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How Facebook and Instagram became marketplaces for child sex trafficking
- ttaranto 3y agoIt is imperative to enforce the law and block internet platforms that fail to comply with legal regulations. The internet cannot serve as a sanctuary for promoting neo-Nazi groups and other illegal activities, as it must remain subject to legal jurisdiction. All individuals and organizations, whether online or offline, must be held accountable to the law. It is unacceptable to allow hate speech, homophobia, and the promotion of heinous crimes, such as child murder, to proliferate unchecked. The platform Telegram, for example, was rightfully blocked for refusing to provide authorities with phone numbers. It is essential that this platform and others that violate legal standards be severely punished to ensure compliance with the law.
- bheadmaster 3y agoAgreed! While we're at it, we should also put cameras and microphones in every street corner, every public place, every household, every toilet. Everyone who refuses to do so should be considered a terrorist for refusing to cooperate with the authorities who, we all know, are infallible, only have children's interest at heart, and would never abuse their power for their own gain. We should not stop until every inch of the Earth is covered in surveillance technology - after all, nothing to hide, nothing to fear. That's the only way we can guarantee the safety of our children. And no price is too high for the safety of our children! Anyone who says otherwise is a terrorist and a child abuser, and if that's not obvious to you, you're a terrorist and a child abuser. Privacy is a necessary precondition to child abuse - therefore, allowing privacy is allowing child abuse.
- throwaway71271 3y agowe are almost there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMLsHI8aV0g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMLsHI8aV0g nothing to hide, nothing to fear
- ChatGTP 3y agoNeed more AI and surveillance in our lives for sure.
- waselighis 3y agoWhile I knew China is a surveillance state with cameras and face rec everywhere, this is just horrid. Fuck, what a terrible place to live, I can't even imagine growing up there as a child.
- slaw 3y agoAgreed! The government should have access to all online accounts. Bank, email, Facebook,.. and at least once a day each citizen should give mandatory report what they were thinking.
- ihatepython 3y ago> and at least once a day each citizen should give mandatory report what they were thinking. So just like SCRUM?
- mypastself 3y agoUsing standups to determine who’s an upstanding citizen…
- psychlops 3y agoAbsolutely! And neo-Nazis are just a start, all illegal activities in all nations should be upheld as moral imperatives. The law should be treated as inviolable religious edicts and those who violate them as blasphemers and infidels!
- soco 3y agoIs there nothing in between? While surveillance is indeed bad, also free pass is bad. So what should we do about the crimes already happening, as few as they might be?
- 988747 3y ago[dead]
- bheadmaster 3y agoYes, there is a lot in between, that's the whole point of the hyperbole. Internet surveillance could solve child abuse, but so could nuclear bombs. Solutions to problems should be judged by the amount of collateral damage they cause. The original comment advocates for government surveillance of all digital communication - in my opinion, that causes a lot of collateral damage.
- vorpalhex 3y agoDid the last 5x times we did something help? How many "save the kids" bills have we passed that haven't worked? Repeal those and let's talk.
- MrMan 3y ago[dead]
- cubefox 3y agoExcellent troll post (assuming it is one).
- 0x53 3y agoThis is really hard to read. It fits in with what we know about meta’s content moderation in other instances though (see genocide in Myanmar). If you are an employee of Meta or even just a user of their products, I would ask you to take a step back and think about whether in totality this company is worth working for. - doesn’t care that one group of humans is using their platform to plan to kill another group (Myanmar) - doesn’t care about child sex trafficking - doesn’t care that teen girls are committing suicide. Even if you say it isn’t metas fault, don’t they bear more responsibility then they are taking?
- tomgp 3y agoYes. Imagine creating a platform that facilitates the kind of things that article recounts and instead of dedicating all possible resources to fixing the problem being like; nah, let's just pour millions upon millions of dollars into making "the metaverse". Truly a moral void.
- gsatic 3y agoThey didn't know what they built. And there are no real fixes. It's your basic jurassic park story. But the only diff is things scaled so fast, they got the whole world inside the park, before ppl started noticing how dangerous the park is. All the fixes will be half baked because the park itself is poorly thought out.
- aierou 3y agoAt an even higher level, Apple and Google devices are what allow hateful and abusive content to be created. Should they bear some responsibility and prevent us from creating such content?
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoWhat bearing does your question have on what Meta's responsibility is, exactly?
