This is so freaking sad. The criminals behind this are reprehensible—but the buck doesn’t stop there. It is the responsibility of social media platforms to work to prevent these schemes from succeeding and spreading on their watch.
https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/west-virginia-boy-sextortion-scheme/
This is why trust and safety (T&S) is so important for online platforms. It’s not just what you might think of as moderation, but actively working to safeguard the people on a platform from harm.
It means combating the spread of harms including hate speech, grooming, child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), terrorist and violent extremist content (TVEC), and extortion.
T&S means using the DIRE framework¹: detecting, investigating, reviewing, and enforcing consequences on and off the platform.
¹My colleagues at @roost.tools literally wrote the paper about the DIRE T&S framework: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5369158
These stories always make me sick, but remind me why we’re doing what we’re doing at ROOST: building Robust Open Online Safety Tools to enable platforms to scale their T&S efforts in a more transparent way.
We know that the right approach is to bring the superpowers of open source development and community to the T&S domain to collaborate on this shared layer of Internet infrastructure.
If you are interested in using these tools—and potentially contributing back to the emerging open source T&S commons—please check out https://roost.tools. We’re a nonprofit building open source T&S tools and community, and we’d love for you to join us.
