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Facebook Social Networks The Internet

Facebook Accounts For Over Half of Sex Trafficing Recruitment (cbsnews.com) 135

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: The majority of online recruitment in active sex trafficking cases in the U.S. last year took place on Facebook, according to the Human Trafficking Institute's 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report. "The internet has become the dominant tool that traffickers use to recruit victims, and they often recruit them on a number of very common social networking websites," Human Trafficking Institute CEO Victor Boutros said on CBSN Wednesday. "Facebook overwhelmingly is used by traffickers to recruit victims in active sex trafficking cases." In 2020 in the U.S., 59% of online recruitment of identified victims in active cases took place on Facebook alone. The report also states that 65% of identified child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited through Facebook. The tech giant responded to the report's findings in a statement to CBS News: "Sex trafficking and child exploitation are abhorrent and we don't allow them on Facebook. We have policies and technology to prevent these types of abuses and take down any content that violates our rules."
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Facebook Accounts For Over Half of Sex Trafficing Recruitment

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  • by Vandil X ( 636030 ) on Friday June 11, 2021 @08:09AM (#61476514)
    Let's see if their fact checkers agree, since they are held to such high esteem during the election and COVID-19 eras.
    • by jbengt ( 874751 ) on Friday June 11, 2021 @11:45AM (#61477404)
      To be sure, it's a lot easier to catch a "trafficker" (previously known as a pimp) working thru Facebook than those working off the grid or through more private connections. So I'm guessing that the data is skewed towards the percentage that get found out, rather than the percentage of all of those actually trafficking.
      • I am no expert in this area but it certainly seems like that would be a reasonable confounding variable. But I also think you may misunderstand how the recruiting works. Nobody asks a victim "Hey do you want to be a prostitute?" The process is called grooming. First the perpetrator wins the trust of somebody vulnerable and then exploits that trust. I'm sure only the first half is happening on social media in most cases.
  • "we have policies" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Squash ( 2258 ) on Friday June 11, 2021 @08:13AM (#61476532) Homepage

    Policies aren't enough. Facebook is moving millions of dollars around fact checking satire sites and memes, but can't seem to slow down the flood of pedos. Their response is a sad, sick joke. FBI stats recently showed that FB Messenger was the most used platform for CP as well. But by all means, keep telling me that Fauci doesn't actually recommend wearing a mask over your eyes to keep from seeing his leaked emails and just point out that you have a worthless policy against something that's illegal anyway.

    • by jythie ( 914043 )
      To be fair, they don't do a very good job policing anything else either.
      • To be even more fair, it's the police' job to do that sort of thing.

        FB isn't in the business of policing their users' sex-crimes, anymore than Radio Shack is. Or Burger King. Or the local Ford dealer....

    • If people don't have the sense to stay the hell off facebook there's not much can be done. All these stories about the evils they perpetrate are becoming tiresome.
    • Facebook is moving millions of dollars around fact checking satire sites and memes, but can't seem to slow down the flood of pedos.

      Based on what? Do you have a Facebook that isn't moving millions of dollars around to compare against?

    • Fauci's emails were not leaked. They were released per established processes in response to a FOI request, with his full knowledge.

      And contrary to what Fox/Talk shaw circuit is wailing about, they contain nothing controversial.

      • by Squash ( 2258 )

        You somehow managed to completely, and I mean "100%" doesn't adequately describe it, miss the point. Do you by chance work for Facebook? I'm embarrassed on your behalf.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Outrage hypocrisy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Train0987 ( 1059246 ) on Friday June 11, 2021 @08:21AM (#61476564)

    The Left really needs to figure out where they stand instead of just trying to lever weapons in some failed guilt-trip quest. One minute we're being scolded that sex workers are perfectly regular people who have found a way to empower themselves or some shit and prostitution should be legal. The very next minute sex work is transformed into 'Human Traficking" for the purpose of scolding us all once again with their nonsensical preening.

    "Facebook recruitment" implies the person isn't a "victim", they consented. Obviously children are different but this article seems to separate the horror of "human trafficking" and "child exploitation" as two different things.

