The social media platforms that millions of Americans have become addicted to for their daily entertainment are bastions of child abuse, it turns out.
Most of the world's sex trafficking activity occurs on Facebook now. And Twitter, as we have reported on in the past, is a magnet for pedophiles who use it to exchange illegal photos and videos of their victims.
According to the Human Trafficking Institute's 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report, the vast majority of online recruitment for sex trafficking occurs on Mark Zuckerberg's digital baby, where perverts lure children into the sex trade.
"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," says Human Trafficking Institute CEO Victor Boutros.
"Facebook overwhelmingly is used by traffickers to recruit victims in active sex trafficking cases."
Data from the past two decades shows that 30 percent of all victims identified in federal sex trafficking cases since the year 2000 were recruited online.
In the U.S. in the year 2020, 59 percent of online recruitment of identified victims in active cases took place on Facebook alone. And a whopping 65 percent of identified child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited specifically through the Facebook platform.
In a statement to CBS News, Facebook tried to deny its involvement in child sex trafficking, calling the practice "abhorrent." Facebook also denies allowing child sex trafficking on its platform, claiming that it has "policies and technology" in place to prevent it.
It would appear, however, that Facebook is much busier censoring conservative free speech and medical/health free speech than it is protecting children against being recruited into the sex trade. Facebook's priorities are a bit off, in other words.
Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat and WeChat are all used to recruit child sex slaves
Facebook also offered up a canned statement about how it works with "safety groups" and "anti-trafficking organizations" to address and report all cases of child exploitation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Instagram and Snapchat are right behind Facebook for being the next most frequently cited platforms for recruiting child sex slaves, along with WeChat.
According to the trafficking report, most of the people recruited on social media into the sex trade are children, and of these a majority are female – though there are many young men who are also trafficked.
Since 2013, the internet has been the most common place to recruit victims, though the street, stores, and cults are also prominent targets.
"These data do not reflect the prevalence of online solicitation in sex trafficking schemes beyond those federally prosecuted," the report explains.
"To be sure, the internet is implicated in many sex trafficking situations, but the high numbers of federal prosecutions involving internet solicitation are equally if not more reflective of the strategies law enforcement use to investigate these crimes."
Among the most common tactics for recruiting victims are fraudulent job offers and feigned romances. Sex traffickers will usually identify existing vulnerabilities in their victims and prey on those.
"A lot of times we imagine that traffickers are these large group syndicates or networks, exploiting a huge number of victims," warns Boutros.
"But actually most traffickers are not operating as an organized crime enterprise. It is mostly individual traffickers that are operating individually and often exploiting a small handful of victims at a time."
The report included data on 602 victims who were identified in active sex trafficking cases for which the details of their recruitment were known.
More related news about the social media cesspool can be found at Evil.news.
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