Meta axes head of global community development embroiled in underage sex sting | Hacker News Reader

Meta axes head of global community development embroiled in underage sex sting

techcrunch.com

118 pointsspenvo66 comments

The article tries to make the story all about Facebook, when it basically just boils down to the fact that a (alleged, there is still due process required) pervert worked there. They didn't know about him, they weren't harboring him or anything, it's just a low level employee doing something inappropriate.

The head of global community development is a low level employee?

> The head of global community development

The article says "a head", not "the head", and refers to him as "manager of global community development".

Of course I can't confirm this, but on one of the big Reddit threads on this topic an anonymous user claimed to be a Meta employee and looked this fella up, he managed 10 people. Just a low level people manager.

10 direct reports is very different from total downstream people. Feels unclear still

A manager of community development isn't even necessarily a people manager. That said, other people with a similar title at Facebook on LinkedIn do seem to be fairly experienced (although not really senior) so they may very well manage people.

I glanced through a cache of his twitter account. I would expect important industry leaders with twitter accounts would have larger following. I don't think this was a high level roll like the article described.

I'm not clear that somebody's ability to make funny tweets has a relation to their importance to a company or industry

Not every leader does things through the internet friend.

Probably, in much the same way as a vice president is a low level employee at Goldman Sachs. "Global community development" sounds to me like a team that was named to sound impressive, not a team that actually determines Facebook's global priorities.

Banking is a bad example. Anyone with 2+ years of experience gets a VP title.

That’s not very far off from how it works in this kind of subspecialty. Google had a controversy last year involving their “Global Lead for Diversity Strategy and Research”, who seems to have been just a random IC with no particular authority.

I made an assumption based on "manager" as his title. Usually they is way down in the hierarchy for big companies, I could be wrong in this case

title inflation. Banks have thousands of VPs

I am a numbers guy. How many bank VP is a kiddy diddler? I would venture, quite a bit.

true but its not exactly the first time :

https://www.polygon.com/2016/12/27/14088862/cops-arrest-ocul...

FB has 72000 employees and many more former employees, so if this was the first time it would be miracle.

Is there any large company without bad people? There was a guy on my floor that was fired when he was busted by the police for child porn. I didn’t know him, but I have to assume he isn’t the only one at a company with tens of thousands of employees.

There was a somone at a defense contractor here in Cincinnati that piled a bunch of amunition in a wastebasket and set it on fire, hoping to cause a chaotic explosion. He felt bad and went screaming for everyone to leave the building after he lit the fire. Nice guy. Building was ruined. He got four years for it.

metamate pervert.

> doing something inappropriate

Accused of something inappropriate, but summarily fired anyway.

Well if we're being pedantic, he also admitted to that inappropriate (and illegal) act, which happens to be involving a child.

> (alleged, there is still due process required)

He literally admits to it on the video.

Admitted, not alleged. Leave due process to the courts.

I have seen the video (or parts of it) and it's hard to imagine how he could not be considered guilty. On the other hand, determining the innocence or guilt of a person based on videos from vigilante groups who have a huge incentive to produce dramatic videos makes me incredibly, incredibly uncomfortable.

Wanna link to the juicy parts?

Embrace the drama.

EDIT: 40m32s is so damning. https://youtu.be/XDbMDy2e44w#t=40m32s

I’m amazed how stupid he is for not shutting up and walking out the door.

Highlights are here

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1494455923049390080

The interrogators are pretty slick at this, and this is clearly not their first rodeo. The way you stop someone from walking out the door is you pretend that if they cooperate with you, you will help them out and contain this issue; if they don't cooperate with you then their life is ruined. You can see this from the good cop/bad cop routine they have setup between the man and the woman [1]

Once you're caught as a pedophile who is lured into a hotel room with walls of text worth of conversations, you're basically done. At that point in your mind you're praying that the person who caught you doesn't disclose this to everyone, your job, your partner, your family, etc... You are praying that there is some way to contain this issue and get some help, and the good cop interrogator gives you some hope that she will help you contain it and that while she thinks what you did is disgusting, she can help get you out of the worst of it if only you cooperate and do what she tells you.

Of course in reality it's not like these interrogators are good guys themselves and this entire thing is being streamed to Twitch in real time. The whole thing is just a crappy mess.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_cop/bad_cop

Nice screening process for the company that knows everything about you.

I keep seeing this criticism and I don't get it. Presumably no one knew about his proclivities - not his parents, not his best friend, not his wife (if he had one), no one. It's obviously a very secretive part of his life and it's unreasonable to expect an employer to somehow know this about him.

Meta employes 60,000 people according to a quick google search. I promise you there are plenty of Meta employees who have hobbies and interests the employer doesn't know about.

