12 ms·

37-Year-Old Mom Spent Seven Days Online as an 11-Year-Old Girl

287 points by maxaf 7y ago

bloopernova 7y ago
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.
- api 7y ago
  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.
  - zbentley 7y ago
    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.
    - whiddershins 7y ago
      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.
    - a1369209993 7y ago
      ? Are you saying that pioneers in the wilderness wouldn't/shouldn't warn their kids about enemy tribes?
atq2119 7y ago
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.
- api 7y ago
  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).
  - mc32 7y ago
    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.
    - zbentley 7y ago
      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.
born2discover 7y ago
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.
- RHSeeger 7y ago
  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.
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    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.
SimeVidas 7y ago
Does the author know that the article is behind Medium’s paywall? https://outline.com/BNreFw https://outline.com/BNreFw
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago
  They do, they specifically select it to get paid for their articles.
  - SimeVidas 7y ago
    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.
- TheBeardKing 7y ago
  That's only the first section of the article. 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.
  - kaikai 7y ago
    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.”
  - jfk13 7y ago
    > As a parent of 9 and 7 year old girls, I'd like to know what platforms to be weary of. All of them.
  - neonate 7y ago
    http://archive.is/SVUFw http://archive.is/SVUFw
  - tomaszs 7y ago
pas 7y ago
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.)
- lopmotr 7y ago
  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.
MPSimmons 7y ago
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.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  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.
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    One doesn't have to be a sociopath or psychopath to be attracted to children or thrilled sexually by the taboo. Trying to put a label on these people will make you overlook the ones who don't fit.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      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.
      - zbentley 7y ago
        Citation needed.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - hendersoon 7y ago
        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.
notcreative123 7y ago
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?
- mmmrk 7y ago
  Why do you want to worry?
  - michaelt 7y ago
    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.
- cambalache 7y ago
  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.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  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.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  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.
newarticle1000 7y ago
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.
- Izkata 7y ago
  > 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.
yread 7y ago
There is this new documentary film (sorry Czech only: https://www.csfd.cz/film/720753-v-siti/prehled/ https://www.csfd.cz/film/720753-v-siti/prehled/ ) where they did something similar
- mormegil 7y ago
  Right, see e.g. https://variety.com/2019/film/festivals/caught-in-the-net-ji-hlava-1203384625/ https://variety.com/2019/film/festivals/caught-in-the-net-ji...
megous 7y ago
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.
hendersoon 7y ago
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.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  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.
  - hendersoon 7y ago
    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.
newnewpdro 7y ago
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.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  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.
danielhitome 7y ago
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.
- danharaj 7y ago
  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?
  - krapp 7y ago
    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.
    - foxylad 7y ago
      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.
      - bagacrap 7y ago
        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.
        int_19h 7y ago
        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.
anoplus 7y ago
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.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > prevent those guys from becoming predators. 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.)
generalpass 7y ago
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? Is Bark profitable?
- bloopernova 7y ago
  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.
- sjy 7y ago
  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-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/SVUFw http://archive.is/SVUFw
- generalpass 7y ago
  I learned from their twitter to use `archive.md` instead of all of the other TLDs.
bengale 7y ago
> 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.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  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.
  - zdragnar 7y ago
    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.
ryeights 7y ago
I'm not generally a fan of advertisement by fearmongering. Why would an 11 year old have an Instagram account anyway?
- jfk13 7y ago
  > Why would an 11 year old have an Instagram account anyway? Because we've saturated our society with messages telling them this is how to be popular and successful.
- rexgallorum2 7y ago
  I'm glad at least a few people here can recognize a blatant advert using scaremongering to sell a product.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lopmotr 7y ago
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.
- aalleavitch 7y ago
  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.
Ewigkeit 7y ago
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.
- scotty79 7y ago
  Absolutely horrific. What country/language?
  - Ewigkeit 7y ago
    This was in the suburbs of a major city in the US. English.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    You could find stories like this from every major city in the world. Most days.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  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.
Angeo34 7y ago
If you let children under the age of 15 on the internet unsupervised it's your own fault and the parents should be punished heavily. 15 is the median age of consent in the entire developed world (the US is as developed as Nigeria in sociological view). Problem solved.
awinter-py 7y ago
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.
- chmod775 7y ago
  > 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.
  - awinter-py 7y ago
    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. It's about liability for public posts.
awinter-py 7y ago
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.
leetrout 7y ago
> 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.
droithomme 7y ago
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.
rexgallorum2 7y ago
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.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  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.
  - rexgallorum2 7y ago
    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.
  - nikanj 7y ago
    There's about 25 million kids between 12 and 17 in the US ( https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/101-child-population-by-age-group#detailed/1/any/false/37,871,870,573,869,36,868,867,133,38/62,63,64,6,4693/419,420 https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/101-child-popul...) 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.
boh 7y ago
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.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  How does this help other than give you a vague feeling of satisfaction? How do we even know that the person is using their own picture?
unixsheikh 7y ago
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.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I’m not sure isolating your children from the world is necessarily the only response, or even an appropriate one.
  - unixsheikh 7y ago
    It has nothing to do with isolation from the world, it's protection. The children still have lots of friends.
elyobo 7y ago
Wow, that was hard to read (so much so that I couldn't read much of it, had to skim). Horrific.
INTPenis 7y ago
My past gf used to hitchhike with grown men when she was 14. My current gf used to party with sailors she found in the harbour when she was 16. We used to laugh this off and reference the Cyndi Lauper song. Both turned out to be professional and independent women btw. Is all this monitoring really going to help? Or is it just going to freak parents out? I'd rather see them go after predators actively than help AI monitor children.
pyuser583 7y ago
An article by a private security company says the world is unsafe.
rambojazz 7y ago
I would have gladly read the article if it hadn't asked me to sign in with facebook or google. Sadly, I'll pass.
usebunsby 7y ago
howdy do that
floppiplopp 7y ago
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.

