The first time I was catcalled I was six. My friend and I were playing dress up and we put on very messy red lipstick and blush. She left to have lunch and home and we agreed to meet after lunch on the corner of street, her house was next-door to mine. I guess I didn't wash off all of the makeup, but a group of grown men shouted and whistled at me then quickly drove away. At 11 I went on short runs close to home, I was whistled at most days. When I turned 15 and took the bus to work at a nearby mall, I was often asked if I needed a ride by older men, and often had to brush off comments or offers by older men, twice they had sat next to me on the bus blocking my way out, I had to tell the bus driver and stand up on my seat to climb to the seat behind me. When I first went on the internet I tried asking people about about majoring in Physics and what their work was like, I was in high school and if they found out I was a girl they would usually try to convince me to date them, send a dick pic. I even had an offer from a 60 year old to fly me out to live with them. I think men have no idea that girls and women experience this.
> I think men have no idea that girls and women experience this.
There is a stats model as to why this is. I can't find the reference, so my recollection may be spotty.
Essentially, assume there are more men than women in some room. Assume that some percent of either sex will espouse sexist comments at the other sex. Running through the math, you find that women hear more sexist comments than men do. If you plug in some real world numbers (of sex imbalances, sexist remark frequencies, time in various environments, etc) to these percentages and not just some random ones, then something like 95% of women will get some very crude remarks thrown their way nearly every day. Again, I can't find the reference, but it has it's own eponymously named rule to it on Wikipedia (though it's not on that linking page yet for some reason).
Basically, one possible reason men don't hear a lot of very sexist stuff all that time is 'because math'. Men need to listen to their sisters, mothers, wives, friends, and coworkers and believe them more often.
This comment was so useful to me, as a man i consider myself to be sensible enough to not be an harasser but it's true that from the standpoint of a white male it's very complicated to fully understand what women goes through.
I think exactly this is the reason why many mans perceive the sexual harassment and the sexist argument has overkill sometimes, basically it's an issue cause by a low exposure to it.
Thank you for this comment, i'll use it as an argument in sexism discussions trying to help other fellow mans to understand it.
Yes, this is what it's like. Most of the men seem harmless but when someone starts to follow you it gets scary. This was in a populated area thankfully. A few years ago I attended a women who code meetup and two men decided to try and follow two women home, arguing that it wasn't illegal to walk on the street etc. They had to be threatened with someone calling the police and the women had to delay going home and stay with the group leaving the building before it was clear the men would leave them alone and they could safely walk away.
I would love to see this same experiment repeated in other cities. For some reason this seems very specific to NYC. Has anyone tried this in Los Angeles for example?
Word of caution though, I may be misremembering the model and may be totally off base. I couldn't find the reference very easily, so if you'd like to use this argument yourself, try running a similar model through Excel/Python/R first. It'll give you a pretty good idea of the issues involved.
Maybe it's a sexist thing to say, but in my experience, men are far more likely to make overt obnoxious comments.
On the other hand, it's my experience that women are far more likely to share obnoxious comments with their friends. But I admit that's based on a small sample, just close female friends and lovers, and wives. And perhaps I'm not the sort of guy who encourages such sharing by male friends. Or even has such male friends, for that matter.
Sure, Assume that there are twice as many men in this room, then if a sexual remark is made by a random person, then it will twice as often be made by a male. If the target of said sexual remark is always of the opposite sex, then a specific sexual remark made against a male will have twice as many males to choose from, meaning that a particular male has half the chance of receiving each comment than a female would.
So as a summary: if there are twice as many males in the room and everyone is equally likely to make a sexual comment against the opposite sex, then females would get 4 such comments for each comment a male gets.
Now, for normal everyday examples like walking down the street, asking a question in a class, taking the train, etc.. Does it seem likely to be twice as many males in this "room"?
> I think men have no idea that girls and women experience this.
Definitely. It's hard to fathom pretty much any "deluge of interactions" and their destructiveness at scale without having going through.
An other common case is online pileups e.g. a random tweet gets retweeted and is controversial enough that people now viewing it want to reply. For them it's just a reply, for the rando it's thousands of by and large useless repetitive and unoriginal message.
It's fundamentally a DDOS, and the skeeviness or even maliciousness of the interactions you experienced only serve to make things workse.
I feel like we're evolved to deal with this kind of concrete threat throughout the day. Go out into the world, avoid the saber tooth tigers and enemy tribes, gather some berries, go back home to safety, threats are gone.
On the other hand, the kind of existential dread many men experience now is something only modern society really made an opportunity to foster. Depression, loneliness, and feelings of abject hopelessness can eat you from the inside out. You feel anxiety as if there's a tiger outside but there is no tiger, you can never "escape" the tiger until you find a partner (and even then your past life can have a permanent lasting effect on you), and being clocked as experiencing all of this makes you "desperate" and less attractive creating a vicious cycle of misery.
If I could have chosen I'd rather have been born onto the other side of that experience instead of barely being able to enjoy life up until recently. Manageable specific threats presenting themselves throughout the day that go away when I remove myself from a situation (or mace them or something) instead of going through the motions day in day out feeling increasingly worthless with every failed attempt at reaching out to a potential partner, online or offline. Having too many options presenting themselves to you versus knowing that at least 500 people in a row online deemed you not even worth responding to.
You are presenting a theory that those primitive tribal living environments did not have the same social interactions and dynamics that we have in the present day. But you’re not presenting any evidence so support that assertion.
It’s entirely reasonable to assume people then had the same existential dread and fear of social exclusion we had today plus festering wounds, lack of hygiene, and poor dental care.
Come on, the whole point of tribal living as a social structure is that it has way more tightly-knit social interaction than a modern day, Western, late-stage-capitalistic, 'Bowling-Alone' society. OP's theory is entirely plausible, even though the sort of existential dread he posits has little to do w/ gender relations per se.
The gender relations point is any random woman is much much much less likely to have loneliness and finding dates as a problem so it doesn't come up in this scenario as much.
When I reconnected with one of my (attractive) female friends from high school (I was 2 years ahead of her) after graduation, in community college. We decided to take a walk together from her house. On the way we passed a construction site on the other side of the street.
She looked to the construction workers and seemed baffled. She told me she was she was surprised that they were 'NOT' catcalling her with me walking with her.
That opened my eyes a bit. She had walked by them before several times and they had harassed her many times, from across the street.
She was either 16 or 17 at the time. I am pretty sure she was not 18 at the time. The age of consent in California.
Yes, there are enough totally obnoxious men around, in many areas, for any women who happens by to be harassed. And maybe worse, you have the ones who are just subtly obnoxious. Or even unconsciously obnoxious.
But then, I'm a guy. However, I have been catcalled and propositioned, by gay men. In clubs, at parties, in restrooms, etc. Rarely, though. And sometimes I flirt, just for lulz. Almost got me knifed, one time.
And then there's all the other crap that we all need to deal with from obnoxious guys.
Fine with that, as long as the "hear about it" part doesn't involve stereotyping all men (and specifically men) as potential predators.[1] Because that sort of misdirected moral panic can only make things even worse.
[1] (See also: "teach them not to rape!" and the like. You can't teach a rapist not to rape - the leopard doesn't change its spots. And the moral majority of dutiful, ethical, law-abiding folks don't need to be taught not to be predators!)
> And the moral majority of dutiful, ethical, law-abiding folks don't need to be taught not to be predators!
The whole discussion around "rape culture" suggests that a lot of people need to be taught where the boundary is. They don't do it "deliberately" but declare that anything other than a clear repeated "no" counts as consent, which is not right.
No, the actual issue with so-called "rape culture" is the way it enables predators by providing them with cover, plausible deniability, social support etc. etc. That's why male-hierarchical and supremacist societies like we see in many places outside the West are a huge problem. (And they hurt males also, since sexual predation often targets them too - much like we'd see in the stereotypes about prison rape in the U.S. It's not homosexuality in the modern Western sense but sexually predatory behavior that's masking as homosexuality. The underlying dynamics are exactly the same as when females are targeted.)
>The whole discussion around "rape culture" suggests that a lot of people need to be taught where the boundary is.
They're taught by popular culture and outdated notions of masculine identity that the boundaries don't really exist, or that they're just an obstacle to be overcome. Plenty of popular songs teach men that women should consent to sex if a man is aggressive enough or rich enough, or handsome or gets a woman drunk, etc.
Rape culture sends men the message that consent is defined by what they want, and that they're entitled to sex, and that there's something wrong with women who don't give it to them (and, conversely, something wrong with men who can't get it at every opportunity.)
Historically, the problem was solved by not allowing women in public at all. In nearly all higher cultures, women lived in completely segregated and controlled world. Let's not forget that what is novel is not that a tiny minority of men are sex-obsessed low-inhibition asshats, but what is novel is that women casually sit in the bus right next to them. By this, of course, I do not intend to downplay the severity of some experiences some women make.
We already have things like segregated, female-only rail cars in Japan. So I'd argue we're slowly going back to that world. Somehow, we'll also develop new "non-predatory", "consent-respecting" sexual scripts that will most likely look a heck of a lot like the old-fashioned rules of public etiquette and courtesy.
My parents were mostly absent, hence why I was 15 taking a bus to work so I could afford basic goods. If they were willing to care for me, I would have had way fewer encounters with men harassing me. People who never step out of the bubble have no idea.
Nonsense. In the upper crust maybe, but in tribes and farming cultures women were.alwqys full part of public society. It changed only with the industrial revolution - smaller families, bigger cities, more distinct gender roles.
> I think men have no idea that girls and women experience this.
