There Are No Girls on the Internet - We’re wrong about trafficking, with Michael Hobbes - BEST OF TANGOTI

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

Odds are, you’re probably not going to be kidnapped and sold into sex trafficking in a Target parking lot in broad daylight. On the fantastic podcast You’re Wrong About, Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall debunk the thinking that leads to moral panics. Michael explains what we’re all getting wrong about trafficking and why it matters. Listen to You’re Wrong About: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/human-trafficking/id1380008439?i=1000465289965 Want to support the show? (thank you!) Subscribe, tell a friend, leave a review, or buy some merch at There Are No Girls on the Internet’s store: TANGOTI.COM/STORE Join our newsletter: Tangoti.com/newsletter Say hello at [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.

Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Tolodano. It's our favorite time of the year on our podcast point game, the playoffs. We're digging into the biggest surprises of the season. And I'm looking back on some of my greatest playoff moments. If we didn't talk ever again, I was harmed.

You just understood. That's how personal it got. Wow. Then after that game seven, Marquis come in, he's like, you know I love you, dog. You know, it's all love. This was just playoffs. This was just basketball. So listen to Point Game on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, it's a Shanti Plummer from Fudderound and Find out. This week, Azee Fud and I sat down with Step and Curry. Step talks pressure, confidence, and what it really? takes to stay great. There's different categories, I guess, so I'm like conditioning, shooting drills where you try to simulate kind of games. Look at her face. We have a love-hate relationship with those

because you know you're getting something out of it. You don't look forward to those days. Listen to Futter Around and Find out on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. So real quick, before we get started, I just wanted to give a quick shout out to all of our listeners around the world. And I wanted to let you all know that I am spending most of my July in Portugal. I've never been to Portugal before, and I am beyond excited. And I know we have listeners

in Portugal, so if you're listening in Portugal and you have a recommendation of something I just have to know about or have to check out while I'm there, please let me know. And if you are a listener and you want to maybe do an event or a live show or a meetup while I'm in Portugal, please reach out and maybe we can try to make it happen. There Are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. So this week, we did the first part of our two-part series looking at the claim that Lena Dunham sexually abused her sibling. Episode one was all about the claim, where it came from and the cultural climate that fueled it. Next week, we're looking more into the context.

And one of my main reasons for wanting to talk about this issue is because I think it really shows what happens when lies, misleading, or inaccurate information, is injected into conversations about what are really serious issues. You know, we're not even really able to have a real conversation about what, actually happened because it gets so muddled with the lies. And it's a problem. And this all really reminded me of an episode we did with Michael Hobbs, formerly of one of my favorite podcasts you're wrong about, all about how the topic of trafficking has kind of suffered from the same thing. So let's listen in. You're listening to Disinformed, a mini series from there are no girls on the internet. I'm Bridget Todd. Bad guys are coming. They're coming for you and they're coming for your

kids. If you spent any time on social media in the last few years, you've probably heard some version of a story like that. Strangers are waiting, lurking, generally in the parking lot or the aisles of a big box store like Target, and they're hunting down women and their children to snatch them up in broad daylight for trafficking. This is not new at all. I definitely grew up hearing horror stories, like the one about the woman driver terrified by a man tailgating her and flashing her high beams at night, but he's actually just trying to warn her that a man is in her backseat waiting to strike. Those stories definitely made a big impression on me, but instead of them just being passed around in homeroom, add in social media and stories like this can spread to peak virality online.

Stories like these are especially common on social media. Just search the hashtag sex trafficking awareness on TikTok, and you'll find thousands of women making videos about how traffickers tied a ribbon or a zip tie to their car to mark them as a victim. Or how a van parked too close to them in parking lot, and it was a near miss for a trafficking attempt. The only issue is, this kind of trafficking, where someone is snatched by a stranger in a public place, is exceedingly rare. Yet videos like these often go viral on social media, leading to the impression that women should be afraid anytime they leave their homes to go to the store. In this two-part episode, we'll explore the roots of online panics around trafficking, why they're so dangerous, and hear from

two people who are fighting back with facts. The podcast you're wrong about is kind of a goal to standard for revisiting moral panics and debunking the commonly held beliefs that led to them. Hosts Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall have found that in many ways, we're basically just doing a mad lives where the blank is filled with some kind of boogeyman society can blame at times when people are feeling anxious or scared. Like the satanic panic of the 80s and 90s, where parents were horrified that satanic cults were ritualistically abusing children. Only, that was never really happening. Basically, there is always some big, scary threat that we need to be watching out for. My name's Michael Hobbs. I'm the co-host of a podcast called You're Wrong About and another podcast called Maintenance Phase.