There aren't 60,000 employees who are the Head of Global Community Development. I'm not sure how far up the org chart that position is but I'm betting it's up in the top 1% of the company. It's not like this is the janitor or the person stocking the supply closet.

So what do you want, Facebook to hire dicks to investigate employees?

In case the downvotes are for language, "dick" is also slang for a detective, sometimes specifically a private investigator[0], which I infer the parent intended in their usage.

Which isn't to say it's never been used in a double entendre with its more common meaning. See, for instance, the theme to Shaft[1].

[0] https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-term-private-dick-for-a-pr...

[1] https://genius.com/Isaac-hayes-theme-from-shaft-lyrics

Slang for a private investigator, in 1940 maybe.

They already do; they've contracts with Pinkertons to undermine union organizing.

You might lose that bet. The article merely describes him as "a manager of global community development".

LMAO

Article - "a manager of"

Headline - "a head of"

HN Title - "head of"

I assume that as your company scales your chances of hiring criminals are about the same as their presence in the population.

anyone have more info on the group that makes these videos ? seems like they make decoy accounts and pretend to be underage targets but would like to learn more about their process: are they legit or would it be equivalent to police entrapment ?

What do you mean legit? Usable in court?

Nothing else is really equivalent to "police entrapment" though. What makes that bad is that it's the police doing it, otherwise it's just asking a favor.

If you can lie your way to getting someone to confess to a crime that's pretty much fine in the legal system, I think. Police do it all the time anyway and not even as some shady thing they have to hide it's just part of the work.

In American jurisprudence, the police can be as deceptive as they want to be in interrogations. They can say that a confederate confessed, that they have evidence, that the victim died or identified the suspect, regardless of the truth of those statements. See the recent Nightingale case, which is hilarious because criminals are idiots.

"""Ferland and Keegan suggested to Nightingale that they potentially had satellite photography of his car at the Millers’ home; had DNA test results showing that Nightingale’s DNA was on a doorknob and a locking mechanism at the Millers’ home, which was significant because it appeared that the last person out had locked the door; had found flakes of Nightingale’s skin on the Millers’ bodies; and had recovered fingerprint or DNA evidence on money that the detectives told Nightingale they had seized from his father. These were “realistic bluffs” and untrue."""

Related: There is always at least one person lying during a polygraph examination.

great question ! i guess i was just wondering how the investigators make sure they aren't creating a situation that wouldn't exist otherwise. i couldn't find much info on the process. is the victim a real underage person ? was the victim already being contacted in a sexual way by this guy before the investigators got involved ?

having seen internet investigators get things wrong before and having an incentive to create the most sensational content possible, i just want to evaluate for myself how careful they are about what they're doing

Fun fact: 99% of the people who think something is entrapment have no idea what "entrapment" means.

If the cops leave a car running with the keys in it, and you steal it, that's not entrapment.

If someone says in a forum "hey I'm 13 and I like dinosaurs" and you start messaging them about touching peepees and such: not entrapment.

The cases involving entrapment and terrorism charges, for example, have been largely bullshit. They'll find someone not-all-there mentally, source a "weapon" for them, groom and coach them, egg them on, hand them plans, etc....that's entrapment.

for sure, thanks for the reply. i meant something like "is the group doing anything to initiate or solicit contact, or a relationship, or do they only create an account and wait?" in your example there seems to be a line between initiating contact and an initiating an illegal act, and i'm curious which side of that line the investigators are on in this case

Here is a good example of legitimate entrapment from my province in Canada, matching your description very closely:

https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/sc/16/14/2016bcsc1404.htm#Bo...

FBI specialty. Illegally survail criminals and then tempt them with a big deal. The entire deal is an orchestrated play by the FBI, the perp did not approach them, the FBI initiates everything from zero to 100% and eggs them on: entrapment.

The entrapment aspect is always left out of the shows/documentaries/news. The media reports only about what the perp did...showing zero FBI context.

Despite them doing this to criminals, I find it disgusting. Rarely mentioned are the innocent lives they trash in the process.

This group is called Predator Catchers Indianapolis. Here's their Facebook page - they seem like an incredibly unprofessional outfit.

https://www.facebook.com/PredatorCatchersIndianapolis/

It sounds like they pose as minors and look for sketchy men to try to set up meets with them. Here's a news article with this quote from a female predator catcher,

> “Basically, I brought you out here ‘cause we know who you are, I’m definitely not 14, you’ve definitely been talking to a decoy,” the woman said while walking with Boyer into the nearby parking lot.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/02/25/indian...