This is generally true in both directions. While I have never experienced sexual harassment, I do experience nothing. As in, no woman (online) initiates contact with me. Every woman apparently initiating contact is a scammer and likely not actually a woman.
Possibly reading the wrong thing between the lines,but if anyone expects women to initiate relationships online, they're going to be very disappointed. For women, the risk\reward equation is astronomically biased against them.
If you're looking for a relationship, look offline. And not in pick-up joints - take any interests you have and make them sociable, invest in social gatherings with people your own age (anyone younger than a couple of years is going to think you're a creep), and tell women you find attractive that you find them attractive subtly, and don't be childish if they knock you back.
I always thought the benefit of online dating is to avoid the need to muck up friendship activities with finding a partner. Like, don't people not want to be propositioned just because they like f.e. table tennis?
> the risk\reward equation is astronomically biased against them
...what? An almost guaranteed date for a minimum of effort is a bad risk/reward how exactly? I suppose it is a little more effort than just replying to one of the 1000 messages in their inbox.
Idk, lots of sexual assaulters exist in the offline world. In the social dancing scene, you can meet lots of charming men who will push your boundaries beyond comfort and some will rape. Heard dozens of stories for just the scenes I'm involved in. And you'd think it happens once and then the dude is gone, nope. They stay around for 20 years raping people. And it's very frequently the people leading the community.
I'd love to hear if online dating is statistically riskier than offline but duck duck go isn't helping me much here.
> This is generally true in both directions. While I have never experienced sexual harassment, I do experience nothing.
I'm trying to make sense of this comment and am drawing a complete blank.
Seems to me that zero unwanted online sexual advances from creepers of the opposite sex would be an example of "winning", not an example of "men have it bad, too."
As a guy who wishes he'd had zero unwanted online sexual advances from creepers, what am I missing here?
> I'm trying to make sense of this comment and am drawing a complete blank.
> Seems to me that zero unwanted online sexual advances from creepers of the opposite sex would be an example of "winning", not an example of "men have it bad, too."
You may be struggling to make sense of this by inserting some sort of "who is winning and who is losing" query. I'm not positing winning, losing, better, or worse for anyone. I'm stating that men and women have different online experiences and most are not aware that the other has a different experience.
> As a guy who wishes he'd had zero unwanted online sexual advances from creepers, what am I missing here?
Okay, so non-zero over what time-frame?
Without meeting IRL, is there any way for you to determine if these "creepers" are scammers? You may find they are nearly all scammers if probe even just a little.
You may have something in your profile most men do not have, making you a more attractive target, because, really, HN is full of men and although this is a really poor survey, you are so far the only person stating you experience elsewise.
I would be curious to hear if you receive initial contact from non-"creeper" women. Women also receive non-harassing contact from men, whereas men generally don't receive any.
It's not "true in both directions" because one of those "directions" is a lifelong experience of harassment and intimidation and the other "direction" is nobody wants to seek you out to have sex with you.
So men just want sex? None of these men are grappling with loneliness and feeling unvalued getting nothing but radio silence trying to reach out to potential partners? Having the pressure of having to work out, get a high paying job, etc. just in order to try to increase their chances of not dying alone?
It's about sex, but it's also about entitlement. These men you're talking about believe that it's somehow unfair that they get "radio silence" when they "reach out". I'm sure they feel bad, but nobody victimized them. They're just insecure.
And, heh, hoooooo boy, yeah, let's talk about pressure. Let me tell you, as a man, I am pressured constantly to look good. All the makeup I put on every day, all the different outfits I own. All the work I have to do on my butt and abs, all the crazy crash diets I've gone on to try to slim down, the sheer amount of money I spend on my hair... You're right, it really is unfair how society pressures me, a cis man, to constantly look good and make lots of money, in order to be treated as a person.
I know lots of women that don't do any of those things and get "treated as a person" perfectly fine. None of that is remotely necessary to get dates as a woman. Including weight, lots of guys like heavier girls but it's practically a death sentence for men.
If you really think lonely people are just victimizing themselves then you need to make a better attempt at having empathy skills. It /is/ grossly unfair having to live like that. Unfair having to get catcalled too but as I said in another comment I'd have picked that over what my life had to be like in an instant.
"It's not society's job to be fair to you," said the employer to the Irish immigrant in 19th century America. The Irishman needed to learn how to be an adult and stop whining about hiring discrimination - it was his responsibility alone to find a job and be happy, not some imagined monolith of "all employers."
This is a great example of casual misandry. You seem to think men have no issues, and only women have difficult lives. That simply isn't true. Men and women both face issues, and both have issues that are both significant and insignificant. Try to learn some empathy.
You could list any two random things and say "yes those two things suck". If one person got mugged and another was short on bus fare, yes both would suck, but the comparison is wildly out of proportion. Not only is the impact much different, but the whole context is different. And it's especially frustrating and inappropriate when it's used to downplay an important issue.
Women do understand what men experience online, because many men have developed a massive victim complex lately and won't stop trying to derail every mention of something women experience online to talk about themselves.
It is not my experience with the women I know that they are aware of this. Maybe they think it is somewhat reduced from what they experience, or perhaps they think that the only women who contact men are legitimate, non-harassing contacts, but they are not aware that the actual experience is zero initiated contacts.
> because many men have developed a massive victim complex lately and won't stop trying to derail every mention of something women experience online to talk about themselves.
I have observed no massive victim complex. My comment was not intended to "derail" any mentions. I flatly stated my experience and that women are generally unaware of this experience.
If there is no interest in considering the experience of a party for whom you have some desire to influence, what is the likelihood of successful engagement? If you want men, who experience no initiated contacts to fully understand that women experience large amounts of harassment, might it be critical to approach them with the understanding that they have a completely different experience?
>I flatly stated my experience and that women are generally unaware of this experience.
Yes but the subject at had was, specifically, womens' experience with harassment. There was no reason to make it about you, or about men not being engaged with by women. Sure, maybe some women don't understand what men go through in that case... it's not relevant, though.
The situations aren't even equivalent. Women have a right to expect not to be harassed online, men don't have a right to expect women to initiate contact with them online.
And this sort of thing happens all the time. Almost any conversation relating to women will result in someone trying to turn the conversation towards men, or calling such conversation sexist for not including men. It's as if we're not allowed to discuss women here except in relation to men somehow.
>If you want men, who experience no initiated contacts to fully understand that women experience large amounts of harassment, might it be critical to approach them with the understanding that they have a completely different experience?
No, it shouldn't be critical. Men who don't experience contact from women should be able to comprehend that women are often harassed despite their own personal experience being different. If anything, such men should perhaps consider that the amount of harassment women receive and the degree of personal contact women are willing to initiate are not at all unrelated.
> Women have a right to expect not to be harassed online, men don't have a right to expect women to initiate contact with them online.
No one is arguing this... they are simply saying women don't understand how men experience online dating.
> Men who don't experience contact from women should be able to comprehend that women are often harassed despite their own personal experience being different.
If this is true, then women should be able to understand that a man who has faced nothing but rejection during years of online dating will begin to get frustrated, and may lose their peachy demeanor. After the 100th "genuine conversation" you have online with someone that ultimately goes nowhere, and the 1000th message you send that gets no response, you may begin to resort to "ay bb want some fuck?" Obviously no one deserves to be harassed online, but ignoring the factors that cause these behaviors is silly.
You won't change these men's behavior by telling them to just die alone silently and accept their loneliness. You will change men's behavior by understanding their position and empathizing with them.
No offense but think about the other side. I'm very lightly kidding here, I remember making a female account on a website to assist some girl (say an ancestor of tinder) and remember being washed by a torrent of messages from guys. It was a shock, I never ever imagined it was possible to get so much "attention" in so few. I understood a thing or two about girl's life all of a sudden. I also realized how our world were different, because at that time, on a myspace like website, I honestly wrote hundreds of long and fun message to women and maybe got 3 answers total. Men are frustrated, women are harassed. It's an absurd situation in a way.
ps: my story is very slightly related to the thread and your example as I was not a minor nor made a minor female profile. Strangers annoying young girls should be stopped immediately.
Men are frustrated, girls and women fear for their lives. Most of the negative attention I received came from much older men, with the exception of one walking up to me at a train station at midnight and putting his hand on my shoulder while his friends cheered from his car and I had to aggressively push his hand away and walk away quickly hoping he didn't follow.
Many years ago, I was walking with a female friend, and some random guy slapped her ass. She kicked out one of his knees, and he went down hard. We didn't kick the piss out of him, though.
Have you considered purchasing a firearm? It is your 2nd amendment right and may come in handy when you are harassed or stalked. There are a lot of training programs as well, teaching the basics of storing a firearm, when to use it, how to use it, etc.
I haven't yet pulled the trigger and actually bought one yet, but I have taken safety classes and done some target practice. Unfortunately I live in an area where concealed carry is not legal.
With the exception of chicago (and a few other cities like newyork), concealed carry is usually granted. And I say this as someone whose paperwork for the application got lost by the department performing background check, twice (because of my name). Even in new york city and most of california, it is possible, just takes some doing (speak to an attorney that specializes in this) and don't forget the training.
I'm consistently flabbergasted people put forth getting a lot of messages on dating sites as some difficult situation that's hard to deal with. It's metaphorically like they want some cheese so they go to the cheese store and are so overwhelmed by all the cheese selection and free samples that they run out screaming without buying any cheese, somehow expecting me to feel sympathy for them and accept that I was in the privileged position starving in a cold wet cardboard box not having had any my whole life despite searching far and wide trying as hard as I could, not being able to get my first nibble of cheese until the age of 24 while they got pallets and pallets of free cheese offered to them their entire life.