So online, I find that so many conversations about big complex issues, things like trafficking or homelessness, are really dominated by people who don't really know what they're talking about and who are either spreading bad information intentionally or unintentionally. When you started making your wrong about, were you all setting out to give people the tools to push back against this kind of bad information? No. Like, this was completely accidental. We had no idea when we started that we would find out that America keeps having the same moral panic over and over again. This was not something that we thought, you know, it's all the same thing. It's like a tide that comes in and out. You know, the satanic panic is always with us. QAnon is always with us.

We had no idea that we would come up with that. It's just sort of we research sort of debunkable episodes in history. And when you start debunking them, you're like an hour or two into the research. And you're like, oh, it's this one again. oh, we're going to do the thing where they're like strangers coming to get your kids, right? Or there's some societal outgroup, right? Like homeless people, like trans people, like sex offenders that we don't like. And we're going to project this extreme power onto them.

We're going to project this extreme rapaciousness onto them. There's millions of them. You know, they're coming to the border. They're trying to steal your kids and get them into street gangs. I mean, it's like this madlibs where you can just throw in like, okay, which societal outgroup is it going to be? What are they doing to our kids today? Like, it's over and over again the same thing.

So we've both, me and my co-host Sarah Marshall, have become these like accidental insufferable debunkers where we're like, nope, same one. We're doing this again, guys. Like, let's calm it down. We've done this seven times before. So in my research around disinformation, particularly like false panics around things

that are rooted in people's identity, so whether it's trans folks, queer folks, you know, immigrants. It is always sort of the same thing. Like I feel right now we're seeing all of this legislation sort of meant to make you think as if trans children are like running the world. Like trans children are the biggest threat to your kids. Totally.

And it's the same tropes, right? They're coming for your kids. They're recruiting your kids. Like this is the same thing that Anita Bryant said about gay people in the 1970s and 1980s. Like we're just running exactly the same playbook. Anita Bryant was a singer and beauty queen who famously led the Save Our Children children campaign that attempted to save children by cracking down on gay people having rights.

And we're just mad living in a new societal outgroup. Absolutely. I mean, at the beginning of the pandemic, I read a bunch of books about the black plague, just out of like more just out of like morbid curiosity. And, you know, what you find in these old panics, you have these times of societal anxiety, you had some of the biggest pogromes against Jews in Europe in history, right? It was like there's this big thing we can't explain. There's all of these anxieties.

People are dying all around me. Who can we blame? We don't want to look at any existing societal structures. We don't want to look at something that's just difficult for us to explain. It's sort of out of our scientific knowledge. So there's this group here that seems sort of shifting, and we don't really like them. Let's blame them and kill a bunch of them.

It's like these things are old ancient human impulses. And they're very difficult to see at the time. But zooming out a little bit, you're like, oh, no, this is just what happens during times of anxiety. And isn't the perfect recipe for a very anxious society? A global pandemic? It's probably not a coincidence that as COVID worsened. We saw more and more content about QAnon and save the children,

purporting to save kids from some perceived danger lurking out in the world. Why do you think right now, this specific moment in politics and culture, why are we seeing this resurgence of panic around sex trafficking and trafficking, do you think? I mean, it's hard to say exactly. I think, you know, this really hit its peak last summer, all of this Q&On, hashtag Save the Children stuff. And it really seems like there was a moment where, you know, we're in the middle of a pandemic. Information was all over the place, right? Like, remember we didn't, like, are we wearing masks?

