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WARNING: Harrison Haynes was a 12-year-old, video game-loving middle school student when he said he met a stranger online through a video game.

Over the next few months, Haynes says that stranger, who claimed to be 19-years-old and whom Haynes never met in person, became someone whom Haynes considered his “best friend.”

“I’m not making friends, so this gaming space was like a really good space for solace for me,” Haynes, now a 20-year-old college student, told “Good Morning America.”

Referring to his friendship with the “teenager” he said he knew only as a fellow video game lover, he added, “We had so much fun.”

READ MORE HERE.

There are so many ways that the U.S. business sector can support survivors of sex and labor trafficking, starting with being informed about how to recognize and respond to suspected human trafficking in your workplace. Businesses can also support survivors and help them, over the long and short terms, by providing vocational training opportunities to survivors, and they can offer safe and quality long-term jobs that ensure economic stability and financial well-being.

Companies have an additional, powerful lever they can further deploy to aid survivors of human trafficking in their recovery: employment. As employers, companies are uniquely positioned to offer quality training and stable incomes. Vocational training and good jobs enable survivors to better build the skills and resources they need to achieve financial security and long-term safety. Doing so also helps survivors to overcome socioeconomic vulnerabilities, reducing the likelihood that they or their dependents will be exploited in the future.”

Let’s rally around this movement. If you can help and support this and own or operate a business, please contact [email protected]

Read more here. 

Thom Hartmann Writes –

This week saw a dramatic turn in our nation’s desperate efforts to clean up the increasingly poisonous online sewers that we call social media.

First, the backstory:

If you publish a newspaper or newsletter (like this one) and you publish “illegal” content — encouragement of crimes or homicide, offer to sell drugs, display child porn, advocate overthrowing the government by violence — you can go to jail. If you publish things that defame or lie about persons or corporations, you can be sued into bankruptcy.

If you own a bookstore or newsstand and distribute books, magazines, and newspapers and offer for sale illegal content — child or snuff porn, stolen copyrighted material, instructions for making illegal drugs or weapons — you can also go to jail. And if you sell materials that openly defame individuals or corporations, you can also be sued into bankruptcy.

In the first category, you’d be a publisher. In the second, you’d be a distributor.

But what is social media? Particularly those types of social media that use an algorithm to push user-produced content out to people who haven’t explicitly asked for it?

Twenty-eight years ago, social media sites like CompuServe and AOL were regulated as if they were publishers, with the occasional/secondary oversight as if they were distributors. They had an obligation to make sure that illegal or defamatory content wasn’t published on their sites, or, if it was, to remove it within a reasonable time period.

The internet back then was a relatively safe and peaceful place. I know, as I ran a large part of one of the largest social media sites that existed at the time.

But then things got weird.

Back in 1996, some geniuses in Congress thought, “Hey, let’s do away with the entire concept of the publisher or distributor having responsibility for what happens in their place if that publisher or distributor happens to be operating online as what is called social media.”

Seriously.  Selling drugs, trading in guns and ammunition, human trafficking, planning terrorist attacks, overthrowing governments, sparking genocides, promoting open lies and naked defamation. All good. No problem.

Read more here. 

Thom Hartmann writes –

This week saw a dramatic turn in our nation’s desperate efforts to clean up the increasingly poisonous online sewers that we call social media.

First, the backstory:

If you publish a newspaper or newsletter (like this one) and you publish “illegal” content — encouragement of crimes or homicide, offer to sell drugs, display child porn, advocate overthrowing the government by violence — you can go to jail. If you publish things that defame or lie about persons or corporations, you can be sued into bankruptcy.

If you own a bookstore or newsstand and distribute books, magazines, and newspapers and offer for sale illegal content — child or snuff porn, stolen copyrighted material, instructions for making illegal drugs or weapons — you can also go to jail. And if you sell materials that openly defame individuals or corporations, you can also be sued into bankruptcy.

In the first category, you’d be a publisher. In the second, you’d be a distributor.

But what is social media? Particularly those types of social media that use an algorithm to push user-produced content out to people who haven’t explicitly asked for it?

Twenty-eight years ago, social media sites like CompuServe and AOL were regulated as if they were publishers, with the occasional/secondary oversight as if they were distributors. They had an obligation to make sure that illegal or defamatory content wasn’t published on their sites, or, if it was, to remove it within a reasonable time period.

The internet back then was a relatively safe and peaceful place. I know, as I ran a large part of one of the largest social media sites that existed at the time.

But then things got weird.

Read more here. 

Our goal is raising awareness, educating and helping you and your families stay safe. Realtime, online, we live in a new world. It is up to us to be aware. It is up to us to #BeAWarrior.

Subscribe to Lynn’s Warriors Channel here. 

Thank you. We need ALL of you. We cannot do this alone.

Parents often say parenting is one of the best jobs but also one of the hardest. I see this reflected in the faces of new parents who radiate love for thei babies through their sleep deprivation. I hear it in the voices of more veteran parents who delight in their children’s emerging personalities even as they grapple with how to keep them safe and healthy in a precarious and sometimes dangerous world. I recognize it in the wistfulness of parents whose teenagers are getting closer to leaving home for college, careers, or to start their own families.

Read more here. 

We warned you. Speak up and out and contact your representatives now. This violent gang traffics drugs and weapons and counts sex trafficking as main businesses. They have no regards for girls and women.

Denver’s decision to welcome migrants with open arms is bringing bloodshed to the suburbs next door. A notorious Venezuelan prison gang has set up shop in Aurora, Colorado — even though the town wanted no part of the influx of asylum seekers in the first place.

Aurora — a quiet bedroom community with a population of 390,000 directly east of the Mile-High City — has become a base of operations for the brutal Tren de Aragua gang, which has seized multiple apartment complexes and set off a wave of violent crime.

Denver leads the nation in new migrant arrivals per capita, with more than 40,000 arriving from the southern border since December 2022.

Read more here. 

ParentsTogether is leading a Day to End Meta Sextortion on August 27th to shine a spotlight on the serious and growing problem of sextortion on Meta platforms, Instagram and Facebook, and pressure Meta executives to take additional measures to prevent it.

What is sextortion?
Sextortion is a serious and sometimes deadly crime that has increased more than 150% in the past couple of years. The crime often follows a common pattern – a predator or organized group of criminals pose as a teen and convince a victim to share sexual images. The criminal then
blackmails the victim for money – often called financial sextortion – or more images – often called sexual or image-based sextortion. While any type of sextortion can happen to anyone, data indicates financial sextortion impacts more teen boys, and sexual sextortion impacts more tween and teen girls. Recent analysis of data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) by Thorn found Instagram was #1 platform where sextortionists meet kids, as well as the top platform where these predators threaten to share and actually share the images of the kids they are blackmailing. Facebook too, has a long history of connecting c children with sextortionists.

Sextortion is a serious crime, and by not taking it seriously and continually failing to put real prevention in place, Meta is putting thousands of kids at risk of exploitation, abuse, and even death. The parents who have experienced this harm first hand have had enough.

Learn more and how to participate here.

https://parentstogetheraction.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Day-to-End-Meta-Sextortion-Toolkit-1.pdf

Watch our discussion here.