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Researcher Lara Putnam wrote that Facebook has a problem with “child predation.” Putnam, a UCIS Research Professor in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh, was working on a project about “disinformation” when she discovered some concerning things about the platform.
Putnam wrote in Wired that she had searched for the 10th, 11th, or 12th wards of the City of Pittsburgh when the phrase “Buscando novi@ de 9,10,11,12,13 años.” The meaning of the phrase? “Looking for a 9-year old girlfriend.”
“The page’s aesthetic was cartoon cute: oversized eyes with long lashes, hearts, and pastels,” Putnam wrote. “The posts that made explicit references to photographed genitalia were gamified and spangled with emoticons: ‘See your age in this list? Type it into the replies and I’ll show ‘it’ to you.”
Putnam was horrified.
“Most often posts were just doorways to connection, the real danger offstage. ‘Looking for a perverted girlfriend of 11,’ read one post, with purple background and heart emojis. Replies asked for friend requests to continue via Messenger, or offered entry to private groups or WhatsApp chats—away from the eyes of even a digital passerby.”
Part of the horror was the visibility of the search results on Facebook.
“[A]s late as January 2022—three months into my efforts to get action taken against them—if I searched 11, 12, 13 on the platform, 23 of the first 30 results were groups targeting children of those ages, with group names that included the words boyfriend/girlfriend, novio/a, or niños/niñas, sometimes along with ‘pervertidos,’ ‘hot,’ etc,” Putnam wrote. “They totaled over 81,000 members.”
It should be noted that no one under the age of 13 is “allowed” to join Facebook. However, in one study forty-five percent of US children aged 9 to 12 reported using the platform every day.Multiple Facebook rules were violated in such posts, but Putnam stated […]
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