    • by Dorianny ( 1847922 ) on Friday June 11, 2021 @08:37AM (#61476638) Journal
      "Sex work should be legal" and "we must stop people from falling victims to a currently illegal and dangerous way of trying to make a living largely controlled by ruthless exploiters" are not mutually exclusive concepts.

      FYI: The "left" in this case is not the majority of the Democratic party. There are no so called "progressive states" that are even seriously considering making prostitution legal.

      • The problem I see is that the term "sex trafficking". "Trafficking" means "to deal or trade in something illegal" so "sex trafficking" means "to illegally deal or trade sex" but most sex work is illegal so most sex work is "sex trafficking".
        • by Magnus Pym ( 237274 ) on Friday June 11, 2021 @11:56AM (#61477444)

          "Sex Trafficking" is just new branding for prostitution. It was conjured up by a coalition of feminist activists in collaboration with hard-right Christian organizations as a new boogeyman because of data that says most US citizens are not as outraged by the concept of prostitution as they once were.

          Sex Trafficking nicely conflates Child Abuse, Slavery and Prostitution all in one vague phrase and is impossible to criticize the concept politically. So it is having the result its creators hoped for.

          So now any man who hires a prostitute is a sex trafficker, which the associated stigma.

          There are several reasons why a large cross-section of society are reflexively against prostitution. The reasons vary from economic to political.

          Prostitution arrests, like Marijuana Arrests, are a major source of revenue for the Govt. It is sort of like Marijuana. Legalizing this would result in considerable revenue loss.

          A legal and safe avenue to have sex whenever they want till screw up the age-old power-balance between men and women. A very large reason for why men put up with the risks and hassles of marriage is because men are helpless against the force of their sexual drive between the ages of about 14 and 50. This particular weakness has been cynically and ruthlessly exploited from time immemorial by governments and women. If men do not invest in long-term commitment, a large source of productivity will disappear... as they will do the bare minimum to survive and satisfy their direct wants and not worry about putting up with shitty jobs to save for their kids' college funds.

          And of course, there is the over-powering man-hate from feminist organizations, powered by women who cannot stomach the thought that there may be some man in the world who may not be completely unhappy.

          • I hate commenting on these threads since it seems like a dangerous third-rail. But I do read news stories now and again about victims and how they were recruited. There may be people who have made a well-thought out and reasoned choice to become professional prostitutes. I certainly can't prove a negative. But the horror stories from the victims are compelling enough that one should be very skeptical of the idea of voluntary sex work.
            • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

              This might be stating the obvious, but the flip side of that is that one reason for those horror stories being so common is the illegality of it all. A sex worker who is abused can't exactly run to the police and say that she was raped by someone who she started to sell sex to, but changed her mind. She can't say that her pimp forced he to take clients she didn't like, or wouldn't let her leave when she realized it was a mistake. (Well, she can, but only at the risk of going to jail herself.)

              Think about

              • On the other hand, many underage victims respond terribly to bad situations. I don't want to Google exact statistics at work, but many adult women don't report rapes. https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]

                I am not qualified to say whether or not legalizing and destigmatizing sex work would be a good solution or whether or not it would reduce the number of underage victims

                I don't think that coerced prostitution is the same as other forms of coerced labor, though. The psychological damage is certainly much

                • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

                  On the other hand, many underage victims respond terribly to bad situations. I don't want to Google exact statistics at work, but many adult women don't report rapes. https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]

                  Underage is a whole different question. That said, a lot of people in general respond terribly to bad situations. There's no way to absolutely guarantee that people won't do bad things, and it isn't useful to try, because the end result can only be a dystopian society that nobody wants to live in, in which young people are discouraged from trying new things and taking risks, out of fear that they'll get in trouble. And you'll end up with a generation of people who never learned from their mistakes, never

            • Saying

              I certainly can't prove a negative.

              in reference to

              There may be people who have made a well-thought out and reasoned choice to become professional prostitutes.

              ignores the fact that

              There are people who have made a well-thought out and reasoned choice to become professional prostitutes.

              is a positive assertion and thus imminently provable.

              But the horror stories from the victims are compelling enough that one should be very skeptical of the idea of voluntary sex work.

              That is the spotlighting fallacy.

