How Facebook and Instagram became marketplaces for child sex trafficking

None of this is Meta's problem though. Requiring platforms to monitor user activity is unreasonable.

The main issue here is one of education. By 12 years old, a person should have learned enough about sexual exploitation in school that if a stranger asks them for nude photos, they would call the police.

Correct, I cant speak for all the world. In the United States, only a party to a phone conversation may record that call. Some states have stronger requirements than that, requiring all parties to consent.

The phone company can't listen to your phone calls and there is definitely no public expectation or journalists demanding that AT&T and others do something about preventing crimes that used a phone by recording all calls and passing them through a Crime Detector (TM).

Kids are generally monitored in parks and such. You cant easily creep on them without another adult or kid noticing.

And Instagram is like a mall for a predator. Its literally just walls of selfies to anonymously scroll through, and then an instant way to DM anyone you want. Thats not like a park at all.

Incidentally, in the late 20th century we had a moral panic about exactly this fact and stopped letting kids outside the home unsupervised (in the US anyways)

If bad PR was a problem surely you can start by actually actioning reports on obvious cybercrime pages instead of saying that they "reviewed my reports but that none of the groups were found to have violated its standards".

I stand by my argument. That disgusting company doesn't care about crime and malicious activity because it's cheaper to let it happen and simply clean up the few PR incidents with some lies which people (such as you) will happily believe.

It's quite easy to restrict access to kid's devices. We use Google family and the kids all hate us because they have to ask our permission whenever they want to install anything. We also get to see activity reports and we talk to them often about bad people online and why they need to be careful.

I understand you can't monitor a child 24/7, but you can be careful with what devices children have access to and what they can and can't do on those devices.

It's also worth remembering that the criticisms of social networks and calls for more monitoring of private communication can be applied to any crime. Do we want Facebook reporting people who it suspects could be committing a "hate-crime" for example? What about drug users, is that Facebook's responsibility too?

At the end of the day parents have to accept some responsibility to protect their own children. Yes, it's hard to do perfectly, but allowing a 12 yo to use social media then meet up with a stranger they met online seems like a total failure on the parent's part here. It's like letting a 5 year old play outside then once the kid gets hit by a car complaining that the cars are the problem because car manufactures care more about selling transportation devices than protecting kids. If you let your children chat to strangers and meet up with people they don't know then bad stuff will likely happen no matter what form of communication they're using.

That's what happens when parents restrict kids instead of teaching them about the dangers.

>What is odd to me in the story was the absence of a moral compass of the child and lack of knowledge of the internet as a potentially hostile place.

The term I see being used again and again is "grooming". I also saw another story that mentioned one person who was convicted, and reportedly contacted THOUSANDS of children online (using many fake profiles, of course). While most children probably aren't being pulled in, it seems like they're "fishing" for the vulnerable few that they can manipulate into being trafficked.

A public education campaign, especially in schools, could do much to reduce the problem, but still there will always be those children who are vulnerable. We should still try to educate children and parents on the dangers, but like climate change, there is no one solution to the problem.

"A 12yo without a phone is a social pariah."

If I give a kid that young a phone, then I'd probably want it to be a dumb phone, no camera, etc for emergencies only.

They didn't know what they built. And there are no real fixes.

It's your basic jurassic park story.

But the only diff is things scaled so fast, they got the whole world inside the park, before ppl started noticing how dangerous the park is.

All the fixes will be half baked because the park itself is poorly thought out.

What bearing does your question have on what Meta's responsibility is, exactly?

I think this is a fair question. I guess the way I see the difference is that a google/Apple phone is more like a tool (say a hammer) where Meta is providing a public space (like a restaurant or public square). So I think that in real life we would say that a restaurant owner has some duty to prevent their restaurant from being used to kill people/encourage suicide/do sex trafficking, but we wouldn’t ask a hammer manufacturer to police how people use hammers (we still do require some basic things like that the product must be reasonably safe). So I guess the root difference is the difference between a tool and a platform. They both bear some responsibility, but we expect the platform/space to bear much more responsibility for what happens.

we are almost there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMLsHI8aV0g

nothing to hide, nothing to fear

Agreed! The government should have access to all online accounts. Bank, email, Facebook,.. and at least once a day each citizen should give mandatory report what they were thinking.

Absolutely! And neo-Nazis are just a start, all illegal activities in all nations should be upheld as moral imperatives. The law should be treated as inviolable religious edicts and those who violate them as blasphemers and infidels!

Is there nothing in between? While surveillance is indeed bad, also free pass is bad. So what should we do about the crimes already happening, as few as they might be?