from Hacker News

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

by maxaf on 12/14/19, 3:53 PM with 281 comments

  • by Ewigkeit on 12/14/19, 7:44 PM

    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.

  • by bengale on 12/14/19, 7:02 PM

    > 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.

  • by atq2119 on 12/14/19, 5:18 PM

    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.

  • by rexgallorum2 on 12/14/19, 8:39 PM

    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.

  • by bloopernova on 12/14/19, 5:03 PM

    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.

  • by newarticle1000 on 12/14/19, 5:55 PM

    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.

  • by danielhitome on 12/14/19, 6:43 PM

    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.

  • by hendersoon on 12/14/19, 6:43 PM

    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.

  • by born2discover on 12/14/19, 5:24 PM

    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.

  • by ryeights on 12/14/19, 7:07 PM

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

  • by MPSimmons on 12/14/19, 5:37 PM

    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.

  • by leetrout on 12/14/19, 8:30 PM

    > 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.

  • by yread on 12/14/19, 6:09 PM

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

  • by generalpass on 12/14/19, 7:01 PM

    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?

  • by lopmotr on 12/14/19, 7:44 PM

    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.

  • by pas on 12/14/19, 5:27 PM

    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.)

  • by awinter-py on 12/14/19, 8:09 PM

    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.

  • by anoplus on 12/14/19, 6:55 PM

    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.

  • by notcreative123 on 12/14/19, 5:48 PM

    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?

  • by megous on 12/14/19, 6:31 PM

    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.

  • by pyuser583 on 12/15/19, 3:51 AM

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

  • by INTPenis on 12/14/19, 10:59 PM

    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.

  • by neonate on 12/14/19, 7:02 PM

  • by floppiplopp on 12/17/19, 10:05 AM

    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.

  • by awinter-py on 12/14/19, 7:49 PM

    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.

  • by boh on 12/14/19, 9:38 PM

    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.

  • by newnewpdro on 12/14/19, 6:43 PM

    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.

  • by rambojazz on 12/15/19, 6:32 AM

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

  • by elyobo on 12/14/19, 9:58 PM

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

  • by usebunsby on 12/16/19, 3:23 PM

    howdy do that

  • by droithomme on 12/14/19, 8:36 PM

    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.

  • by SimeVidas on 12/14/19, 5:26 PM

    Does the author know that the article is behind Medium’s paywall?

    https://outline.com/BNreFw

  • by Angeo34 on 12/14/19, 7:47 PM

    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.

  • by unixsheikh on 12/14/19, 9:46 PM

    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.