This comment is like if someone said they watched their parents burned alive in a house fire and it changed the person for life, and someone else replied "yeah, but think about the other side, my brother is a firefighter and he works so hard..." Sure, let's minimize the first thing and talk about something different.
> This comment is like if someone said they watched their parents burned alive in a house fire and it changed the person for life, and someone else replied "yeah, but think about the other side, my brother is a firefighter and he works so hard..." Sure, let's minimize the first thing and talk about something different.
No, it isn't like that because the discussion is regarding the same environment. within your analogy, both discussions would have to be about parents. So the one person provides the stated example of watching their parents burn to death while the other explains that their parents locked them in a 48" x 48" x 48" cage and tortured the person for 18 years. (I'm going very extreme here to demonstrate the point.)
Made a okcupid account back in the day with some random pictures I found on non-English internet of a decently attractive woman. Holy shit, within a week there were tens of unread messages and likes.
What is the lesson there? Go meet women in person. Online/tinder/okc is for schmucks. Women have it so easy.
Also this article is submarine pr for bark. Honestly bark sounds like something that would be awful for parents mental health. Do you really want to know what your kids are doing? At 10-15 we (girls included) we were trying to be as offensive as possible on the internet.
The comment was directly referring to likes and direct messages received in an online dating profile.
In a platform such as an online dating app/game this in no way would be considered “online harassment”, if anything they world be considered validation.
Cool be offended. But I would still disagree with your attempted rebuttal of my original points.
a) Not just Young or attractive women will get attention. There are a lot of older/non conventionally attractive women that use online dating too. Who knows since we are thinking in hypotheticals would you deny them male attention if they wanted it? What about a younger man who wants to meet older/bbw/non conventionally-attractive women?Tinder et al. are great for that, and I would not dissuade anyone for trying to find someone they are sexually attracted to.
b) The point that I was making, and that you have created a straw man argument out of....is that yes women have it easy in regards to receiving validation and invitation to dates/encounters/sex in the form of likes and messages on online dating services. There may be undesirables/creeps out there but it is trivial to unmatched so it would arguably be easier than swanking with bad attention in in the real world.
> They’re all children. And like every case of abuse, a child is never at fault.
This is accurate, first and foremost before what I say could be interpreted as shifting the blame from these perverts. But one thing not mentioned in this article is why an 11 year old would be on the internet at all. I think we need to have a serious think about whether it makes sense to expose a child to everything to world has to offer, unguided, before they're much older than 11.
There was a lot of optimism about the internet, or more specifically the web I guess, as it developed. But realistically it's not the utopian vision many expected it to become, large parts of it are a cess pool.
Back when I was younger the idea that it would aid in education, and make it easy for children to research any topic. Is that truly the case? I'd argue not, misinformation is rife, could any child really be expected to critically examine this stuff unguided? I think we were better with something like encarta to be completely honest.
Social media is an abomination, I'm not convinced many adults have the faculties required to use it in a non destructive way. How many of us have parents that seem to be completely radicalised by one Facebook group or another? We know that because they won't shut up about it, so what's it doing to a bunch of kids that don't share what they're reading with their parents? God knows.
This is all before we admit that children can be really quite cruel, which gets magnified by them not actually seeing the result of their words/actions. Putting a screen in-between the bullying is a sure fire way to make it much worse. Couple that with the isolation that's felt by this fake 'social connection' and its a recipe for disaster.
I really worry about the future if our education systems can't be retooled to teach children critical thinking, and if we don't start to change the way we look at the internet to realise its way more dangerous than we expected it to be.
You might have an exaggerated sense of what kind of control parents can have over their children, and an underestimation of how pervasive Internet tech is among preteens.
My 12 year daughter, for example, is one of only a few kids in her class that don't have their own phone. And it's been like this for a couple years. Her friends think we're dragons for restricting her and her brother to 1 hour a day. Throughout the school day she is getting access to school iPads for 'free time' where it's open season on YouTube and the like.
The ages 11 and up are when parents get a harsh education in just how little 'control' they can (or should?) have over their kids. The best bet is to make sure there's open channels of communication and enough mutual respect that your kids will come to you when confused or upset, and maybe even listen to your advice. Trying to clamp down on them and control their access to the Internet (in an era where most of their peers have almost unfettered access) doesn't encourage that trust. We've learned the hard way.
Our (allegedly very good for our state) elementary school gives the Kindergarteners iPads. Not to take home—I think they wait until 3rd grade or something for that complete fucking nonsense—but during much of the school day. Their free time in lower grades is iPad shit. Mediocre edutainment games. Having the iPad read books to them. That ends up being quite a bit of their day. Meanwhile they have under half an hour of recess. Talk about screwed up priorities.
Do you know what occupies kids really well so you don't have to do your job? Ding, ding, ding.
In all honestly knowing how harmful those devices are to development of kids this should be banned.
Do your job and take care of kids that were trusted to you.
It seems crazy that the school allows that. This is sort of what I mean though, society in general doesn't recognise the danger. No school would just allow strangers into the school to chat with the kids during their free time, or get some flat earth loon in to speak with them, but quite happily expose them to YouTube without supervision.
Lots of schools, though, would allow 12 year olds to read books written by unknown authors or flat earthers. In a world where content is increasingly online, how do you draw the line between protecting preteens from dangerous interactions and preventing them from exploring interesting ideas?
I doubt they'd stock books on Flat Earth in the school library. Maybe it'd get a mention in a book on kookie conspiracy theories alongside Elvis being an alien. There wouldn't be enough material there to get a start then... just keep going indefinitely, like there is on the Web.
> But one thing not mentioned in this article is why an 11 year old would be on the internet at all.
Because she wants to expeirience and learn society where it happens.
Internet is main space for human interaction. Asking why 11 year old would be on the internet is like asking why would she be in the mall or on the street or anywhere really except home, school and inside of family car.
She should be on the internet and she should be expeiriencing it because that's the only way she can learn to tolerate it and find her way around it. She won't learn it at school or from parents that barely have any clue what's internet outside of their email accounts.
When children access internet you need to keep an eye and explain parts of it you yourself do understand. Same as with TV or people in the streets. You can't ban things till children become adults because you are stealing from them opportunity to learn when learning is easiest for them.
If they have your support internet won't break them.
Sorry, but that's the way it is. Internet is the future of human interaction.
Look at how people learn now or how they find their peer group or their life partners. Where they discuss issues. Where do they go for help.
Internet is the society. Your family is there. Your fellow villagers are there. Your sages are there. Your support network is there. And your village idiots and villains are there too.
You might not like it but that's reality and there's no comming back because internet is the best way of interacting with people thanks to its speed, memory and safety (when compared to any other form of interaction with exactly same people).
> Look at how people learn now or how they find their peer group or their life partners. Where they discuss issues. Where do they go for help.
Sure, it's a tool. That doesn't mean it embodies society.
> Internet is the society. Your family is there.
No, my family is in their physical community, houses, work places, places they go for recreation, etc. That is society.
> internet is the best way of interacting with people
That is highly opinionated. And absolutely wrong if interacting with people means being able to talk in person, go somewhere together, shake hands, hug, high five, etc.
It seems you're thinking of interaction in the context of, e.g., a work environment where efficiency is of capital importance. This is one kind of interaction, yes. But there are others.
Why would an 11 year old be on the internet at all?
Homework, from a surprisingly young age, often expects and requires internet use. Personally I would have preferred a reasonable mix of all sources, including using a library, and when and why to choose - the internet often lacks depth, or is wrong, and kids often go through a stage of "it's on the internet, it must be true". I'm not convinced they all get past that, as if they do it's self-learnt. Adults too.
Guided use is for younger than 11 as they'll use the net in class and for homework, as well as socially well before high school these days. You'd better have tried to give them the tools and skills to try and judge, be suspicious etc before then. Considering most people really aren't that tech aware, how is a non-tech parent meant to judge when is the right moment? My peer group isn't even slightly representative as there was a heavy presence of router rules, firewalls, non-admin access and so on. None of which is there the moment they hook up to coffee shop or friend's wifi. So, just like walking to school, best you can do is give them the nudges to fend for themselves, and hopefully know when to yell for help or advice from parent or teacher. (Teach would probably be non techie, and not much use either).
Then you have peer pressure. It's hard to resist too early smartphone or social media use when your kid is the last in class without, and it's their main form of contact. They don't call round houses or phone like we did in my, pre-internet schooldays. Facebook et al say you shouldn't have an account before 13, but there is precisely no enforcement of that. So what to do? As you say children can be quite cruel, often especially to those who don't conform. We judged the right moment was around 12-13 - high school is when kids get properly cruel. We were amongst the last of the very late adopters as far as we can tell...
Critical thinking is one thing that is markedly absent in education, it's far more checking the boxes of giving them a tech education, and schools using "modern stuff", like those mostly pointless interactive whiteboards all the schools got at great expense. No evidence of teaching them to think, to judge, to differentiate between ads and SERPs, or which SERPs might be potentially trustworthy, how to judge a source's credibility, etc, etc. Course critical thinking might have some of them questioning the system... :)
It's sickening that schools sign agreements that basically let third parties collect data on students... I'm guessing there's a loophole somewhere where that date can be used after they turn 18...
When I went back to school for my Master's degree, I had the highest confidentially settings I could set. If I wanted to ask questions on a homework or project, the school required I gave my name, email, and course information, along with the content of my post to Piazza.
The argument and agreement was that they can't use my information unless I also am a member on their website outside the context of Piazza... Funny enough, I used LinkedIn... So since I want to use LinkedIn, my school information privacy is violated.