More on their process (and even more detail in the article):

> Here's how it works: Members of these groups create fake, "decoy" dating or social media profiles and, once connected with someone, share their decoy age. The conversation either ends or continues and eventually becomes sexual, Spain and Schmutte said, at which point they'll agree to meet, only to reveal their true identities and confront the person while streaming on Facebook Live.

> Austin Spain looks at his Facebook Messenger inbox on his phone Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. He has two decoy pages that he uses in his search for sexual predators online. > For Spain, it's as easy as creating decoy Facebook pages using photos of adult female friends who he said have given him permission to use their images. One decoy page reviewed by IndyStar shows a young woman who says she's a student at a Bedford high school who likes reading. There's nothing outwardly provocative about the page.

> Spain doesn't send friend requests, he said, nor does he initiate conversations. He lets the requests come to him. When he spoke to IndyStar on Jan. 22, Spain said one of his decoy pages had around 900 pending friend requests. Typically, he sorts through requests and messages, deleting those that are obviously fake or out-of-state. Then, it's just a matter of responding to that first message.

----

To me the people running these groups seem very narcissistic. I have no doubt they think they're doing a good thing, but I am never in favour of vigilante justice.

I think maybe they would be more effective by revealing themselves earlier on and hopefully scaring the offender out of doing what they are doing (I dont really know the psychology of this, I picture there are pathological cases that need real help and won't be deterred anyway and some borderline creeps who just need to be shocked into realizing what they are doing is not cool.) For the latter group, scaring the shit out of them may better serve the actual purpose of deterring crimes against children, vs going all the way to some kind of final sting operation that is only going to marginalize people further and maybe even push them to doing more of this. Unfortunately I think the vigilantes are more about getting a sensational result than actually trying to solve a problem

Yikes, here is that Jeren Miles at an event for the Boys and Girls club[0].

- [0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DyQT5vZUcAAtUDe.jpg

One interesting secondary effect: people are now saying Reddit (the company) is participating in a coverup, even to the extent of deleting accounts. https://twitter.com/simpbloodbath/status/1494464667032252432...

I want to say “I doubt that’s true,” but that’s the thing about propaganda. It’s often hard to tell.

EDIT: it seems true: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrazyFuckingVideos/comments/suq88j/...

Hmm. That’s not a great look. On the other hand, the submitter’s account still seems to be active. Maybe they reversed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/top/ it's literally the #1 video of the day in what I assume is the biggest videos sub; they are probably just removing reposts.

Reddit admins themselves removing reposts? Seems unlikely.

And sure, it’s #1 now. The point was that they were doing this as the story was unfolding.

If you look at the timestamps, there’s a pretty big gap between the one at #1 and the one I linked. It’s pretty strange seeing admins remove a post like this. And a bunch of people are saying they saw the account get suspended.

The video was posted 19 hours ago.

Yep. And the one that was deleted by admins was posted over a day ago.

It now seems at least plausible that someone was trying to wipe this story, and lost.

At the time, users felt frustrated no one was covering this: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrazyFuckingVideos/comments/suq88j/...

Even if this is true, given Reddit's history with the Boston Bombing debacle, I think it's entirely reasonable for the admins to take a hard line against accusations of serious criminal conduct from unknown sources. In any case the video is being widely discussed on Reddit now.

This was my thought: I can see a witch hunt forming from miles away. This guy is not a "public person" and the doxxing and publicising that is happening with this video is crazy.

Sure, pedophilia is terribly wrong, disgusting and illegal. But it's still not clear, apparently the "13 year old kid" was actually the impersonation by the woman doing the interview. And what kind of vigilante "justice" was being shown there... and why the heck put the video out in the wild?

These guys should have gone to the FBI and provide all that information for a serious investigation. Everything else is just uncalled for drama.

You present no evidence that this is true. You just fan the flames of outrage by assuming that a deleted post means a conspiracy. It seems far more likely that it was caught by a spam filter, or by a Reddit mod, or by a Reddit admin who mistook it for actual CP.

The users in that thread are somehow outraged that a breaking news event is not receiving massive worldwide coverage despite a) it not being very important and b) not having a particularly good source.

It literally says "[Removed by Reddit]" and that "Reddit sometimes deletes posts that violate the site's content policy."

I think maybe you're looking at the old version of reddit. On the new version, you can see the admin removal.

Hmm, no, it shows up on the old version too. The reason I posted it is that it's interesting and new; I haven't ever seen Reddit admins manually delete a post before. Certainly not something of this magnitude.

Reading over the content policy, the only rule that seems applicable is "Do not post or encourage the posting of sexual or suggestive content involving minors," or "Respect the privacy of others. Instigating harassment, for example by revealing someone’s personal or confidential information is not allowed." But both of those seem like a stretch.

Well, it seems like he had the right job at Facebook.

Smart move by Meta.

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