287 points by maxaf 7y ago

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.

api 7y ago
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.
- zbentley 7y ago
  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.
  - whiddershins 7y ago
    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.
  - a1369209993 7y ago
    ? Are you saying that pioneers in the wilderness wouldn't/shouldn't warn their kids about enemy tribes?

atq2119 7y ago

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.

api 7y ago
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).
- mc32 7y ago
  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.
  - zbentley 7y ago
    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.

born2discover 7y ago

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.

RHSeeger 7y ago
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.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  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.

SimeVidas 7y ago

Does the author know that the article is behind Medium’s paywall? https://outline.com/BNreFw https://outline.com/BNreFw

KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago
They do, they specifically select it to get paid for their articles.
- SimeVidas 7y ago
  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.
TheBeardKing 7y ago
That's only the first section of the article. 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.
- kaikai 7y ago
  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.”
- jfk13 7y ago
  > As a parent of 9 and 7 year old girls, I'd like to know what platforms to be weary of. All of them.
- neonate 7y ago
  http://archive.is/SVUFw http://archive.is/SVUFw
- tomaszs 7y ago

pas 7y ago

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.)

lopmotr 7y ago
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.

MPSimmons 7y ago

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.

zozbot234 7y ago
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.
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  One doesn't have to be a sociopath or psychopath to be attracted to children or thrilled sexually by the taboo. Trying to put a label on these people will make you overlook the ones who don't fit.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    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.
    - zbentley 7y ago
      Citation needed.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - hendersoon 7y ago
      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.

notcreative123 7y ago

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?

mmmrk 7y ago
Why do you want to worry?
- michaelt 7y ago
  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.
cambalache 7y ago
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.
ravenstine 7y ago
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.
RandomBacon 7y ago
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.

newarticle1000 7y ago

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.

