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."
Facebook Fact Checks Found This False /s (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Facebook Fact Checks Found This False /s (Score:5, Insightful)
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"we have policies" (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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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....
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Re:"we have policies" (Score:4, Informative)
maybe start by removing the content they claim to be removing but clearly arent?
Re:"we have policies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook is in a no-win situation. There is a never-ending torrent of the worst of humanity posted to their platform, and just trying to moderate it gives their staff PTSD. They don't have enough staff, and their technical tools are apparently shit because they can't e.g. stop people sharing the same videos and photos over and over without manual intervention every time.
They wanted everyone on Facebook posting all their stuff. Now they have everyone on Facebook posting all their stuff and they have to deal with it.
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While at the same time they get profit, for the targeted ad's based on the content being posted.
They created a system where it was too big to be controlled, too much effort into algorithms and not enough effort in people and common sense managing the content.
If I make a model rocket, and launch it, then it goes astray and hits a neighbors house. I am responsible, I didn't intend for the rocket to hit the house, however I had built the rocket and launched it.
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Well considering they are a private entity and not the U.S. Government, they don't have any obligation to provide "free speech"
That's correct, and I have argued the same many times. And yet, I also still believe that they ought in general to promote free speech, and Mark Zuckerberg claims that he stands for free expression [fb.com].
Now if you'll do me a favor, point to the part of my comment in which I claimed that they were obligated to promote free speech.
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I don't see how you bring up free speech in a discussion about Facebook, one of the largest abusers of "but muh private business" when it comes to regulating what people are allowed to say. Facebook should continue doing that Facebook does with regard to free speech, aka ignore it as a concept.
But here's a suggestion.. For one day a week, instead of forcing everyone to scroll past a propaganda post about vaccines, force them to scroll past a propaganda post about avoiding predators. Surely it won't be any l
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Look at the system they use to read your posts and messages to determine what ads they send you or which of your content needs to be fact checked, which already exists and is already running full force and in real time on the platform. Take the known cases which per the article makes up the majority of FBI statistics, analyze the messages that are not E2E encrypted (thanks, FB) and are easily queried, and use that data to train a new model. That would be a good start, beyond my earlier suggestion of spammin
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Look at the system they use to read your posts and messages
That isn't real time. Remember, the recruitment takes place over messenger, not FB posts, so the removal you want must be done in real time. Try again.
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Don't be daft. They're reading all of your content in as close to real time as is possible They don't just stop allowing people to post and send messages on Sunday so they have to catch up. This includes messages, which is why I specifically said messages, which are already read by their system in near real time. You even quoted the word messages but for whatever reason ignored it?
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Not sure why you keep insisting I'm not talking about messenger when every post I have made calls it out by name, and then call me dishonest? I imagine you have some fundamental misunderstanding here but I'm not sure what it is. You do realize that messenger is not an E2E platform an Facebook has access to all your messages, can analyze them as they are sent, can go back and query against them, and often supplies that data to LEOs?
Anyway, if you're intent on reading what you want instead of what has been wr
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Monitor the connections between people. You already know the majority of victims are going to be female, you ignore what they say their age is and develop an :"Age Profile" based on their interests and check ins. The perpetrators culture is going to play a part in this, you're not targeting their race but a 25-35 year old Male who just moved from Yemen to New York and immediately starts friending and messaging 14 year olds in his area that he has no social connections with should set off alarms. You flag th
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Monitor the connections between people.
Specifically how?
You already know the majority of victims are going to be female, you ignore what they say their age is and develop an :"Age Profile" based on their interests and check ins.
So, you are going to ignore males, ignore whether one is an adult, and also go after the larger side of the equation then have all those connections monitored how? And, you are basically saying women are too gullible to be allowed on to the internet without being watched over.
The perpetrators culture is going to play a part in this, you're not targeting their race but a 25-35 year old Male who just moved from Yemen to New York
Amusingly enough, you have just described racial and religious profiling. "25-35 year old male from Arab Muslim country". Not to mention that most of the people that are trafficking humans for sexual purposes are Ameri
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Yes, you target the larger share of the crimes. Use the same system to monitor male users, sure. But numbers are more important than some half assed "Men Are Important Too" movement.
What guidelines are they to use when the females profile says she is 18 and the conversation is legal? How much are you willing to payout in damages for falsely reporting someone?
You misunderstand, Facebook isn't becoming the police in this scenario. They are filtering for potential cases and forwarding those to the experts. So if the girl turns out to be of age, then the Feds drop it, no harm done. And you DON'T "payout for damages"; in this scenario Facebook becomes a Mandated Reporter, which they kind
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Free speech has limitation. There is a lot of presidents for this.
Free speech allows you to speak if you think a topic is a Good or Bad thing, despite what the current laws on the topic is, or if it is a popular stance, or morally right or not.
However you cannot claim free speech just because your communication is directing and operating the illegal activity.
So for example, If I say Interstate 95 should have no speed limit, and we should all just drive the speed we feel safest at. I will not be given a spe
Re: "we have policies" (Score:2)
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i didnt fail shit you fucking egotistical moron. learn to speak to people.
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Say something worth hearing. We all know what the problem is.
They take down a shitload of content, everyone bitches because they take down too much content. So they're missing content. Everyone agrees on that. So how do you fix it without taking down too much of the wrong content?
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The comment about fact-checking satire and memes suggests that Facebook might be able to divert some of their thought police from those efforts, and towards identifying and removing the human trafficking that happens on their site. Trust users to recognize satire, and remember the old saw that "the cure for bad memes is more memes" (or however that went).
