Posted on 02/07/2019 2:05:32 AM PST by blueplum
A failure to grasp how technology and social media is being used to coerce, control, blackmail and track the movements of children as young as 11 by “county lines” drug gangs has seen an epidemic of child criminal exploitation spiral out of control in the UK.
“For the past seven or eight years we have been warning the government, the authorities, teachers, anyone who would listen, that technology is the central organising feature of the county lines business model,” said Sheldon Thomas, a consultant on gang behaviour through his organisation Gangsline. (snip)
...Snapchat is used heavily as a recruitment channel, with gangs posting clips of children in trap houses with new trainers, piles of money and weapons. “We’ve seen Snapchat posts with very young children posing with £30,000 in cash,” said Sawyer. “Gangs have always glamorised their lifestyles to suck in new recruits, but the growth of platforms like Instagram and Snapchat has moved this to another level.” Once children are recruited,
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
One good reason I will not be buying my children a ‘smart phone’. They may get my dumb phone, though.
JoMa
Start spreading the rumor that all Smart phones use pigs blood in their plastic mixture. Holding a smart phone is just like kissing a pig.
Probably more important (maybe near impossible) is to keep them off of social media.
If they snare them on social media it is cheap to give the kid a phone.
For sure get them a phone, it is a matter of safety.
Bookmark
better than pigs blood is to pressure our critters at every pre-election town meeting to hammer-down on these social apps. Free speech is one thing but they’re all basically contributing to the exploitation and delinquency of minors.
Editing bots on Wiki fight with each other on a daily basis over uploaded content, so there’s no reason those same type of editing bots can’t be used to flag potential child exploitation uploads on Snapchat or Instagram or Twitter or whatever. They all certainly have bots that flag conservative upload! so it’s unacceptable for them to claim they can’t control the content.
If safety was the primary issue, I would buy each of my children a gun before I would buy them a phone.
JoMa
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