              • Fair enough but you have just promoted the exception which proves the rule. Many coal miners *don't* get black lung and yet we still require adequate ventilation. Some miners might choose, if given the choice, to work without adequate ventilation in exchange for increased pay. This isn't allowed because there is so much of a power-imbalance that the entire practice is outlawed even though some might make a "well reasoned decision" to do such a thing. (One way I make enough to feed my kids, the other I d
    • by jythie ( 914043 ) on Friday June 11, 2021 @08:51AM (#61476702)
      It is almost like sex work and human traficking are not the same thing.... oh no, not nuance! The left needs to be like the right with simple slogans, simple solutions, simple views, and a complete disregard for context or facts!
    • by fermion ( 181285 )
      It has to do with consent. Ideally sex workers would have the same protections and rules as a fast food or other retail worker. They might not have the freedom to choose customers, as retail does not, but there would be no more coercion or violence than at your average chik fil e.

      In these cases, young people are generally lured into a trap where violence or imprisonment is used to force their services. On one level this is no different from the cases in the US where families has trapped servants, taken th

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      typical conservative is having trouble telling the difference between freedom and enslavement

    • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      There are obviously bright lines - children vs adults.
      There are also a lot of cases where people are "recruited" where they are lead to believe the arrangement is on thing and when they arrive its something else. A lot of this takes the form of here we will make travel arrangements for you and then when the victim arrives now well removed from their support system, suddenly the modeling gig becomes sex work etc.

  • Recruited? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Friday June 11, 2021 @08:27AM (#61476588)

    It's politically incorrect to identify exactly what is meant with sex trafficking for various reasons, but I assume they're talking about lover boys here? (A term formerly used in the Netherlands, unfortunately now too politically incorrect to use even there.) A generally young version of the traditional pump who first woo a teenager and then manipulate them into prostitution.

    That the lover boys start their seduction on social networks is hardly a knock on the social media, they are just facilitating people forming relationships. That unscrupulous people use such a relationship once formed to manipulate teenagers into prostitution can hardly be blamed on the social network.

    • Re:Recruited? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Friday June 11, 2021 @09:29AM (#61476862) Homepage Journal

      The trafficking part means that there is a scam involved where they transport the person a long way from home in order to force them into prostitution or modern day slavery. Often they are taken overseas with the promise of good jobs, only to discover that their passport has been taken, they are under threat of arrest for not being there legally, and their captors tell them that the local cops will abuse them far worse than they will.

      In the US it is sometimes done over state lines instead of internationally, with things like the ticket home withheld. Check the Wikipedia article on "Girls Do Porn" for some details.

      • Thank you. I've commented a couple of times. I forgot about the "Girls Do Porn" story (which I probably wouldn't have read if it weren't for the slashdot discussion). Facebook is full of all kinds of scams to which many people fall prey. It's no surprise that unsuspecting teenagers are getting victimized. Especially when the scam artists are seasoned veterans.
    • by mark-t ( 151149 )

      Nobody is saying that Facebook is responsible for it... the point of the story, as I understand it, is to make people aware that a significant percentage of such trafficking occurs via a mechanism that is very well known to many people, and that it should drive a point close to home.

      Parents need to really be regularly monitoring who their children are in contact with online, and absolutely everyone needs to be cautious about anything that they might find online which entails meeting up with a person they

  • You have to drill into the report not the parent link for that to find out it's only a few thousand...in a nation of over 300 million people.

    That's how to troll for hits. Humans are bad at counting making clickbait even more effective.

    • A few thousand kidnapped girls isn't important enough to report on?

    • by mark-t ( 151149 )

      That's a few thousand people in a nation where it isn't supposed to be happening *AT ALL*. Have some effing empathy.

      And the point of this article is that over half of the trafficking that does occur within the USA can be attributed just to people being recruited via Facebook, and this is significant because it weighs close to home for many people, who might also use Facebook

      Of course, all that you can take really from that is that it speaks to simply how popular Facebook is more than how serious the p

      • I didn't read the article. The real question is whether FB makes it easier or harder to recruit. It certainly seems that you can setup a FB page for just about anything and make it look legitimate. And there is less of a trail than if you were to register a domain name and buy hosting service and such. Neither the raw numbers nor percentages tell us whether social media is adding to or reducing the problem.
      • it speaks to simply how popular Facebook is

        My take as well. About half of people have a Facebook account. Let's pick an example, people who cover themselves in marmalade before masturbating.

