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Great work done by this company, but I wonder why social networks like Instagram isn’t doing this themselves to protect children? If a paid service has caught s

Great work done by this company, but I wonder why social networks like Instagram isn’t doing this themselves to protect children? If a paid service has caught so many already, you can imagine the scale of the problem... Hope I’m wrong and they are doing it.

danharaj 7y ago
The dark secret is that no social media company would clamp down on such a lucrative source of user engagement. A lot of the early adoption of social media platforms is by young people and... well, you see?
- krapp 7y ago
  Just because pedophiles are common on social media doesn't mean they're particularly lucrative as a demographic . It's not as if they can legally form pro-pedo groups and chat and share child porn and create a social graph around their interests that would be of any value to advertisers.
  - foxylad 7y ago
    Your comment triggered the thought that blackmail is INCREDIBLY lucrative. So much so that I'm surprised it hasn't already happened. If favourite rogue state infiltrated FB/IG enough to do what Bark is doing on a system level... that's a scary amount of leverage. And it's difficult to see how our society could protect against it.
    - bagacrap 7y ago
      Leverage against some random dirtbag who lives in a trailer? The bigwigs are using services like Epstein's, not Instagram spam. And they successfully shut down that potential threat when he was compromised.
      - int_19h 7y ago
        There's a lot of spectrum between a trailer and Epstein. And you don't necessarily need people in Epstein's social circle, for such a scheme to pay off. Industrial espionage and sabotage doesn't require bigwigs - worker bees that happen to have access to things just so that they can do their daily job can do a lot.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
hendersoon 7y ago
There are obvious privacy implications with social network owners running fake accounts to entrap their users without consent. This company is training machine learning on grooming language and they could sell that data to companies like Facebook to automatically monitor child accounts-- with their parents' consent. That's a much better solution.
krapp 7y ago
I would assume that, at the very least, every large social media platform that allows image uploads is checking them against a law enforcement database of CP hashes. If not, they should be.
- mindslight 7y ago
  There is a major conflation of wildly different issues in this thread. Downloading child pornography is not cybersex, and neither one is kidnapping/molestation. I suspect the conflation occurrs because most people don't want to bear thinking about specifics, and stop at "abuse". This is understandable, but distinctions are important when analyzing any problem. For example, the idea that grabbing the perps from the story means there are fewer kidnappers is highly wishful thinking. Details are necessary to develop appropriate solutions. The behavior in the article is something that legal enforcement likely cannot curb, like "speeding" 10mph over. The perps are certainly problematic and guilty of something, but their quantity/fan-in is too great at Internet scale. The only solution I can see working is curated whitelist-only environments, the same way you drop kids off at a purpose-tailored daycare rather than a downtown alley or a prison. Details are also important for making sure that the "kid-safe" solutions are appropriately targeted so they don't end up leaking to wider society. Anonymity in general is important for a whole host of marginalized peoples, and there are many interests that wish to erode it for their own nefarious ends.
  - krapp 7y ago
    > There is a blatant conflation of wildly different issues in this thread. Downloading child pornography is not cybersex, and neither one is kidnapping/molestation. Is there evidence that no correlation exists between downloading child porn and soliciting minors for sex online? It seems oddly pedantic to insist that only a lack of critical thinking ability could lead one to assume that behaviors on the same platform which try to satisfy the same form of sexual urge might be related, because they're not literally the same. >For example, the idea that grabbing the perps from the story means there are fewer kidnappers is highly wishful thinking. I mean... there are n fewer for n arrests. The set of all child predators may be undefined, but it isn't infinite. Are you arguing that law enforcement shouldn't bother attempting to investigate or arrest criminals because crime still persists? >The only solution I can see working is curated whitelist-only environments, the same way you drop kids off at a purpose-tailored daycare rather than a downtown alley or a prison. Why can't multiple solutions work? Why should the only acceptable solution be society retreating behind walled gardens and simply accepting that pedophiles will (even, for the sake of maximizing freedom of speech, should) be left alone to freely operate in any public space? Although I do agree that children probably shouldn't be on these networks, and better curation would definitely be a good idea (particularly where PMs are concerned,) I also believe a public platform has every right to moderate activity and police itself. > Anonymity in general is important for a whole host of marginalized peoples, and there are many interests that wish to erode it for their own nefarious ends. And speaking of blatant conflation, it seems like all such interests are assumed to be nefarious in these discussions, and everything is a slippery slope towards the camps.
Mathnerd314 7y ago
The last time I tried Instagram I got followed by 5-6 bots within a few minutes of creating the account. The problem seems similar to Twitter in that there are more people working on spamming the network with bots than there are Twitter employees blocking them, so they focus primarily on automated blocking than on catching other types of abuse.
gwd 7y ago
One thing I felt was missing from this article was concrete suggestions for parents. What do you do if you have an 11-year-old daughter? Maybe 11 is too young for an Instagram account, but are you really going to prevent her from having a social media account at 15? How do prepare her for this kind of vileness, so she's not burdened with secrecy and self-blame?
- arkitaip 7y ago
  You start when they are 4 or 5 years old. No, I'm being serious here: that's the age at which most kids are using tablets and phones regularly. That's the age you need to start having conversations about the dangers of the Internet and how your kids should protect themselves. And just like teaching any other skill, you start with the absolute basics and build stepping stones.