I imagine there's a similar goal with high school students. As soon as they turn 18 and claim that on LinkedIn, they can go back and mine their high school and middle school data.
Do you have any examples of classes is in critical thinking that might be appropriate? Maybe online self guided lessons or ready-made lesson plans that parents could go over with their children directly? Seems most material in this area is geared towards adult self-improvement
Not sure I can help here - while we did find a few online resources that were useful, our kids are in their twenties now so I can't remember much of what we came up with ten or so years ago. A lot was what might be considered "HN common sense" or pedantry. Looking at a site, article and author and deconstructing their bona fides, playing spot the flawed reasoning, appeal to authority or whatever.
And an awful lot of encouragement to question their beliefs, assumptions, and the spin of any particular article, or the motivations and intent, and change their own perspective at will. In short trying to encourage them to stay in the awkward squad who are constantly questioning...
If a bank leaves its vault open to the street and unguarded, it's possible for the the thief and the bank to be simultaneously and fully in the wrong, without the negligence of the bank being somehow compensated for or compensating for the guilt of the thief.
We don't expect children to be perfect; in fact, we expect that they need to make mistakes to learn from.
The bank in your example is beyond negligent, as it provided the opportunistic thief the opportunity to abscond with customers' money the bank exists to protect.
In this case, the bank is the parents of children who are obligated to supervise their behavior online, not the children themselves.
I'm a parent and I'm not sure why the idea that parents should protect their children is somehow controversial.
In this case it should not be necessary - the world should be a better place, without these sick assholes preying on children. However it is not a better place and so parents need to be aware.
There's a combinatorial naivety about anything as free form as internet. There will be whatever, good or bad, and everything in between.
About child cruelty, I can remember how mean we could be. And how innocent it was at the same time. It's all a game of loud teasing, we were all calling each other names to make everybody laugh; it's just that sometimes some people get too much and sometimes some people already have too much on their plate. I was as much a victim as a perpetrator.
>This is accurate, first and foremost before what I say could be interpreted as shifting the blame from these perverts. But one thing not mentioned in this article is why an 11 year old would be on the internet at all.
You're not shifting the blame so much as directly blaming the victims and their parents.
I would question why an 11 year old would remain on the internet, if the situation really is that bad. So if there are 11 year olds on the internet for a prolonged amount of time, it seems likely to me the situation is not really that bad.
The irrational decision to return to a environment where they get burned, again and again? Why?
I am not talking about signing up for Instagram. I am talking about staying on Instagram after a flood of sexual harassment, as described in the article.
I don't think so. The story here is "horrible things happen to underage girls who hang out on Instagram". So I don't need to be a doctor to evaluate "horrible things". Either horrible things happen, or not.
In the real world, what if somebody would be beaten up in a certain part of town, every time they go there, and they keep returning. You wouldn't have to be a doctor to ask "why does he keep returning".
>You wouldn't have to be a doctor to ask "why does he keep returning".
No but you need to have domain expertise to understand the mental and emotional processes that lead to decisions being made, especially by people whose brains are still developing.
I appreciate that they included real examples of conversations they captured in the article, as disturbing as that may be.
A lot of the conversation around sexual predation, especially around child porn, is problematic from a democracy point of view: You get authorities asking for more power (usually, more draconian surveillance laws), without showing evidence of what it is that they are supposedly fighting -- and of course, nobody wants to ask too strongly for such evidence being shown, lest they be accused of being a potential predator as well. But we can't just give authorities more power just based on their say-so. Hence, my appreciation for the choice to release some of that material in the article. I'm against more draconian laws, but I do think people should be able to make up their own minds, and the discussions we have about those issues should be more open.
This nicely shows that they don't need more surveillance. A simple honey trap appears to fill up like a bug zapper tray in Mississippi in July.
No dark web, no Hollywood hacker shit. Just go on social media and pretend to be a pretty underage girl and fish meet barrel. These days you could automate this with a good adversarial neural net (including image generation!) that would engage predators and let them incriminate themselves.
The authorities don't do this because they don't really care. Child abuse is a political dog whistle but it's not a real priority. As with many child care issues there is an unspoken classism at work too: that only happens to the children of less responsible lower class people (which is false).
> As with many child care issues there is an unspoken classism at work too: that only happens to the children of less responsible lower class people (which is false)
This was one of the hard problems about the Rotherham abuse scandal. Many of the victims had been in "care" (ie taken away from abusive parents), and their reports weren't believed. Therefore a substantial grooming ring could be built up. This is why people keep saying "believe victims".
The problem is that with children especially, it’s also not that hard to implant false memories and coach them to not only make false accusations but to actually believe them. This is part of what happened with the whole “Satanic ritual abuse” panic with “repressed memories”.
This is part of why people keep saying, “wait for all the evidence” and “presumed innocent until proved guilty”.
Yes. But in a lot of cases of sexual assault there is only testimony, and the dispute is over whether the activity was consensual or not.
You'd expect this wouldn't apply to child sexual abuse, but you'd be amazed at the number of people who claim the child seduced them and they weren't aware of their age.
The best approach against the "repressed memories" or "why are you reporting this now" is to make it as straightforward and encouraged as possible to report incidents as and when they happen, and collect and process any evidence at the time.
> The best approach against the "repressed memories" or "why are you reporting this now" is to make it as straightforward and encouraged as possible to report incidents as and when they happen, and collect and process any evidence at the time.
After the Cleveland "satanic abuse" scandal (where many children were wrongly removed from their kind and loving parents) the UK implemented wide ranging changes.
These include ABE (achieving best evidence) interview techniques that are designed to get accurate information from witnesses without creating false memories; getting social workers to say "allegation of abuse" and not "disclosure of abuse". http://www.transparencyproject.org.uk/things-children-say-di... and a culture of supporting the victim while providing a robust investigation which holds open the possibility that it's a malicious allegation. I'm not sure they're getting the balance right at the moment, and I think too many victims are not seeing justice.
Police and social workers are in a tricky situation here. Clearly Cleveland was awful and something needed to be done to protect innocent parents and children from the harm of false allegations. But the current rate of conviction for sexual offences is far too low (over 100,000 rapes each year, fewer than 3,000 convictions), and the Rotherham scandal was terrible -- vulnerable children being raped by criminal gangs were assumed to have "chosen" that lifestyle and abandoned by their social workers.
In English law consent still matters unless the child is very young indeed. The imaginary 11 year old in this story would be young enough that it's always rape and if the defence (or more likely the accused personally) tries to bring up consent they'll get shut down by the judge because it's irrelevant. But for a teenager consent matters and a defence barrister would be doing their client a disservice if they didn't seize any opportunity to suggest their client believed there was consent.
It's illegal for an adult to have sex with a 15 year old, but there's considerable gap between the likely tariff for "Had sex with a 15 year old" versus "Rape". The maximum tariff for having sex with a 15 year old is not inconsiderable (14 years) but it's far short of the tariff for rape (life imprisonment).
In the case of a 15 year old either might be plausible for prosecutors depending on what evidence they have. If it's clear there was no consent, it'd always make sense to charge rape regardless of whether they're sure they can persuade a jury the defendant knew the victim was under age - but if consent is tricky, or especially if the victim is prepared to testify for the defence that they consented, then you need solid proof the defendant knew they were under age or it won't go anywhere.
> but if consent is tricky, or especially if the victim is prepared to testify for the defence that they consented, then you need solid proof the defendant knew they were under age or it won't go anywhere.
This last sentence is a bit wrong.
Where the child is under 16 and has not consented the CPS recommend prosecuting for rape because that's a more serious offence. Where the child is under 16 but is "consenting" the offence of rape cannot be proved (because rape requires lack of consent), so the CPS recommend charging for section 9 sexual activity with a child.
> Conversely, when reviewing cases involving children under 16 and 18 prosecutors should select more serious charges involving proof of absence of consent over those contained in sections 9 to 12, where all the elements can be proved. So, for example, section 1 rape should be preferred to section 9 sexual activity with a child under 16 where the elements of rape are satisfied.
That’s true, laws differ on this, and in some cases there is a legal distinction not because statutory rape is OK but because forcible rape is so much worse. In the US, the scenario might be very similar to what you describe except with explicit plea bargaining between the prosecution and defense. In fact the prosecution would probably try to charge forcible rape anyway just so they can negotiate down to statutory rape.
Stings like this are the bread and butter of effective law enforcement. The fact is that the vast majority of criminals are not that hard to outsmart. It turns out that if you’re a master criminal pedophile, even then you don’t waste time with darkweb shit, you just con your way into the inner circles of the powerful and blackmail them into covering for you.
Well since we’re guessing it’s also possible this is the tip of the iceberg and that it’s also possible only amateurs do it in plain sight. I’d imagine agencies who tackle this issue have more insight into that realm than an amateur sleuth of online commenters.
Maybe. Or maybe child molesters, like most criminals, are criminals because they have a pattern of making poor life decisions and hence it’s perfectly normal for them to make “amateur” mistakes.
Or, as Zoz explained in his DEFCON 22 talk "Don't Fuck It Up!"[1], OPSEC is really REALLY hard. Even people that have the necessary technical background are human and make mistakes. To stay secure in the "dark web" you need to never make a mistake and e.g. forget to turn on your VPN/Tor before logging in somewhere important. I doubt anybody - even people that made the "best" life decisions - could do this successfully without a LOT of very specific, very technical training.
>> "OPSEC is a 24/7 job."
>> "... a lot of OPSEC fails ... [from] the folly of only using privacy tools when you’re up to no good."
