The CyberTipline operates somewhat differently: the centralized system collects reports from the public and “electronic service providers”-a category which includes social media platforms, but also companies like eBay, Dropbox, and Microsoft-each year. But his findings neglected that 99.8 percent of those kids were later recovered. When challenged, the former NCMEC president Ernie Allen pointed to a third report which estimated an average of 1.7 million missing children reported each year. One of the studies, a Washington Post fact-check found, was compiled in a way that allowed some incidents to be counted two or three times. It relied on two studies, both collected during the 1990s, which included runaways, abandoned kids, and unhoused children. Most notoriously, the commonly-cited data point that “over 100,000 children in the United States are commercially exploited each year,” which was mentioned in a 2010 congressional testimony by the then-president of NCMEC, is based on decades-old data.
Statistics on child exploitation can be deeply misleading. 2020 piece about the account, “is just how dominant the Facebook right truly is… The result is a kind of parallel media universe that left-of-center Facebook users may never encounter, but that has been stunningly effective in shaping its own version of reality.” “What sticks out, when you dig in to the data,” Roose wrote in an Aug. In recent years, the platform has become a hub for right-wing-oriented conspiracy groups-a trend documented by an automated Twitter account created by New York Times journalist Kevin Roose to track its most popular pages each day.
Born out of an independent fundraising effort for the century-old nonprofit of the same name, the movement was quickly co-opted by QAnon adherents and conspiracy theorists, boosting baseless claims about a global cabal of elite pedophiles that includes everyone from Tom Hanks to Chrissy Teigen.ĭespite its dearth of accurate data, #SaveTheChildren proved wildly popular-spurring summer-long protests across the country, many of them planned and promoted on Facebook. The campaign was buoyed in part by an increased interest in eliminating child sex trafficking that gained momentum over the summer under the hashtag #SaveTheChildren. The campaign, which began in February of 2020, presented itself as a “a non-religious, non-partisan effort.” But it was organized by Exodus Cry, a fringe Evangelical group which The Daily Beast has covered extensively, that has spent years lobbying to abolish the entire commercial sex industry. Their involvement coincided with a year-long campaign called #Traffickinghub, which aimed to shut down their subsidiary, Pornhub, for its alleged role in perpetuating underage human trafficking. Last year was the first year MindGeek participated in the study. Notably, MindGeek-the Canada-based parent company of porn websites like Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn-reported far fewer than Facebook: 13,229. Facebook accounted for nearly 95 percent of the 21.7 million reports across all platforms. By contrast, Google cited 546,704 incidents, Twitter had 65,062, Snapchat reported 144,095, and TikTok found 22,692. The study identified over 20.3 million reported incidents related to child pornography or trafficking (classified as “child sexual abuse material”) on the social media site. Last year, the vast majority of online child exploitation reports were found on Facebook, according to new data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) CyberTipline.