Re:"we have policies" (Score:4, Insightful)
So how do you suggest they improve?
Either moderate the site or don't moderate it. Moderating only some of the site so that it -looks- like it is moderated is good for their brand, but its bad for their users to have the false expectation that moderation is happening across the entire site.
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They are required by law to moderate certain illegal activity, like child porn. That is part of both the requirements and the reasoning for getting Section 230 protections.
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Re:"we have policies" (Score:4, Interesting)
Require all accounts for minors to submit report-data to legal guardians, at least as far as contacts and timestamps for contact, including geolocation data. Possibly restrict the ability of accounts of minors to have contact of accounts of adults without parental consent. Actually use their dataset to look for requests for friends or other contact where there's not a strong reason for that subject person to be contacting that minor, and where that subject person likewise has connections or a history of connections to others where there's no otherwise-plausible reason, and flag those for human review.
This might not catch/stop all new perpetrators but it would at least allow existing patterns of behavior/exploitation to be uncovered. Then report those human-reviewed patterns to federal law enforcement.
They already have these systems in place to make friend-recommendations based on when two accounts share strong correlation, it should not be difficult to use them to compare friend-requests where there's extremely weak correlation, basically the inverse of what they're currently doing..
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Okay, but first tell me how to tell if an account belongs to a minor, and how to tell if another account belongs to their actual legal guardian.
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By leaving "hate speech" alone — and concentrating on the stuff, that is actually illegal not simply disliked by the Fascists threatening them with punishing regulations [washingtonpost.com].
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If they did do that, how bad would it be?
The Upsides:
First, it would completely solve their problem: nobody would be complaining that people are using Facebook to talk to one another about forbidden things anymore. Facebook would no longer be "in trouble" over this. They got accused of being A Problem, then fixed it, and then live happily ever after.
Second, it would encourage people to switch to better technology to talk to one another, such as email. Using Facebook for privatel communication was always a r
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For example, if a user sends another user a message with certain forbidden terms
Yes, please implement this feature, but with one slight change. Let me choose my own ban list. For people who don't want to deal with it, let them subscribe to multiple ban lists, catered by other users and/or the Facebook.
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FB already monitors their messaging system, in more or less exactly the way you suggest.. Just not being used for stopping sex trafficking or catching pedos. Remember, FB Messenger is not E2E encrypted, and it maintains a permanent history of your messages, conveniently stored in a database for a variety of use cases.
Outrage hypocrisy (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Outrage hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Outrage hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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Re: Outrage hypocrisy (Score:4, Insightful)
Sex work isn't generally done by people that are free and able to work other jobs
Neither is roofing.
Sex work pays pretty well. It has fexible hours. And some people actually enjoy sex. While the hookers and roofers are waiting for that Fortune 500 CEO position to open up, it's a viable option. And hookers will probably make better CEOs.
Re:Outrage hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Outrage hypocrisy (Score:2)
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.
There are the numbers (from TFS, for whatever that's worth). Note that this refers to victims. Children and adults forced into the trade. The end numbers are probably pretty high for people voluntarily there as well. But labeling everyone as a victim is disingenuous.
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RTFA. It's about fraudulent offers of employment, work visas, and the like, followed by subtle and not so subtle coercion into sex work by adults and children that didn't realize what they were getting into. (What for the most part used to be known as pimping.)
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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: Outrage hypocrisy (Score:2)
and should be able to vote
There's the solution! Legalize prostitution. But require all potential workers to present their voter ID card prior to employment.
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typical conservative is having trouble telling the difference between freedom and enslavement
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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.
Re: Outrage hypocrisy (Score:2)
Ever listen to Leykis 101? That's the basic principle behind bedding hot but insecure women. Are we going to outlaw Chads?
Recruited? (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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.
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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
Re: Recruited? (Score:2)
He's talking about something else entirely.
Clickbait, percentages shown not total numbers! (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re: Clickbait, percentages shown not total numbers (Score:2)
A few thousand kidnapped girls isn't important enough to report on?
Re: Clickbait, percentages shown not total number (Score:2)
Re: Clickbait, percentages shown not total numbe (Score:2)
I'm not assuming they're all girls. I'm extrapolating from the numbers that if there are thousands of people kidnapped for sex trafficking, there are almost certainly thousands of them who are girls, who make up the vast majority of sex trafficking victims.
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Here are some actual gender stats for anyone who cares.
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https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
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Autists will make an argument about the numbers being statistically insignificant.
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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
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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
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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
Facebook Pulls a MySpace (Score:2)
--
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."
Bomb The Roads (Score:3)
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
Misleading headline (Score:2)
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
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Could also be that FB is reporting cases to the authorities so more cases were identified on FB than others.
Facebook good at reporting sex trafficking ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Communications platform used by criminals (Score:2)
to communicate. News at 11.
The message facebook should receive? (Score:2)
"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.
Welp, that's it for Facebook (Score:2)
Shocking...Not (Score:2)
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)
Fight online sex trafficking act (Score:3)
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You make an excellent point.
So when is the FBI going to seize it? (Score:2)
The FBI seized backpage.com for sex trafficking, why aren't they seizing Facebook and arresting Zuckerberg?
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Facebook is a failed experiment (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: Facebook is a failed experiment (Score:2)
You seem not to have grasped a word i said. FB as a new class of business is a failed experiment.
How is it a success?
Funny Memes (Score:4, Insightful)
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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Do you have a coherent point amongst all that waffle?
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I misread the headline at first, thinking it claimed that half of Facebook is used for sex trafficking. Made sense to me.