- 0x53 3y agoI think this is a fair question. I guess the way I see the difference is that a google/Apple phone is more like a tool (say a hammer) where Meta is providing a public space (like a restaurant or public square). So I think that in real life we would say that a restaurant owner has some duty to prevent their restaurant from being used to kill people/encourage suicide/do sex trafficking, but we wouldn’t ask a hammer manufacturer to police how people use hammers (we still do require some basic things like that the product must be reasonably safe). So I guess the root difference is the difference between a tool and a platform. They both bear some responsibility, but we expect the platform/space to bear much more responsibility for what happens.
- senttoschool 3y agoHaving traveled to a 3rd world country, I can easily buy weed (illegal there) from many Instagram accounts. So I totally believe that Instagram and FB are often used to facilitate illegal activities. Also, Telegram is another - probably even more on Telegram.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hermannj314 3y agoCrimes are committed all the time using phones and yet, we do not allow phone companies to monitor, record and report the content of pur phone conversations. And they can't just add a line in a terms of service, they have no legal right to do it. (Ignore the issue of Metadata, I mean the audio portions of our calls) So why have we accepted it is ok for all of our private electronic conversations to be monitored then? These are horrific crimes descrbied here but all the solutions proposed reinforce the idea and start from the presumption that every SV company has a legal right to snoop on every conversation you have on their platforms. I don't think you can have it both ways. If you routinely spy on your customers to sell ads, manipulate their behaviors and build sophisticated AI to make inferences about what every keystroke and mouse movement means, then you don't get to turn your head and pretend the crimes you witness on your platform aren't real.
- nl 3y agoThis is an excuse that makes no sense. As the article makes clear, this is not happening only on private chat: > It could, for instance, be investing more to develop better tools to “flag suspicious words and phrases on unencrypted parts of the platform – including coded language around grooming,” he said. “This is, fundamentally, not a technological problem, but one of corporate priorities.” (There is a separate debate about how to handle encryption. Meta’s plans to encrypt direct messages on Facebook Messenger and Instagram has recently drawn criticism from law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and Interpol.)
- welshwelsh 3y agoNone of this is Meta's problem though. Requiring platforms to monitor user activity is unreasonable. The main issue here is one of education. By 12 years old, a person should have learned enough about sexual exploitation in school that if a stranger asks them for nude photos, they would call the police.
- Clubber 3y agoI think the early generation of internet kids had trouble with this and other things like the permanence of Facebook, etc. Today, my kid and her friends are highly sensitive to "creepers," who might be lurking and their tactics. They are well aware of the pitfalls of posting on social media and all that. It seems society has adapted.
- ShowalkKama 3y agowhy did a 12yo child have unmonitored access to the internet?
- jsemrau 3y agoThat is a valid question to ask. I have kids around that age and restricted Insta/TikTok/etc to <30 min per day. Yet from 13yo most platforms see kids as adults.
- throwaway59601 3y agoIf you think your 12y/o doesn't have unmonitored access to the internet, you're very naive. Especially if you decided to block social media, kids will not have any of that. I used to be a boy scout leader. 10y/o kids routinely broke any and all blocking their parents put on. If they couldn't do it, they bought an old cheap smartphone and went to their friends/McDonald's with it.
- ChatGTP 3y agoBecause we’ve made the Internet so accessible and such an integral part of a children’s lives ? Even just for entertainment purposes, I see kids just staring at screens all day everywhere I go. I mean, it’s a silly question no offence.
- kypro 3y agoIt's quite easy to restrict access to kid's devices. We use Google family and the kids all hate us because they have to ask our permission whenever they want to install anything. We also get to see activity reports and we talk to them often about bad people online and why they need to be careful. I understand you can't monitor a child 24/7, but you can be careful with what devices children have access to and what they can and can't do on those devices. It's also worth remembering that the criticisms of social networks and calls for more monitoring of private communication can be applied to any crime. Do we want Facebook reporting people who it suspects could be committing a "hate-crime" for example? What about drug users, is that Facebook's responsibility too? At the end of the day parents have to accept some responsibility to protect their own children. Yes, it's hard to do perfectly, but allowing a 12 yo to use social media then meet up with a stranger they met online seems like a total failure on the parent's part here. It's like letting a 5 year old play outside then once the kid gets hit by a car complaining that the cars are the problem because car manufactures care more about selling transportation devices than protecting kids. If you let your children chat to strangers and meet up with people they don't know then bad stuff will likely happen no matter what form of communication they're using.