Are we not wearing masks? Some states are in lockdown. Some states are aggressively not in lockdown. It was just this time where nobody really knew what was going on. And there's some research that indicates that sort of at times when you're really angry, you search for information. that reinforces your worldview. And at times when you're really anxious, you are more open to information

that doesn't reinforce your worldview. So all summer, everybody's inside. We're all on our phones. There's nothing else to do. We're looking at the internet. And all of a sudden, you have people whose minds are a little bit more open to things like, well, maybe the real danger

to children isn't COVID. Maybe it's actually these, you know, white van driving traffickers who come from other countries and they're going to kidnap my kids and take them abroad or these these narratives that just make no sense, right? And, you know, at the heart of it, the little seed in the middle of it was this insane QAnon stuff, right? Where it's like adrenachrome and like Hillary Clinton is like cutting the faces off a baby, like completely nuts stuff.

But there's enough sort of plausible deniability around that that you can very easily say, well, I care about children. And so what's the harm of sharing this little meme? Like, what's the harm of taking this little thing on Facebook that says, you know, infamously, there was one that said that children are thousands of times more likely to die of trafficking than of COVID. And so it feels, you know, and it was in like the Instagram aesthetic, right, where it's got like the little logo and it's in pink and it's very shareable. And it's like, well, what's the harm? Like, I might as well share that. You know, if it helps save a kid or two, then I'm doing something good. And that's some sort of, that's a feeling of certainty in the world, right?

but nobody thinks about what it does to reinforce these just deranged myths that aren't helping children, they're not helping non-children, they're not helping anybody. But it's easy to forget that when you're like, well, what's the harm of sharing this? And then all of a sudden these bananas memes start just bouncing around the internet for months. Yeah, I think honestly listening to your wrong about was something that really helped make that transition for me. Because, you know, for a while I'd be like, well, if this person thinks it's going to do some good to share this untrue meme on their Facebook page about trafficking or about children, who isn't hurting? Now I've come to see that, okay, well, if we over-emphasize the risks of little kids being

like snatched up or things like that, what are we under-emphasizing? You know, kids, like youth who are facing homelessness, youth who are put in precarious or, you know, bad or dangerous situations, things that are much more common. Like, if we focus on this big, scary thing that isn't happening, all of the things that actually are happening. We're just taking attention away from that. Right. And there's also this retributive aspect, too, where a lot of those memes that went around were about sort of catching the pedophiles, catching the traffickers. You know, we have to find the evil people and we have to root them out of our society. And that's not where the threats to children come from. The threats

to children are primarily in the family. A lot of it is things like homelessness. There's very few youth homeless shelters in most cities in America. There's also a completely broken foster care system. So when you look at things like the sort of missing and exploited child hotline, 80% of the calls are coming from foster care. So when we talk about trafficking, we're mostly talking about runaways. We're mostly talking about kids who are abused at home, abused in foster care, they're queer, they're trans. They need a place to stay. They don't need somebody else to go to jail forever. And when we're sharing these memes that are sort of blaming all of these societal problems on these societal others that we already don't like or are a little bit wary of anyway,

all we're really doing is contributing to these retributive solutions which do not make children safer. Yeah, and I also think it does kind of come down to what you were talking about before, this idea of like wanting to catch the bad guys. That's so much more exciting and fun than, oh, we need to confront some of these systemic ills in our society that allow for already marginalized people a fault with the cracks. That's boring. It's so much more fun to be like, yeah, I'm going to track down these bad guys. Let's take a quick break.

Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter.

Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business.

Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-8-4. 4-4-Ey heart. Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, actress, mother, lover, and a Gen X woman walking through life one hot flash and hormonal crying jag at a time. You ladies know what I mean. I'll bet you a perimenopausal chin here you do.

So let's talk about it. Join me on my new podcast. How hard can it be with Deanna Maria Riva, where I call on my Gen X squads from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate midlife's most fantastic BS. All of a sudden, I'd had hanginess happening on my own. I was like, what the hell is that? I was married when I had her, so I didn't even consider how empty that Ness was going to be. Mood swings, night sweats, fupas, sex drive. Wait, what sex?