Izkata 7y ago
> 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.

yread 7y ago

There is this new documentary film (sorry Czech only: https://www.csfd.cz/film/720753-v-siti/prehled/ https://www.csfd.cz/film/720753-v-siti/prehled/ ) where they did something similar

mormegil 7y ago
Right, see e.g. https://variety.com/2019/film/festivals/caught-in-the-net-ji-hlava-1203384625/ https://variety.com/2019/film/festivals/caught-in-the-net-ji...

megous 7y ago

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.

hendersoon 7y ago

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.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
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.
- hendersoon 7y ago
  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.

newnewpdro 7y ago

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.

zozbot234 7y ago
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.

danielhitome 7y ago

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.

danharaj 7y ago
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?
- krapp 7y ago
  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.
  - foxylad 7y ago
    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.
    - bagacrap 7y ago
      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.
      - int_19h 7y ago
        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.

anoplus 7y ago

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.

zozbot234 7y ago
> prevent those guys from becoming predators. 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.)

generalpass 7y ago

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? Is Bark profitable?

bloopernova 7y ago
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.
sjy 7y ago
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-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.is/SVUFw http://archive.is/SVUFw

generalpass 7y ago
I learned from their twitter to use `archive.md` instead of all of the other TLDs.

bengale 7y ago

> 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.

whatshisface 7y ago
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.
- zdragnar 7y ago
  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.

ryeights 7y ago

I'm not generally a fan of advertisement by fearmongering. Why would an 11 year old have an Instagram account anyway?

jfk13 7y ago
> Why would an 11 year old have an Instagram account anyway? Because we've saturated our society with messages telling them this is how to be popular and successful.
rexgallorum2 7y ago
I'm glad at least a few people here can recognize a blatant advert using scaremongering to sell a product.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

lopmotr 7y ago

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.

aalleavitch 7y ago
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.

Ewigkeit 7y ago

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.

scotty79 7y ago
Absolutely horrific. What country/language?
- Ewigkeit 7y ago
  This was in the suburbs of a major city in the US. English.
- pjc50 7y ago
  You could find stories like this from every major city in the world. Most days.
agumonkey 7y ago
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.

Angeo34 7y ago

If you let children under the age of 15 on the internet unsupervised it's your own fault and the parents should be punished heavily. 15 is the median age of consent in the entire developed world (the US is as developed as Nigeria in sociological view). Problem solved.

awinter-py 7y ago

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.

chmod775 7y ago
> 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.
- awinter-py 7y ago
  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. It's about liability for public posts.

awinter-py 7y ago

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.

leetrout 7y ago

> 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.

droithomme 7y ago

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.

rexgallorum2 7y ago

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.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
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.
- rexgallorum2 7y ago
  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.
- nikanj 7y ago
  There's about 25 million kids between 12 and 17 in the US ( https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/101-child-population-by-age-group#detailed/1/any/false/37,871,870,573,869,36,868,867,133,38/62,63,64,6,4693/419,420 https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/101-child-popul...) 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.

boh 7y ago

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.

saagarjha 7y ago
How does this help other than give you a vague feeling of satisfaction? How do we even know that the person is using their own picture?

unixsheikh 7y ago

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.

saagarjha 7y ago
I’m not sure isolating your children from the world is necessarily the only response, or even an appropriate one.
- unixsheikh 7y ago
  It has nothing to do with isolation from the world, it's protection. The children still have lots of friends.

elyobo 7y ago

Wow, that was hard to read (so much so that I couldn't read much of it, had to skim). Horrific.

INTPenis 7y ago

My past gf used to hitchhike with grown men when she was 14. My current gf used to party with sailors she found in the harbour when she was 16. We used to laugh this off and reference the Cyndi Lauper song. Both turned out to be professional and independent women btw. Is all this monitoring really going to help? Or is it just going to freak parents out? I'd rather see them go after predators actively than help AI monitor children.

pyuser583 7y ago

An article by a private security company says the world is unsafe.

rambojazz 7y ago

I would have gladly read the article if it hadn't asked me to sign in with facebook or google. Sadly, I'll pass.

usebunsby 7y ago

howdy do that

floppiplopp 7y ago

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.