- bootsmann 3y ago> This legal inconsistency – the fact that child sexual abuse imagery must be reported, but reporting child sex trafficking is not legally required – is a major problem, says Staca Shehan, vice-president of the analytical services division at NCMEC. This seems to be a pretty significant legal oversight.
- waselighis 3y agoThis seems like an obvious first step to combat the problem. Much of the activity is public too, it's not all in private messages. The article does make a good point that it's much easier to detect CSAM than trafficking, but still, I'm sure Meta and other platforms could be doing so much more to detect this activity and reporting it.
- Nextgrid 3y agoFacebook has a history of letting crime groups operate even if they are obvious and don't even try to avoid detection: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/a-year-later-cybercrime-groups-still-rampant-on-facebook/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/a-year-later-cybercrime-... Is it really surprising though? Criminals, including pimps and child rapists, still watch ads, "engage" with the platform and increase the user numbers, and even encourage their peers to also join/engage with the platform. For something like Facebook surely it's a no-brainer to not miss out on all this "engagement".
- tony_cannistra 3y agoThis is nonsense. It is obvious to me that any bad PR is orders of magnitude worse for the business than the potential benefit of having even hundreds of thousands of criminals "engaging" on the platform.
- Nextgrid 3y agoIf bad PR was a problem surely you can start by actually actioning reports on obvious cybercrime pages instead of saying that they "reviewed my reports but that none of the groups were found to have violated its standards". I stand by my argument. That disgusting company doesn't care about crime and malicious activity because it's cheaper to let it happen and simply clean up the few PR incidents with some lies which people (such as you) will happily believe.
- tony_cannistra 3y agoLook, it's clear you don't like Meta. Frankly neither do I. But the reality is that the article at the URL that you linked in your original comments contains evidence that supports my point that PR is all that matters. Namely: "KrebsOnSecurity later found that reporting the abusive Facebook groups to a quarter-million followers on Twitter was the fastest way to get them disabled." Frankly it does seem that you don't appear to have read or understood the information presented in the link you posted.
- rationalfaith 3y ago[dead]
- brucethemoose2 3y ago> But the vast majority of the content that Meta reports falls under child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) – which includes photos and videos of pornographic content – rather than sex trafficking. Unlike with child sexual abuse imagery, there is no legal requirement to report child sex trafficking, so NCMEC must rely on all social media companies to be proactive in searching for and reporting it. This legal inconsistency – the fact that child sexual abuse imagery must be reported, but reporting child sex trafficking is not legally required – is a major problem, says Staca Shehan, vice-president of the analytical services division at NCMEC. That says it all. When legally required, Facebook is aggressive and expedient about enforcement. Otherwise, they are not.
- waselighis 3y agoI probably left too many comments in this thread, but I just remembered something. WTF happened to FOSTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) and SESTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act)? The article doesn't make a single mention of either of these acts. Is Meta somehow exempt from these laws?
- helen___keller 3y agoNot to absolve Facebook or instagram but it’s clear that the entire model of unrestricted access to global internet is ripe for abuse of vulnerable demographics. Also see scamming elderly with fake profiles of relatives claiming they’ve been kidnapped and so on. I wouldn’t claim to know the solution. But our starting point is platforms built to provide strangers with unsupervised digital time spent with other strangers. One of those parties may be perverts and predators and the other may be children or teenagers. You could destroy Facebook and instagram and I guarantee this moves to Snapchat, to TikTok, or to whatever other platforms fill the void.
- Clubber 3y ago>One of those parties may be perverts and predators and the other may be children or teenagers. I don't know if it matters, but this is generally replicated in a public park, playground, library, store, subway, etc. The people on social media are the same people walking around everyday.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoKids are generally monitored in parks and such. You cant easily creep on them without another adult or kid noticing. And Instagram is like a mall for a predator. Its literally just walls of selfies to anonymously scroll through, and then an instant way to DM anyone you want. Thats not like a park at all.
- helen___keller 3y agoIncidentally, in the late 20th century we had a moral panic about exactly this fact and stopped letting kids outside the home unsupervised (in the US anyways)
- DoItToMe81 3y agoFacebook is a "marketplace" for all sorts of crimes by virtue of having three billion users. Which is about 37% of the world's population. The fact that some horrible crimes slip through the cracks, as is inherent to every large population, is no excuse to treat that 37% as criminals.