danharaj 7y ago

The dark secret is that no social media company would clamp down on such a lucrative source of user engagement. A lot of the early adoption of social media platforms is by young people and... well, you see?

krapp 7y ago
Just because pedophiles are common on social media doesn't mean they're particularly lucrative as a demographic . It's not as if they can legally form pro-pedo groups and chat and share child porn and create a social graph around their interests that would be of any value to advertisers.
- foxylad 7y ago
  Your comment triggered the thought that blackmail is INCREDIBLY lucrative. So much so that I'm surprised it hasn't already happened. If favourite rogue state infiltrated FB/IG enough to do what Bark is doing on a system level... that's a scary amount of leverage. And it's difficult to see how our society could protect against it.
  - bagacrap 7y ago
    Leverage against some random dirtbag who lives in a trailer? The bigwigs are using services like Epstein's, not Instagram spam. And they successfully shut down that potential threat when he was compromised.
    - int_19h 7y ago
      There's a lot of spectrum between a trailer and Epstein. And you don't necessarily need people in Epstein's social circle, for such a scheme to pay off. Industrial espionage and sabotage doesn't require bigwigs - worker bees that happen to have access to things just so that they can do their daily job can do a lot.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

hendersoon 7y ago

There are obvious privacy implications with social network owners running fake accounts to entrap their users without consent. This company is training machine learning on grooming language and they could sell that data to companies like Facebook to automatically monitor child accounts-- with their parents' consent. That's a much better solution.

krapp 7y ago

I would assume that, at the very least, every large social media platform that allows image uploads is checking them against a law enforcement database of CP hashes. If not, they should be.

mindslight 7y ago
There is a major conflation of wildly different issues in this thread. Downloading child pornography is not cybersex, and neither one is kidnapping/molestation. I suspect the conflation occurrs because most people don't want to bear thinking about specifics, and stop at "abuse". This is understandable, but distinctions are important when analyzing any problem. For example, the idea that grabbing the perps from the story means there are fewer kidnappers is highly wishful thinking. Details are necessary to develop appropriate solutions. The behavior in the article is something that legal enforcement likely cannot curb, like "speeding" 10mph over. The perps are certainly problematic and guilty of something, but their quantity/fan-in is too great at Internet scale. The only solution I can see working is curated whitelist-only environments, the same way you drop kids off at a purpose-tailored daycare rather than a downtown alley or a prison. Details are also important for making sure that the "kid-safe" solutions are appropriately targeted so they don't end up leaking to wider society. Anonymity in general is important for a whole host of marginalized peoples, and there are many interests that wish to erode it for their own nefarious ends.
- krapp 7y ago
  > There is a blatant conflation of wildly different issues in this thread. Downloading child pornography is not cybersex, and neither one is kidnapping/molestation. Is there evidence that no correlation exists between downloading child porn and soliciting minors for sex online? It seems oddly pedantic to insist that only a lack of critical thinking ability could lead one to assume that behaviors on the same platform which try to satisfy the same form of sexual urge might be related, because they're not literally the same. >For example, the idea that grabbing the perps from the story means there are fewer kidnappers is highly wishful thinking. I mean... there are n fewer for n arrests. The set of all child predators may be undefined, but it isn't infinite. Are you arguing that law enforcement shouldn't bother attempting to investigate or arrest criminals because crime still persists? >The only solution I can see working is curated whitelist-only environments, the same way you drop kids off at a purpose-tailored daycare rather than a downtown alley or a prison. Why can't multiple solutions work? Why should the only acceptable solution be society retreating behind walled gardens and simply accepting that pedophiles will (even, for the sake of maximizing freedom of speech, should) be left alone to freely operate in any public space? Although I do agree that children probably shouldn't be on these networks, and better curation would definitely be a good idea (particularly where PMs are concerned,) I also believe a public platform has every right to moderate activity and police itself. > Anonymity in general is important for a whole host of marginalized peoples, and there are many interests that wish to erode it for their own nefarious ends. And speaking of blatant conflation, it seems like all such interests are assumed to be nefarious in these discussions, and everything is a slippery slope towards the camps.

Mathnerd314 7y ago

The last time I tried Instagram I got followed by 5-6 bots within a few minutes of creating the account. The problem seems similar to Twitter in that there are more people working on spamming the network with bots than there are Twitter employees blocking them, so they focus primarily on automated blocking than on catching other types of abuse.

gwd 7y ago

One thing I felt was missing from this article was concrete suggestions for parents. What do you do if you have an 11-year-old daughter? Maybe 11 is too young for an Instagram account, but are you really going to prevent her from having a social media account at 15? How do prepare her for this kind of vileness, so she's not burdened with secrecy and self-blame?

arkitaip 7y ago
You start when they are 4 or 5 years old. No, I'm being serious here: that's the age at which most kids are using tablets and phones regularly. That's the age you need to start having conversations about the dangers of the Internet and how your kids should protect themselves. And just like teaching any other skill, you start with the absolute basics and build stepping stones.