>> "For example, investigators could look at who went and downloaded the Tor Browser Bundle right before the bomb threat got called in; or look at everyone who connected to a known Tor entry node at that time, or who accessed the Tor directory servers. [...] no compromise of Tor necessary."
Absolutely. I assume that (as horrible as what the people quoted are doing) someone who doesn't predate in the open commits even more disgusting and damaging acts. Given the number of creeps that show up for "level 1" abuse, it seems likely that there are also huge numbers of people doing even worse things.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for pursuing any person who behaves as in the article to the greatest extent possible, but you they have to get IP, dig up the person, contact authorities in that country and hope they do something?
That's a lot of paperwork for maybe something _might_ be done and no one died and no large amount of money went missing (so to speak).
Maybe it's not so much they don't care (most people would care about this no?) and more they are limited in resources (and perhaps motivation) and it is difficult to get results.
If the authorities have cooperation agreements with the other country then often they’ll work together. In Australia the police catch a lot of paedophiles using information supplied by the FBI.
Another reason that the authorities don’t care is that their bosses, the politicians, often partake in child sex abuse as a hobby (cf. Jeffrey Epstein and his very close links to Prince Andrew, his links to Donald Trump, and his acquaintance with Bill Clinton... that’s not all coincidence there).
Popular news stories aren't representative of the real world. There's no sense trying to imagine some cohesive picture of the world from them. It's like somebody discovering a mutant shark with two heads and saying there's less fish in the ocean because sharks have too many heads and are eating more than their fair share!
The constitutionality of such a honeytrap is not exactly clear though since the person isn't trying to molest an actual child. It's a bit like leaving a fake gun on the street and then prosecuting a person who picks it up and tries to shoot somebody for attempted murder. Are you still guilty of a crime if you only think you were going to commit a crime? If someone lies to you that they are allergic to peanuts and you secretly give them peanuts is that attempted murder? If you download a song that you weren't aware is in the public domain, is that attempted copyright infringement?
"It's a bit like leaving a fake gun on the street and then prosecuting a person who picks it up and tries to shoot somebody for attempted murder. Are you still guilty of a crime if you only think you were going to commit a crime? If someone lies to you that they are allergic to peanuts and you secretly give them peanuts is that attempted murder? If you download a song that you weren't aware is in the public domain, is that attempted copyright infringement?"
You bring up an interesting question, but your examples confuse the issue.
In your examples there are always real, intended victims: the person who was being shot at with the fake gun, the person who was being given peanuts, and the copyright holder are all the intended victim (despite the attempts failing due to misconceptions on the part of the perpetator).
In such cases, a better analogy might be to someone trying to rob a bank with a fake (or a broken) gun. It's pretty clear that in such a case they would go to jail for attempted robbery.
However, in the case where an adult pretends to be a child, there's no victim. There's real intent, but the victim is imaginary.
This is similar to laws making it a crime to possess cartoon child porn. Once again, there's no victim.
Attempting to murder someone is still attempted murder, even if it was impossible for the attempt to succeed.
Let’s say you and I both want to kill Bob. I sneak into his bedroom at night and smother him to death with a pillow. Bob is now dead and I sneak away—I have committed murder. Shortly afterwards, you sneak into his bedroom and shoot him multiple times with a gun. In this scenario, you are guilty of attempted murder even though the intended victim was already dead, unbeknownst to you.
Many stings rely on similar principles. People who steal bait cars don’t actually succeed in stealing the car, nor do johns who solicit streetwalking undercover cops succeed in buying sexual favors from them.
So if you paid someone to kill your coworker by casting a magic spell on them you're guilty of conspiracy to commit murder? How about praying for someone to be killed? Quite a few people believe that has a non-zero chance of working.
On an unrelated note, I'm surprised internet pedophiles don't ever say something like "I know you're not really a child but I'm going to pretend you are because that's hot" to create plausible deniability in the event they're not actually talking to a child.
> So if you paid someone to kill your coworker by casting a magic spell on them you're guilty of conspiracy to commit murder?
By matter of pure legality, I suppose it would. In practicality, I doubt you could prove beyond reasonable doubt that such a person genuinely believed that witchcraft was an effective means of committing homicide.
This point is rather academic because any reasonable person believes that propositioning people on the internet who claim to be underage girls is, in fact, an effective method of propositioning underage girls.
That’s true for most crimes. If you sneak into Bob’s bedroom and notice that he is already dead, but shoot his dead body anyway, you’ve technically only committed corpse desecration. (Setting aside the question of why you were sneaking into his bedroom with a loaded gun in the first place.) Intentionality is a central aspect of most crimes—that’s what distinguishes premeditated murder from manslaughter or felony murder.
Not really. The murderer thought they were firing bullets into a live person. The sexual predator thought they were abusing a child. Both were incorrect about their target (dead body, grown adult). It seems to me to be a direct parallel.
Though the better analogy might be: Bob knows that somebody is out to kill him and so he hides at the police station while a cop places a mannequin in his bed and waits in Bob’s closet for the murderer to show up. Or, more commonly, the cop goes undercover and poses as a hit man and gets the murderer on tape contracting the hit. That’s a pretty common sting and people get first degree murder convictions out of it.
> Are you still guilty of a crime if you only think you were going to commit a crime? If someone lies to you that they are allergic to peanuts and you secretly give them peanuts is that attempted murder?
... Yes? Intent matters; why let someone go just because they only tried to commit murder?
> Are you still guilty of a crime if you only think you were going to commit a crime?
I'd argue that it's worth discussing whether it even matters. The goal of the legal system _should_ be to make society safer. Taking a sexual predator off the streets does make society safer, even if they didn't actually commit the crime. They did _try_ to commit the crime; they believed they were committing it.
Admittedly, this falls at least partially into the realm of pre-crime. Is it fair to lock someone up because they are _going_ to commit a crime? It's in the middle ground, because they did believe they were committing the crime. But it's still also very much in the gray area as far as morality is concerned too.
But then the question becomes whether they would have crossed the legal line if it had been an actual child instead of a bot designed to entice them. Maybe a real child would've been more hesitant and made them reconsider their course of action. Maybe a real child would've been genuinely innocent in a way that would've triggered their conscience. I'm not saying that's likely, I'm just saying this is a program designed to turn pedophiles into intended child molesters.
Because criminals are part of society and also need protecting from the government. Without that concept, we'd just have the death penalty for every crime, no matter how minor.
Dependes on the country. In my country, it's not enough to charge someone even if they did think they were talking to a child. But the chance that they can be entrapped like this and get into real trouble as a result, can be enough to scare some people from attempting to do this out of boredom or frustration or whatever.
If the articles claims are true, it would seem to me that even if the recorded conduct wasn't chargeable, it would be probable cause to see their other message history; there's most likely a pattern of behavior if you're surfing newest instagram posters and sending dickpics.
Pretty sure FBI provides fake bombs to would-be terrorists as part of sting operations, which is pretty much your example, so yes, you do charge someone with "attempted" murder.
This is nothing but covert advertising. Almost everyone here seems to have missed this fact. Re-read the 'article' carefully. This text was carefully crafted to go viral by scaring parents.
Again, this is not about a 'police sting' or anything like that. It is about a 'project' (stunt) carried out by a private company that sells software for monitoring kids. The author works for the same company.
The text was certainly crafted to go viral (what in the world is Pete providing security against?), but the claim they're making is still very troubling. If a typical 11 year old girl is getting multiple messages from pedophiles every time she posts a picture on Instagram, that doesn't fit my understanding at all and has very serious implications.
We shouldn't rule out that they're being substantially misleading, but I don't think we should just assume that either.
I find it dubious that each one of them gets over 50 predators attacking them the moment the post a selfie on Instagram. Either a small number of pedophiles would be targeting thousands of kids per hour, or there are millions of pedophiles.
The basic premise of the article rings true (posting selfies on can lead to getting attacked by predators), but the numbers are just ludicrous.
I think you’re right. My intuitive guess of how many teenage kids there are would have been a full order of magnitude lower. At that count, even adjusting for not everyone being on Instagram, I agree there’s no way the numbers can check out.
I think this company is selling panic and hysteria to make a quick buck. The whole thing could well be made up, pure fiction. Their claims aren't worth a discussion.
I don't doubt that this stuff happens. The web is full of filth and excrement. But using the language of moral panic to sell a dubious service is just crass.
If we must wade into the debate about whether kids should have access to it, my answer would be a resounding no. I know of ten year old girls with smartphones. I try to tell people that those things are portals to hell, and they look at me like I have two heads.
The web has morphed into a raging monster, and 'mobile devices' are the devil incarnate.
We should step back from the abyss, or at least refrain from looking into it, lest we discover that we are but monsters ourselves, and the abyss is only a mirror.
Yeah, I have trouble believing this article isn't quite a lot of fiction. If trapping pedophiles is this easy, the police need to get off their asses and do their damn job.
The fact that it takes three letter agencies multiple years and inter-country coordination tells me that it isn't quite this simple.
I don't think anyone is missing it, it's just that it's too obvious to warrant discussion (they article does not try to hide that) and beside the point unless your specific allegation is not that it's advertising, but that it's fabricated.
That's deeply upsetting. For those readers who haven't read the article but were considering it, I suggest you skip it if you've been the victim of sexual abuse.
I wish I could say something constructive, something about a panacea or partial solution to what this woman experiences while posing as a child. I know that VPNs, Tor, Proxies and the like will hide the determined, but I wish that something could be done about this.
Oh, and for those of you who may feel the need to say "don't let kids on the internet". That's almost impossible to enforce. Kids visit other kids houses, sleepovers, libraries, schools, etc etc. They get exposed to this stuff and it's horrible.
