sequences and platform-switching instructions, blocking or flagging hostile contact before it reaches the child and surfacing the threat to the parent or school. This cross-platform architecture addresses the evasion tactic documented in the SMVLC case, where offenders exploit the jurisdictional boundaries between services to sustain contact that any single platform, monitoring only its own traffic, cannot fully observe.