The person in the online chat introduced himself as “Brad.” Using flattery and guile, he persuaded the 14-year-old girl to send a nude photo. It instantly became leverage.
Don’t blame WaPo for the lurid article. Can you pass up a trigger warning like this?
Editor’s note: This story describes extremely disturbing events that may be upsetting for some people.
It’s not just regular disturbing, it’s extremely disturbing, and some people want to be upset. In a good way. Like watching a Frankenstein movie when you are a kid.
The perpetrators — identified by authorities as boys and men as old as mid-40s — seek out children with mental health issues and blackmail them into hurting themselves on camera, the examination found. They belong to a set of evolving online groups, some of which have thousands of members, that often splinter and take on new names but have overlapping membership and use the same tactics.
“Online groups” is giving the wrong impression. It isn’t an organization, but online platforms.
This article talks about men and boys getting young people to degrade themselves. This reminded me of a recent documentary I’ve been watching by Mariana van Zeller. The show is called Trafficked, and each episode, Zeller does a deep dive into some aspect of the global criminal underworld.
In this episode, she goes to the Philippines to investigate mostly Filipino women who meet men on Facebook or other social media and convince them to send nude photos. Then they blackmail the men for money. Her story focuses on a young man who killed himself because he was trapped.
Zeller’s criminals prey on adults for money, while the WaPo degenerates prey on children for sport. They aren’t the same, but similar.
The WaPo article doesn’t address, because nobody does, the vulnerability of children. Parents and society used to protect children while gradually giving them supervised freedom.
No child should have unsupervised access to the internet, yet parents provide them with a smart phone to have exactly that. The social and emotional damage is well documented. By definition, these are bad parents, but it’s practically all parents. Middle-class, engaged and intelligent parents give their child a smart phone so they can keep in touch. As a teacher, I’ve heard it a million times. Flip phones are available, but nobody gets them.
Parents say that their child would be ostracized without it, but would they give their child a credit card and a fake ID if everyone else did?
Social pressure can do amazing things. Since the 1930’s, people knew that cigarettes were bad for their health, but it wasn’t until the 1980’s that society discouraged it. It is no longer cool to smoke.
When Obama was a candidate, he was against gay marriage. Now, flamboyant pervert clowns read gay porn to children at library events.
Some schools are trying to ban phones at school. My students weren’t permitted to have their phones out unless expressly permitted. Parents and society must help us. Most children don’t have the means to acquire their own phones. Our culture must criticize parents who provide smart phones to their kids.
Once the danger to children of unsupervised internet access is emphasized, decent parents will move computers out of bedrooms and into more public areas in the home.
I don’t use much social media, but like the anonymous nature of Reddit. I know what I am getting. Facebook, Twitter X, Instagram and other popular sites should move to a verified identity model. Twitter X leaned that way with the blue check, but that went off the rails.
Censoring social media is bound to fail because there are too many judgment calls and we’ve seen social media become instruments of government censorship. It would be better to allow everyone to speak, but with proper authorization, the identity of each user can be established.
If that is going too far, then all users could choose to block content from unverified users. Some people would choose to go to sites where participants are anonymous. That’s fine. Like going to the sketchy part of town, people would accept the risk.
We may get there eventually, but right now, people in positions of power like the money and perception of control they get from the current system.