Pioneers in the wilderness told their kids about mountain lions, bears, and wolves. We have to tell our kids about this. We can't helicopter them 24/7, especially as they approach their teens.
I think this is qualitatively different than environmental hazards. This is other people, maliciously intruding into kids lives and attacking them. It's less like wolves than it is like an enemy tribe, nation, or army intent on attacking defenseless people.
You are right that it is qualitatively different, and I think this makes it more relevant.
The biggest predator of humans is humans. If we wander around being naive about this fact and acting like it is an outlier, or an exception, we can't deal with it realistically ... we fail to take precautions and then emotionally overreact when we are wronged.
That's alarming. Things are way worse than when I grew up using the internet in the late 90s and early aughts. The worst things I can remember were getting GNAA spam on my Xanga blog at 12 years old and later on the usual Omegle and Chat Roulette exhibitionism; gross, offensive, but easy enough to dismiss and move on. I can recall being solicited for nudes by a much older man at age 16 over IRC but I was old enough to know to just block the creep and move on. Clearly social media has magnified the issue to far more dangerous levels and lets predators find the easiest targets.
When I was young, I was cautioned against giving away personal information like my age or any personal photos. What happened to that mindset?
Obviously, nobody should let their 11 year old child make an instagram account. It isn't even permitted by the terms of service.
I grew up using internet with zero parental supervision, but there's no way I could do the same with my kids until they're at least 16 and capable of recognizing danger. Hell, you can get into plenty of trouble on the internet at age 16 too. Social media has made the internet a worse place.
> When I was young, I was cautioned against giving away personal information like my age or any personal photos. What happened to that mindset?
Seemed to me to happen right around when Facebook got popular. When it was college-only a real identity didn't seem that big a deal, since you were linked with people you already kind-of had access to, and anyone who could see who you were you could also see who they were. But then when it went public the dam broke - hundreds of thousands of people suddenly unmasked on the public internet.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
In general, you're using loaded terms that continue the conflation - eg "predator" and "pedophile". Someone looking at child pornography is not a "predator". And someone who is generally attracted to women but tries to chat sexually with 11 year olds because they make for easy targets isn't necessarily a "pedophile".
The point isn't pedantry or to defend any of these people, but rather to avoid succumbing to too-easy explanations. For instance, your mentioning of "image hashes" in response to the topic of "protecting children". Instagram certainly loves that narrative, but it doesn't actually address the topic at hand.
> Why should the only acceptable solution be society retreating behind walled gardens
For the same reason that dropping your kids off in the middle of a city doesn't make for daycare. Greater society inherently involves being robust to normalized ever-present abuse (eg advertising, for one), which requires adult maturity.
All the dialogs in the article are creepy as fuck, but half of them were ultimately just conversation and will likely ignored by law enforcement as inactionable. If you want to prevent those conversations, the only way is to drastically reduce the scope, eg a heavily-curated playground.
The dialogues in the article included people sending dick pics to a person they thought was an 11-year-old child. I’m sure that the lack of a ‘real’ victim is a problem in some countries, but this kind of offending is regularly prosecuted in Australia.
I wasn't putting that behavior in the category of "inactionable"! I had also thought there were more discrete conversations, but rereading it's really excerpts all from (presumably) the worst one. But, the article does provide its own accounting:
> text-chatted with 17 men ... and seen the genitalia of 11 of those
So even though two thirds are doing something that could be straightforwardly prosecuted, it seems like one third are still abusive in some way that isn't necessarily easy to write into law, especially one that won't be worked around.
FWIW "regularly prosecuted" doesn't necessarily mean that the chance of an individual prosecution is high!
Absolutely. The people who get caught doing this stuff generally haven’t done much to conceal their identity and get caught with evidence of other unreported offences on their computers. It’s horrifying to think about what the sophisticated ones might be getting away with.
I overlooked the word ‘half’ in your original comment and brought up the dick pics because they make the crime so easy to prove. I’d say all of the conversations were illegal grooming, but it’s harder to prove that the person had the necessary intent when the conversation isn’t explicitly sexual.
I went into the article expecting it to look like the old To Catch a Predator TV show, which really bordered on entrapment in many cases, trying to make good TV happen, but that isn't the case here at all. They just put up an innocent profile and were immediately bombarded. Good stuff.
Using these chats to train machine learning corpus on child grooming is a great idea too. Social networks could use that data trivially and at very low cost by having parents opt-in to having their childrens' communications automatically monitored and alerting the parents when a conversation trips a threshold.
You've got to figure anyone harassing children on open channels isn't exactly a master criminal and will get caught sooner or later anyway. But harm done is substantial so you want it to be sooner, not later.
Note, though, that the author's company does sell online child safety as their main product. I'm not saying I think they played any particular tricks, but... I dunno, To Catch a Predator made it sound like they just put up innocent profiles too.
If that data ends up being their real product entrapping people like the TV show would be counterproductive, so the incentives are right. Hopefully the work in the article is representative of what they're actually doing.
This is disturbing on so many levels. I can't even begin to understand how disturbed one must be to be willing to do something like that.
A fair warning to those who haven't read the article yet but are planning to: Be warned that it contains very explicit elements, not for the feeble of heart.
I was reading a story a while ago (I don't recall enough about it to even search to provide a link) that talked to some pedophiles. Specifically, people who had the urge to interact sexually with young people. It talked about how some of them knew this was a bad urge and acted to counter it. One of the ways they did that was to get hold of fictional child pornography (stories, drawings, animations, etc). This allowed them to feed their urge without hurting anyone.
The idea behind the disucssion/story was that pedophilia (the desire) is a condition (like any other we treat; alcoholism, depression, etc). Treating it like that, looking for ways with the urge to avoid hurting people, was a reasonable approach. It was argued that making such fictional items illegal hurt, rather than helped, children; because it took away non-harmful outlets for the desires.
The thing is that the catharsis theory, that is, the theory that providing harmless "outlets" is a way to manage the desire, is not supported by any evidence. On the other hand, Patrick Galbraith has done work with Japanese fictional child porn communities and found that the communities tend to strike a very powerful distinction between real desire and fictional desire. They just don't view real children in the same "space", mentally, as fictional children in pornographic comic books.
Yeah... I can't finish this. It's... too much. I'm glad that there are people who can work with law enforcement to help get these people off of the internet, but I couldn't do it.
Having skimmed the article, I'm increasingly convinced that the perpetrators of this sort of online "grooming" are largely sociopaths/psychopaths/dark triad personalities. The whole M.O. seems to fit that characterization quite closely, AFAICT. It's very helpful to have these chat logs to look at even though they're so disturbing, it lets us know more about what makes these folks tick and how they arrange their predatory activities.
I'm specifically talking about the grooming and manipulation. That's precisely the sort of stuff sociopaths and psychopaths do as a matter of course. People who are just looking for a sexual "thrill" of sorts, by and large, don't engage in predatory behavior especially not of this disturbing sort.
Sure they do. Try putting a fake attractive female 18+ year old profile up on Instagram, you'll get bombarded by predators and dick pics there too. Just not _child_ predators. Many men act monstrously on the internet, but that doesn't make them psychopaths, just losers. Something about the distance makes that sort of behavior more palatable to them.
How many of them will try to "groom" you like we see in the article, though? I'd argue that there is a qualitative difference between that and "losers" just trying to engage someone who's also unambiguously of age.
Imagine you're the sort of guy to slip into the DMs of a random hot of-age woman and she actually replies and engages you in conversation.
"Grooming" is nothing more than establishing a relationship and rapport with the aim being naked pics and ultimately in-person sex. The difference is the target here is a child, and thus more easily manipulated.
Just ask any of your attractive of-age female friends how many times they get harassed on social media by random guys they don't know if they have their DMs open. Which they probably don't.
My point is these people are acting like many horny guys on the internet. The difference is their targets are kids, but that doesn't make them psychopaths, it makes them pedophiles.
I find it quite horrifying that you’d read an article containing a description of an adult man literally teaching an 11-year-old what a blowjob is, after she told him she didn’t know, and follow that up with “meh, grooming is the same thing as Instagram courtship just like your attractive female friends experience, no psychopathy here.”
You don’t know what grooming is. Grooming is taking a kid to get ice cream for years while laying the groundwork for what you have in mind. The article shows clear grooming attempts on an accelerated timeframe. Please don’t ever speak about grooming authoritatively again, especially when others in this audience have been groomed.
If you're a horny guy on the Internet and your preferred Instagram quasi-celebrity "actually replies and engages you in conversation", you almost won't believe your luck. Even if you aren't that horny anymore, you probably will want to engage her right back - who wouldn't? The "horny guys" theory explains the initial DM, but no such explanation whatsoever is needed for what you call "grooming" that hot Instagram influencer you happen to be a fan of. A significant difference that involves far more than just your chosen "target".
> Baby. They keep calling her baby without an ounce of irony.
That is absolutely disgusting. It is heart wrenching and stomach turning to read this exchange of messages. I guess I knew this kind of stuff happens but to have it right in your face and read it; it is almost surreal that people are this depraved.
Is there any independent verification of any of the claims of this article?
I am well aware that terrible stuff happens on the World Wide Web and it may well be that Bark was legitimately founded to stop that stuff, but as a natural skeptic I'm at least a tad concerned that this is self-published by a company that sells a service to catch these kinds of activities.
Were there no journalists interested in covering this story?
I haven’t seen anyone independently verify this article specifically, but it seems pretty consistent with the reporting the New York Times has been doing on this issue over the last few months, notably this article which I think was pretty popular on HN: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
If you want to verify their claims, then perhaps you could contact the company and ask for the court cases they have been involved in. Those will be public records.
