13yr old groomed publicly on Twitter and kidnapped, despite chances to stop it
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
I'm both amused and horrified at how open people are about this stuff.
No longer do we have to divine intent from lists of ambiguous red flags, they'll just outright broadcast their proclivities without fear of consequence. I also love the "I'm mentally 13" nonsense from people old enough to know better.
There was a bone-chilling moment when my (very young) kids were playing with toys together and when asked what they were doing, they responded with "role-playing."
I keep seeing reports that online enticement cases sharply increased thanks to COVID. Can't say I'm surprised. Somewhere along the way, [something] got kids to normalize the very verbiage the groomers use to steer online conversations in sexual directions. They can't see it coming.
I don't even try to teach mine to look for warning signs anymore and just tell them to assume everyone on the internet is Philip Garrido escaped from prison.
If this was bone-chilling, I have some bad news: there's a whole genre of "role-playing games" that have been around for decades.
This isn't about role-playing games, it's about the specific term and act of role-playing-- and kids barely out of diapers describing it as such. It used to be the domain of therapists, then pedophiles.
My point was that they were way too young to know what D&D even was, and is a product marketed to boys (up until 5E anyway). Mine were still playing with dolls at the time.
D&D started marketing to women and girls before AD&D/1e, actually, but more to the point, “role-playing” as a term for make-believe play in which one assumes fictional/alternative roles, a usage radiating out to general use fairly directly from both entertainment (CRPG/TTRPG) and therapeutic and educational use of the term.
The idea that “pedophiles” are involved i is such a bizarre (but totally 2020’s, where “pedophiles are the explanation for everything unfamiliar or different from my childhood” seems to be a common and actively propagandized belief) take.
They didn't do a good job of it; modern feminism has a lot to say about the misogyny of the entire franchise. But that's not my fight.
I'm assuming you're defensive as a fan of the genre. I'm coming at this from the investigative/law enforcement side.
You don't have to dig very far in any online enticement/runaway case before you discover something like:
> Both the teen and the Hunter Fox account made frequent references to the online furry community — a group of people who roleplay as anthropomorphized animal characters.
"Role playing" is a common denominator in these cases so frequently it's on most lists of grooming red flags published by every credible international child safety organization, and for good reason. Of all the setups they could use, of all the euphemisms they could use, predators opt to use verbiage this specific like they're all following the same script.
You may not want to discuss the idea of having sex with me (or have any sort of sexual discussion), but if we frame the conversation as roleplay, we can still explore sexual topics-- because it's not actually you and me talking, right? It's just our characters.
It's ChatGPT jailbreaking, done to humans. The disassociation lowers your guard and facilitates activities that you otherwise would not have allowed. Get kids to agree to roleplay, get them to normalize saying and doing shit they're uncomfortable with, and you can gradually push the boundaries to get them to do more things they're not comfortable with. The process is laughably identical.
I like RPGs myself, so I'm not panning them or trying to imply all role-players are pedophiles or trying to instigate the next Satanic Panic, only making the argument that role-playing is frequently abused as a social engineering technique against children (who are generally receptive to "games"). I don't like it any more than you do, but it is what it is.
They didn't do a good job of representing women, at all; they did (for something coming out of the 1970s wargaming community) a phenomenal, awesome, unmatched, beyond anyone’s wildest dreams (especially anyone at TSR) job of marketing to women, and that’s even before (and largely why) they actually started to try.
> modern feminism has a lot to say about the misogyny of the entire franchise.
Sure, though I am not sure how that’s at all germane to the discussion.
> I'm assuming you're defensive as a fan of the genre
You are, of course, free to make any assumptions you’d like.
> You don't have to dig very far in any online enticement/runaway case before you discover something like:
> Both the teen and the Hunter Fox account made frequent references to the online furry community — a group of people who roleplay as anthropomorphized animal characters.
If you “something like” extremely broadly, so it encompasses all kinds of exclusionary subcultures, including fundamentalist religious groups, then true. If you mean it a narrow enough sense that the word “roleplaying” is at all germane, then, you aren’t paying enough attention or are doing it through media that is painting you a highly-selectively filtered picture.
> "Role playing" is a common denominator in these cases so frequently it's on most lists of grooming red flags published by every credible international child safety organization, and for good reason
This is true only in the same sense that “conversation" or ”joking” or “accident” is on those lists for good reason. That is, in the portion of the list of warning signs that describes the sexualization of the relationship, common examples of how the groomer will do this include things like “sexual jokes”, “sexual conversation/roleplay”, “accidentally exposing the child to sexual/pornographic images”, etc.
Neither “conversation, “roleplaying", or “accidents” (either as concepts or words that might be used by a child) are the problem.
> I like RPGs myself, so I'm not panning them or trying to imply all role-players are pedophiles or trying to instigate the next Satanic Panic,
And yet you are taking these exactly as out of context as would be consistent with that.
I think only a small % of parents are aware of the specifics of these kinds of risks.
No one said anything even remotely like that.
> Twenty-five days before the abduction, police sent a search warrant to Twitter to learn more information about the man police believe was grooming the teen. But they misspelled the username.
> When the police corrected the error several weeks later, Twitter did not immediately respond, police said.
> Five days later, the teen was abducted, according to prosecutors and the McConneys.
The parents did their job and gave the child's iPhone to authorities. Authorities followed up and gave information to Twitter then corrected the misspelling and gave that corrected information to Twitter.
Here's more info on Twitter disbanding it's Trust and Safety Council which addressed child exploitation as well as other matters https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-...
And here's an article about layoffs gutting Twitter's Child Safety Team to the point of one person doing said work in the Asia-Pacific region https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-child-sexual-abuse-mater...
That’s not the only responsibility of online services when they know, or reasonably should know, of things like this.
Also, Twitter failed to respond timely to a legal request from law enforcement, so even on that basic level they fell short of their responsibility here.
The odds are low that it will go as far as in the article, thankfully. But children with certain aptitudes and personalities are hard to protect.
(I shouldn’t need to clarify this, but we’ve done everything we can for this kid.)