Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimt1234 | Hacker News Reader

This story is absolutely horrible. I feel so bad for that kid's parents. I had no idea this kinda thing was happening to dudes; I thought it was all teen girls being tricked into sending nudes, and then being extorted.

I don't know what the solution is here. However, every time I think on it, I keep coming back to parent and personal responsibility, which sounds like victim blaming. I kinda hate myself for that, but for every technical solution I can think of, I instantly think of a simple way to circumvent it. So then I wonder how to make the message stick: DON'T SEND NUDES TO ANYONE ON THE INTERNET. EVER!

View on HN

There are organized "boiler room" operations doing this to kids at scale. They'll trick a kid into sending nudes or even lie and claim to have them or use AI to generate them, then will try to get the kid to steal their parents' credit cards and send money.

Today's dark forest hellscape Internet is not a safe place for young people, and it's getting worse with AI automation of scams and fraud. I wouldn't even post pics of kids online anywhere public since these can be mined to create fake AI blackmail material.

Edit: it's fraud all the way down, too. A lot of these boiler rooms use borderline or actual slave labor. The person doing the scam may not be getting anything for it at all, or might even be captive. So it's fraud perpetuated by fraud victims. At the top is usually organized crime.

Do you have any links detailing these kinds of boiler rooms?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/17/world/asia/my...

This has a different victim demographic but is broadly similar and was a good read (at least as far as I remember)

I think Robin Williams said it best with "God gave men a brain and a penis, but only enough blood to operate one at a time". I don't think that "never send nudes to anyone" is going to work.

The core problem as I see it is that platforms like Instagram connect every person on the internet to every other person on the internet. Turns out that some of these people are a tad unscrupulous. Limiting this, especially for children and teens, seems like a good first step. Last week Instagram announced you can only send DMs to under-19s if they're following you, which is an okay-ish first step (and the absolute minimum they could do).

But it's also not only about these types of extortions, for example from [1]:

> “Two weeks ago my daughter, 16, and an experimenting creator on Instagram, made a post about cars, and someone commented ‘Get back to the kitchen.’ It was deeply upsetting to her,” he wrote. “At the same time the comment is far from being policy violating, and our tools of blocking or deleting mean that this person will go to other profiles and continue to spread misogyny. I don’t think policy/reporting or having more content review are the solutions.”

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/07/meta-face...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com