Here's a funny idea. How much is children's psychological damage from exposure to sexual ideas and images innate, and how much is cultural? Taboos about body parts don't seem to be entirely universal. I wonder if we could solve all child sexual abuse "simply" by treating sex as being as natural and harmless as eating food, which is also a very intimate and vulnerable activity that people have strong desires for. Are humans really wired to emotionally self-destruct as a result of experiencing the wrong kind of sexual behavior, or do we do it because of societal pressure?
The revulsion that people experiencing true homophobia have towards gays looks a lot like the revulsion many people here are expressing about pedophilia. The justifications are a little different, but the emotions look similar. It's nothing like the feelings people have towards objectively worse things like death. They talk about car accidents, disease, and even murder without that sense of disgust.
On the one hand, you're not wrong in that we exacerbate the psychological damage to victims of abuse by our treatment of sexuality, and we do so on many levels. Part of the reason why victims feel so much shame about what they've been through is because we go out of our way to treat it as shameful.
But that's not the scary thing here in the least; the scary thing is how absurdly many of these men are immediately and overtly predatory towards someone they evidently clearly perceive as being a target for manipulation. They contacted her unbidden for the sole purpose of getting sexual gratification out of an individual who they knew was at a disadvantage to them. What are the cultural roots driving this behavior? What does it say about the perception of sex we're engendering in these men that they're so driven to express their sexual will on someone they perceive as vulnerable? These could never constitute a healthy sexual interaction, they are compulsively extractive and impersonal.
I'd argue the real damage that our society does is foster in people an addictive appetite for exploitation and satisfaction through the expression of power over others. No doubt, for these men these young children don't register in their minds as human beings, but as valued objects they can attempt to have control over.
How deeply fucked up are we as a society that hordes of men seek sexual satisfaction through that kind of dynamic? What did we do to them to generate a pathological craving to dominate and feel power?
I'd argue that perhaps this is just what a society based around hierarchies does.
Women just have to learn to deal with such men. As the current top comment says, she was first cat called at age 6. So women learn early that there are men after them.
I don't mean it as victim blaming or shrugging it off, either. It is in a way a sad fact of life. On the other hand, I personally think there is too much emphasis on the downside of being attractive, and not a lot on the upside.
Personally, to be honest, I also think about a rich white woman walking through a poor village in a third world country. She'll be swarmed by beggars, but is she really oppressed?
As another commentator answered, men typically experience nothing of that. Zero, zilch, nada - no interest by other people at all. I am not convinced that is the better side of the deal. The usual comment will be "talk to women" - I have talked to women who would be bothered if nobody would notice them on the street. So there is that.
To point to another example: we learn to lock our doors, don't show our valuables around, and so on. Not because everybody else is a thief, but because a few people are thieves after our valuables. It sucks, but outrage about it doesn't really help against it. Not do draconian laws, it seems.
On the internet, there are presumably over 3 billion people, so if you are fishing for predators, you can easily attract some, even if their general prevalence in the population is low. Even a "horde" would be few in relation to the several billion total.
Another issue, of course, is how to explain it to young girls. I am really not sure what to tell my daughter yet.
You're not even considering the idea it could be different. Many people have lived in communities where they don't lock their doors because they were actually able to trust the people around them.
You realize that it is the disparity itself that creates such incentives to harm each other? The rich woman is an apt comparison, because I think the extreme stratification of society is a large part of what creates this incentive to prey. Women are still today decisively limited in their access to wealth and power unless they appeal to powerful men, which is the attention they want. Most men don't get any attention because they are of relatively little worth compared to the rich and powerful, likewise their sense of the worth of women is warped and judged by the standards of the rich and in their desperation to feel powerful they prey upon women they think meet those standards. It's disgusting on every level for everyone involved except the most powerful men, the ones who sit atop the pyramid. Does this sound just?
> You're not even considering the idea it could be different. Many people have lived in communities where they don't lock their doors because they were actually able to trust the people around them.
The trust in these tightly-knit communities is generally maintained by driving off predatory and criminal folks, and/or by harshly and promptly retaliating against them should anyone be victimized. Unfortunately, this is not something that can work beyond the scale of a fairly small town or perhaps a "gated" neighborhood in a larger city.
I disagree completely, trust is rare in gated communities and police states. The more harshly the law is enforced, the more clear the sign that people do not trust each other to follow it. Trust is most easily maintained by people simply having no need to steal because there is nothing they want more than they want the trust and respect of the people around them. Why would I steal from you if you're no richer than I am and I know you'd help me in my time of need if it came? Society starts to break down when there come to be things that people view as more valuable to them than each other's good will and friendship.
That is to say, trust is only possible under conditions of equality.
Whenever the talk comes to equality and so on, I actually do think about women, or mating partners in general. While you could perhaps try to distribute property to everybody in equal amounts, so that (in your theory) nobody would have a reason to steal anymore, what about mating partners?
It seems some socialist communities actually tried to make it mandatory for women to sleep with everybody, but I don't think that is a good solution (not sure if that needs to be discussed).
So mating partners to me show that that equality in society you describe is not really attainable.
And even if everybody would own the same things, it wouldn't imply that nobody would want other people's things. If you would steal stuff from somebody else, you would still have more things than before.
I also don't think it is generally true that only poor people steal. Many criminals seem to become rich and they don't change their mind afterwards.
And there would be all the other issues with socialism - some people would work more, some would work less, yet all would get the same things. That would be another recipe for dissatisfaction and social unrest.
Your story of "men preying on women that fulfill the standards of the rich" also doesn't ring true to me. Why would non-rich men find other things attractive about women than rich men? And why can't they have normal relationships with women, why is it preying if a poor man contacts a woman? It is also definitely not true that women depend on men to make a living these days.
Of course you can consider the long-term effects of whatever morals you want to instill in society. For example Christianity seems to have done quite well with their monogamy mandate, providing most people with a mating partner. In reality, presumably the few attractive men and women would be happier if the attractive men could mate with several women, and the women could get to only mate with the most attractive men. It would just leave many men (the majority) in the dust, again causing social unrest. Other societies try that model, and have problems of their own.
What is attractive in society is always aligned to the values of that society. Contrary to what evopscyh would have you believe, there is massive cultural variation in the standards of attractiveness. Wealth inequality itself is the most massive driver of inequality in partner selection; the entire reason a mandate to monogamy exists is because there is a huge incentive for all partners to flock to the richest person. If we lacked wealth inequality, we would have far less inequality in the factors of attractiveness, and less sensitivity to those factors which still existed. Being attractive in modern society is an incredibly time and resource intensive activity, and is composed of far more than raw genetics. And even then, those genetic traits are weighted in value by society. The reason all of this takes on so much importance for us is explicitly because we are constantly awash in the act of competition to climb the socioeconomic hierarchy.
I don't think that is true at all. If wealth was taken away, physical attributes would simply become more important.
It's true that culture has effects on what is considered attractive. That doesn't mean it is arbitrary, though. And I don't think any culture managed to make unhealthy people attractive, for example.
It's pretty common for societies to do exactly that. For example, if you look at the descriptions of beautiful women in the Victorian society, it overlaps pretty well with the symptoms of tuberculosis - obsession with unhealthy levels of thinness, or pale translucent skin.
And whenever you look at what underpins it, it almost always has to do with class and wealth - basically, physical traits that correlate with lack of need to perform hard menial work become a mark of belonging to the upper class. Better yet when it's physical traits that make it impossible to perform such work from birth, or close to it. When they didn't exist, they would sometimes be invented, such as foot binding.
All explained by signalling theory - signalling status, which is useful for survival of offspring. That's what I mean by it isn't arbitrary. And it isn't all about wealth, either. Walking in high heels proves a certain level of fitness, for example.
And most things that are seen as attractive in women are simply signals of youth, as young women can have more children than old women. You can't remove that with socialism.
As for descriptions of women in Victorian society, they may just be caricatures, or something like modern fashion photography might be going on - the women displayed in fashion photography (artificially thinned) are not actually the ones men find the most attractive. It might be more of an intersexual competition between women. And again status - in our world thinness proves status, because it is difficult to be thin. In scarcity worlds, some fatness proves you are rich and can afford to eat.
(Peacocks signal with their tails that they are healthy and strong, even though they have no society they live in, so no inequality and class struggles).
> (Peacocks signal with their tails that they are healthy and strong, even though they have no society they live in, so no inequality and class struggles).
And yet many animals have very little sexual dimorphism and exhibit very little sexual competition or selectiveness, so it would clearly seem to be a result of their evolutionary niche or environmental factors that lead to one behavior or the other. The most common example being the differences in form/behavior between the chimpanzee and the bonobo. The difference being that the bonobos live in relative abundance because they are not subject to competition with the gorillas. Likewise if humans did not face the intense artificial scarcity imposed upon us by strict social hierarchy and economic inequality, we might see our society shape itself much more like bonobos than chimpanzees.
> How deeply fucked up are we as a society that hordes of men seek sexual satisfaction through that kind of dynamic? What did we do to them to generate a pathological craving to dominate and feel power?
Maybe they’re just a small minority of psychopaths that have always existed, and the internet has made it easier to trick them into revealing their true nature and produce objective evidence of it.
> How much is children's psychological damage from exposure to sexual ideas and images innate, and how much is cultural?
I'm not actually convinced there is any damage.
Dunno, around where I lived, every kid in school knew what sex is by the age of 10-12, boys probably had found porn magazines in the woods, and would've been excited if some older lady with actual boobs sent them nudes through a computer.