        About half of marmalade masturbators use Facebook to contact other marmalade masturbators. Shock! Horror!
        I think not.

        The news would be if 10% (or 90%) of people sex-trafficked to marmalade masturbators had used Facebook to do it. indicating that Facebook's anti-marmalade masturbator technology is (or isn't) effective

    • in 2019, 79 people were killed and 100 were injured in mass shootings in the US. Our president almost daily bemoans this and attempts to put in place legislation to stop this, spurred on by many who consider this number "out of control".
      People WILL respond to something, no matter the number, if they feel emotionally hit by it.

      That being said: we've been told by so many over the past few years that this "doesn't happen". These are also the people who often point to gun violence as out of control

  • ... and somewhere in the world, MySpace Tom is sitting on a beach, sipping a Mai Tai, and laughing at Mark Zuckerberg.
    --
    "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."
  • by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Friday June 11, 2021 @09:07AM (#61476754) Homepage Journal

    Whether it be Facebook, Parler, or telephone - sex trafficking or unarmed revolutions - they all have one thing in common: the roads.

    Yea, each of these incidents could not have been possible were it not for the road network.

    I think we've found our root cause. The name trafficking says it all. You know what to do, government.

    #thinkofthechildren

  • The title makes it seem as if Facebook is responsible for more than 50% or the total recruitment but the article says:

    In 2020 in the U.S., 59% of online recruitment of identified victims in active cases took place on Facebook alone. The report also states that 65% of identified child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited through Facebook.

    The article clearly states that the statistics are for online recruitment only. Because the article doesn't give what percentage of recruitment occurs online, the headline should be

    Facebook Accounts For Over Half of Online Sex Trafficing Recruitment

    • by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      Could also be that FB is reporting cases to the authorities so more cases were identified on FB than others.

  • by JoeESmith123 ( 7459544 ) on Friday June 11, 2021 @10:03AM (#61477032)
    I remember listening to a podcast with a sex traffic researcher. One thing mentioned was that FB is actually one of the best at reporting these things when the find them. So, sex trafficking could be just as common on other platforms, and the numbers look the way they do because facebook is actually taking action.
  • to communicate. News at 11.

  • "You can't function right now.
    Facebook facilitates Child nudity and/or sexual exploitation of children, even if you didn't mean to. You can post again in 4 years"

    As a side note I've been short term banned twice from facebook
    1) for suggesting that the person who stole my philosphy book should ponder the philosophical implications, and eventually arrive at the conclusion that they should commit suicide.
    2) For hoping that someone would violently murder the Liberty Mutual Emu from those annoying commercials.

  • When these stories start circulating it means a crackdown is coming. They're prepping the public to support it. Not that I'm a fan of FB but I don't think this will end well
  • Is anyone really surprised that the home for broken little girls and their bullies is where pedos would find them?

    Why do you rob banks? Because that's where the money is. (yes, I know he never actually said it)

  • by BytePusher ( 209961 ) on Friday June 11, 2021 @11:13AM (#61477300) Homepage
    Interesting how Congress passed an act specifically to shut this down, but it only applied to Craigslist and other lower revenue sites.
  • The FBI seized backpage.com for sex trafficking, why aren't they seizing Facebook and arresting Zuckerberg?

    • FB does not have an "adult personals" section. And Facebook does not seek to directly profit from the illegal activities. Was this a serious question or the world's worst attempt at "telling the question" in a way that only betrays ignorance?
  • by BishopBerkeley ( 734647 ) on Friday June 11, 2021 @03:54PM (#61478256) Journal

    How many more horror stories must come out of facebook for it to be declared a failed experiments and killed? Given that FB monetizes its users, actual human trafficking on the web site fits well within its business model. The only difference is that selling human attention is not illegal, but selling humans is. The legal proscription of the latter does not condone the former. FB really needs to be shut down.

  • Funny Memes (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hduff ( 570443 ) <hoytduff@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Friday June 11, 2021 @05:00PM (#61478460) Homepage Journal

    They seem to have no problem penalizing me for posting memes (their AI does not understand irony at all), but they can't deal with sex traffic posts? WTF, facebook.

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