"She added: “I’ve also had a lot of terrified men message me things along the lines of, ‘Hey, I think I may have written you something sort of weird seven years ago. I’m really sorry about that.’ They’re scared I’m going to post their old messages.”"
This is the biggest takeaway from the article for me, because it implies that HN user corysama's prediction that attaching a small amount of risk to the activity will have a significant impact on its incidence is essentially correct:
Her partner posted content about being attracted to children as far back as 2015.
A five year setup followed by a Twitter hack seems incredibly unlikely.
Edit: The unique name used for her partners keybase account is associated with similar content posted in 2004. The evidence appears concrete that her partner is a self-confessed paedophile.
And while they're deleting those posts people are free to repost images of vulnerable users, with added sexualised language, and send pms telling those vulnerable people to kill themselves.
> In tweets reviewed by NBC News, the accused adult identified as a “map” — a common online abbreviation for “minor-attracted person.”
I'm both amused and horrified at how open people are about this stuff.
No longer do we have to divine intent from lists of ambiguous red flags, they'll just outright broadcast their proclivities without fear of consequence. I also love the "I'm mentally 13" nonsense from people old enough to know better.
There was a bone-chilling moment when my (very young) kids were playing with toys together and when asked what they were doing, they responded with "role-playing."
I keep seeing reports that online enticement cases sharply increased thanks to COVID. Can't say I'm surprised. Somewhere along the way, [something] got kids to normalize the very verbiage the groomers use to steer online conversations in sexual directions. They can't see it coming.
I don't even try to teach mine to look for warning signs anymore and just tell them to assume everyone on the internet is Philip Garrido escaped from prison.
> And no one is buying into the sexual aspects of this shit show
Yeah, but that it's attempted is bad enough, and how that is shrugged off I find creepy. Search for "appelbaum" on reddit and sort by date, go back to the beginning, you don't even have to count to see it's kind of a blitz. It has 0 comments in most subs, and not a whole lot response elsewhere, most people are skeptical or dislike the site, etc... but some people are trying REALLY hard regardless. It was on a lot of news sites, too, though that wasn't as easy to "measure" so I didn't bother. But reddit? Super weird.
And I think letting that slide is a shit precedent. I'm not that gullible to be shamed by these stories, even if they and worse are true, into going with "it's just a bunch of people sharing their story about this horrible person". Everyone involved pretends it's just something that "happens", instead of something a lot of people do. That's something we all have in front of us, there is so much we do not have to guess about at all, and even that isn't properly discussed.
> In this particularly disturbing case, a father of three hints that he is willing to share pictures of his children.
> npt@hotmail.com: hi im a married dad of 3, i prefer girls from pt to jb. I’m looking forward to joining in and sharing in the community
A little later in the article there is an entire section devoted to his findings that many visitors of the site were predators seeking to do more than look at photographs. In addition,
> Many visitors offered photos from their “private collection” as a means to bribe me for entrance to the website. They took care to note that the material they were offering me was original.
Having skimmed the article, I'm increasingly convinced that the perpetrators of this sort of online "grooming" are largely sociopaths/psychopaths/dark triad personalities. The whole M.O. seems to fit that characterization quite closely, AFAICT. It's very helpful to have these chat logs to look at even though they're so disturbing, it lets us know more about what makes these folks tick and how they arrange their predatory activities.
This was the threat:
"Once he had coerced Alice into sending intimate images, Fordyce convinced her that she was complicit in making and sharing child sexual abuse material. Fearing arrest, she kept everything secret from her family and friends."
That headline suggests someone has copied her photo and used them on a phishing account. It's much worse - someone is impersonating her and talking to men about having a rape fantasy. Also that doesn't seem to be illegal in Canada.
It's a pretty big risk to make any kind of conclusions off of shared images like this, not knowing what the earlier prompts were, including any possible jailbreaks or "role plays".
This should be upvoted so that it can be discussed on HN, since I think it is a dangerous trend. For some reason the previous story about violentacrez's outing didn't get too much discussion: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4647116
The irony is that the creep hunters, e.g. "Samantha" themselves want to remain anonymous.
But aside for that, although I find CreepShots and the like abhorrent, e.g. a teacher posting photos of his students online, I find what people like "Samantha" are doing almost equally bad. Contacting people's employers and esp. the police on an alleged crime as the first step seems not only cruel and unusual punishment but may in fact may be illegal. What if "Samantha" makes an error in her identification and contacts my employer?
I don't want to comment on the "In my personal opinion, not all speech deserves to be protected..." comment, which has hundreds of years of debate on it. But "Samantha's" assertion that
"But Samantha believes that CreepShots is a gateway drug to more dangerous hobbies. Fetishizing non-consent "indicates [that CreepShots posters] don't view women as people, and most will not be satisfied with just that level of violation," she said. "I want to make sure that the people around these men know what they're doing so they can reap social, professional, or legal consequences, and possibly save women from future sexual assault. These men are dangerous."
is quite indefensible, to me. The idea that porn (not that these pictures are porn) will lead to predatory behavior was the leading cry of old-school feminism, but is not so widely accepted.
> These are the stories fearmongers tell because it happened to one or two people many years ago.
Here's a recent one:[0]
> Gibson’s arrest grew out of an ongoing probe of the “Freenet” — an online network that allows users to anonymously share images, chat on message boards and access sites, the probable cause statement says.
> behaviour consistent with someone who has experienced sexual abuse (i.e. thoughts of suicide, weird night behaviour like taking baths, body issues as she got older)
Can you link to something about it? That behavior rings a bell
> Finally, why has this post (and previous related posts) been repeatedly flagged? It's very troubling, I expect this from some HN users
I'm not too sure if it's concerning YC in some way or just the techbro crowd being itself. Downvotes are typical here with child abuse related topics in general and especially if it concerns tech. But also there's a possibility that's just a random person and not really his sister.
> By way of example only, Talton sent or received messages that include the terms “jungle n***s” and “gross lesbians,” “butterfaces,” “rape,” “big rubber dog dick,” “pathetically obsessed pussy slave,” phrases such as “women don’t experience pain the way humans do,” “I’m never going to get to pin you down and fuck you again, am I...you know how hard I get when you humiliate me,” “now i have to jerk off before my meetings start” in addition to sending links containing explicit and misogynistic pornography.
> Arturo’s bombshell finding was that 13% of teen users of Instagram between the ages of 13-15 said that they themselves had received unwanted sexual advances…. In the past week!
This is the biggest takeaway from the article for me, because it implies that HN user corysama's prediction that attaching a small amount of risk to the activity will have a significant impact on its incidence is essentially correct:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836242
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