I think parents are way more shocked and traumatized than their kids are.
It seems to affect different people differently. Some commit suicide and blame their childhood abuse so it was probably bad for them (or they were led to believe it was bad). But perhaps those severe cases also had severe psychological and/or physical abuse or neglect. The sexual aspect gets adults all angry but those other things are extremely common and usually perfectly legal while also ruining people's lives.
Some psycologists have looked into this. There are/were societies that treated sex as natural, even between children (not between adults and children though), but they did not have the level of technological development we do today. I have no desire to research any further into it.
tl;dr: there are people starting conversations with accounts that clearly seem to be childrens' on Instagram, sending unsolicited and very sexually explicit content, and basically openly requesting CP.
This is serious and naturally the extreme proposed solutions are all flawed, yet we as a society ought to spend more energy managing and ultimately solving this. (Education of kids about exploitation, better tech solutions to prevent these messages reaching them - reputation systems on social media sites - for establishing contactability for both senders and recipients. Long term probably some serious genetic engineering to make consentability a must for sexual attraction, and whatever out of the box ideas are out there.)
Just a feedback. Your TLDR is ambiguous about whose account clearly seems to be childrens'. I took the wrong meaning from it at first and thought you meant the fake children were sending things.
Kind of fascinating that private companies are operating stings
I don't have a clear opinion on the validity of a sting as an argument, but I suspect every large platform with a crime or fraud problem is doing some kind of counterintelligence work.
This phenomena is so common it makes me think the educational system can do more.
I somehow feel that many of those guys have severe distortion of reality.
Like they are completely unaware they are doing something wrong.
I mean it may sound odd, but in addition to protect children and catch predictors (important),
we may talk about this stuff in schools and prevent those guys from becoming predators.
There is something about the online world that blurs red lines.
p.s having said that, this post is beneficial from educational perspective partly because it is explicit and disturbing. It shows exactly what it is we as society want to uproot.
You think this hasn't been tried? These guys are not like you or me, they are severely lacking in empathy. They feel no aversion whatsoever to engaging in predatory behavior on fellow humans, including kids, as a matter of basic temperament. You can prevent them from becoming predators only by providing clear consequences for such behavior, and an appealing alternative for them to choose instead. (The latter is why smart people don't tend to become predators of this sort - they have other ambitions, whatever those might be.)
Sorry to hijack the thread: I read all the dialogs there but did not feel disturbed or upset or anything, really. Should I be worried? Should I check doctor? Or will it come naturally later when (if) I have my own kids?
You probably have an understanding that the world has always been full of predators and that children shouldn't be having conversations with random strangers, so there's nothing for you to be shocked about. We were told not to do that as kids, but today we're handing children the keys to adulthood by giving them iPads not even before they're a year old.
The fact that there are people preying on children over the internet is disturbing, but I don't find it surprising. I'm not upset in the visceral sense because I can't keep that feeling up for something that has been a matter of fact about the world since time immemorial.
The fact that you are posting this suggests your ethics are good.
The way people engage ethical questions is very complex. One way of looking at this is along the emotion vs. logic spectrum. Both strategies work, but have different advantages and require different feedback loops to improve. But it is our collective responsibility to engage those feedback loops as much as possible (which you're doing by your posting, which I think took courage).
On this particular issue it seems you're more towards the logic end. That's fine. If that makes you uncomfortable, that's ok. Dig a little but don't judge yourself - this only hurts the process.
At the end of the day, in the words of Batman: "It's not who you are that defines you, it's what you do."
Edit, for anecdata: I lost a parent to disease early in life, and it took me years to come to terms with the fact that I very rarely feel any emotion about it. Interestingly, I find my reaction changed with age.
You either are worried or not. Being worried about not being worried is a bit too meta. :)
I'm not that worried either. This issue is already being discussed quite widely, children will get educated, etc.
Naked/sexual images aspect doesn't disturb me much, what disturbs me is the manipulation/secrecy/blackmail aspect, and attempts at real life contact. Both is hopefully preventible with educating children on how to treat the internet, and how to keep their privacy, and how to recognize danger and deal with it. Newer generations of parents will have more clue about this, and will be able to prepare their children for this better.
From what I've heard so far about the issue, and given how widespread this is, I have a theory that children get targeted more, simply because they are more likely to give attention to people giving them some attention and simple adoration.
If you worried about everything that didn't affect you, then you would need to see a doctor because basically at that point you shut down.
There are an infinite number of things in the world that are troublesome, that don't affect you. You do not want to let it take over your life. I have a friend with severe anxiety and he worries over everything that doesn't involve him or that is inconsequential. He is absolutely miserable because of it. You do not want to be like that.
No. You are normal. Not everybody reacts the same, modern humans have been in the planet for 250k years facing wars, devastation, famine, lynching , rape, murder, etc and they have always prevailed. Nature does not have trigger warnings or jazz hands.
If all of Bob's friends were disgusted by a video of a kitten being killed and thought the killer was a monster, but Bob was indifferent to the video, Bob might wonder if he was somehow more like the killer than any of his friends, and perhaps worry about that instead.
This is what Facebook (or other social media) "connecting people" also means in practice. You get children connected to whoever wants to chat with them online.
The Facebook will even helpfully provide you with the closest children around you, and help you infiltrate large groups of children, just by sending a few invites around, and being lucky to hit a few that will accept your invitation mindlessly. Then you'll get much easier way into their social circle, and easier time getting accepted by others in the social graph.
Honestly, this article is a disgusting sales pitch for AI snake oil, using child abuse as a marketing ploy. Everything triggers my bullshit detectors. Even the comments below the article read all the same, like this is some amateur PR stunt. A ML system that can dectect nuances in social interaction? Sure, that'll work... not! Just pay some private company money to monitor everything a child or teenager communicates, that potentially saves sensitive information and that might be breached one day? Whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
Listen, I know online grooming is a problem that might be as prevalent as abuse in the immediate family, and I'd like to prevent this as much as anyone. But some cyber-bullshit company writing tear jerking marketing articles and its own comments below on the back of abuse victims isn't going to help.
On the face of it this isn't a section 230 issue because nobody published anything illegal (CDA doesn't apply to private chats). But actually it is -- I suspect there's a COPPA violation in here. The platform could be a defendant in these actions if not for the exemption.
SESTA doesn't help here because of 'knowingly'.
I buy the argument that 'without section 230, ISPs wouldn't exist.' I hate my ISPs specifically but in general I think internet access is a social good.
But I don't feel the same way about instagram, or even the AOLs and compuserves that existed when this law passed. Rewrite this so that it protects ISPs but not social platforms. 'Without this exemption, FB has to charge its users so they can afford moderation' is a fine compromise for me.
> But I don't feel the same way about instagram, or even the AOLs and compuserves that existed when this law passed. Rewrite this so that it protects ISPs but not social platforms. 'Without this exemption, FB has to charge its users so they can afford moderation' is a fine compromise for me.
You want some faceless moderator at Facebook/Google to read all your private messages and look at all your stuff? I don't think you've thought this through.
This isn't about DMs. CDA / 230 doesn't apply to DMs. It's about the hypothetically COPPA-violating public account created by an under-13 minor. The original photo in the sting wasn't a DM, I assume it was posted publicly.
Shame should be a key element in combating this behavior. The guy from this article shouldn't have his username or profile pic pixelated, we should be able to see exactly who this is.
I wonder how many of these predators are getting off as much on the virtual corruption of some negligent parent's innocent offspring as they are a sexual attraction children.
If the perps are sociopathic/psychopathic/etc. we can definitely expect that to be a major factor. Sociopaths look for weak, vulnerable people that they can easily manipulate and exert some sort of power on, and kids fit that description quite closely. "Sexual attraction" in its everyday sense would be quite secondary.
Holy crap, that was much worse than I expected seeing the title.
Ok, so suddenly I want to say we should have no internet social media for kids. Also, internet drivers license so we can trace all these men and go arrest them and put them on a list.
A teen boy in my family had some adult man in another state sending him presents and inviting him to come visit. The mother thought it was not a problem. The father was pretty sure it was bad. I eventually convinced both of them they needed to shut this down and make sure the boy understood he was being groomed. So I know this happens. But it wasn't anything near as bad as the article describes what happens to girls.
Are you certain? Medium has started putting blogs behind their paywall by default, and authors are generally unaware of that. Most recently, I had to notify Google Design to remove the paywall.
Edit: Can someone paste the whole article? As a parent of 9 and 7 year old girls, I'd like to know what platforms to be weary of. There's no way we'll be letting them have public social media accounts for a very long time.
They only talk about Instagram in the article. It’s an ad for the service they run, so there’s not much info besides “this horrible thing happens regularly, we’re working on it.”
Honestly you should be worried about all platforms. This article applies to abuse on Instagram but this is not the only problem and not single platform. If it comes to Instagram IT was the first place where i noticed how dangerous social media can be. It was not so popular like now and it was not "as safe" as now. Some years ago i have seen a lots of posts with photos of people cutting hands. It was extremly disturbing. My advice is to educate and keep away children from social media as much as possible. This is a tip of an iceberg how it can destroy young lives
I'm perhaps going to hit a soft spot here, but parents need to take serious responsibility for their children.
Home school the children!
Take control of the Internet (firewall and DNS) and don't allow access to social media or a smart phone until appropriate age.
Teach the children about these problematic issues so they actually understands why they can't have free access to a smart phone, and what's really bad about the Internet. Make them understand these issues!
Make contact to other people who do the same and let the children's social contacts be with like minded people in real life.
We, and several other families, have done that, and are still doing it, with great success.