Dating at 45. How hard can it be getting naked at 50 with the new guy? That one's kind of hard, you know? Well, that's lighting. They say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears, or tears of laughter, and dive into it, unfiltered and unbothered and ask, how hard can it be? I cannot believe I'm about to say this out loud in public. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Deanna Maria Riva as part of My Cultura Podcast Network available on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast Point Game is about defining the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows. Without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got him in the...

manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nash would get that thing.

That man, hell get the flying. He run up the court, licking his fingers, why he got the ball like. You go through a training camp with that Isaiah, you figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On our back, an Instagram video made by mom influencer Katie Sorensen, where she said that two strangers tried to kidnap her kids in a Michael's craft store in California, got over two million views.

Monday of this week, my children were the targets of attempted kidnap. which is such a weird thing to even vocalize. But it happened. And I want to share that story with you in an effort to raise awareness as to what signs to look for and to just encourage parents to be more aware of their surroundings and what is going on around them. Sorensen said that she overheard the couple making comments

about her kid's appearance, and the man even tried to grab at her child stroller. But when the couple saw their picture being posted on Save the Children forums online, in connection with an attempted kidnapping, they came forward to deny any wrongdoing and cooperated with the police investigation. Grandparents themselves, they said they had just been discussing their own grandkids, not Sorensen's kids. Their daughter says Sorensen's allegations were racially motivated because her parents are Latino. Police cleared the couple of any wrongdoing and closed the case, and Sorensen says that she shared her story just to warn other parents to remain vigilant.

But this is a great example of why sharing stories just for awareness is not always a helpful thing to do. It also overemphasizes the idea that white kids are at risk for being kidnapped by strangers from public places and affluent suburbs, which when it comes to trafficking is exceedingly rare, while de-emphasizing that the existing threats out there are much more likely to be family members or trusted community members praying on vulnerable people, and that those targeted are more often than not marginalized youth, queer kids or trans kids or kids facing poverty or homelessness. Like someone who's kidnapping children and taking them across state lines

and keeping them in motel rooms and forcing them to have sex with people, which almost doesn't exist. I mean, the number of confirmed cases of that, you can almost count on one or two hands. It's extremely rare. Kids are running away from home. They don't have a place to stay. They don't feel safe where they're sleeping. They end up sleeping on the streets. Somebody pulls up in a car and says, I'll give you a place to stay tonight if you have sex with me.

Like that is something. It's called survival sex. It is a very well-known phenomenon. It is a huge problem. And the way that you solve it isn't by putting in it. anybody in jail. It's having a phone number for those kids to call and a van comes and picks them up and takes them somewhere safe. And we've known this forever and we're not doing anything about it. And so that's less memeable. That's less sort of satisfying to share online. But it's like we just

need more places for kids to go who need somewhere to sleep. Like that's it. Absolutely. And I think you make a good point that the people who are often targeted for this kind of thing are queer kids, trans kids, youth of color, black youth. And I think it's so interesting that if you spend any time scrolling TikTok, the people who are taking up the most space in terms of talking about the risk that trafficking poses are white women, you know, suburban white women. And so I can't help but see this real disconnect in terms of who is actually the target and the actual person who is harmed by this and the people who are talking about it

and making the most content about it and sort of like garing people about it. What do you think is going on there? I will just say, for the record, no one is doing zip ties on your car at Target. No one is hiding under your car to cut your ankle with a razor blade. I mean, the minute you Google, or even like, you don't even have to Google. You just have to think about these things. Does it make sense to lie down underneath somebody's car for hours and wait for them with like a razor blade in your hand and then slice their Achilles heel? Like that's not a fun or smart thing to do for somebody who wants to try to kill you, right?

So all of these kinds of stories, it's just, it's very important to just say, like, on their face, stuff like this really doesn't happen very much. We know that the primary risks to women are from their partners and from their dads. And if you're somebody younger, it's like a soccer coach or somebody in power, right? It's like a weird scout leader who's asking you to stay over at his house the night before one of these camping trips. Like, these are the threats to people and to children. and they're mostly from people who have enough societal power that you don't trust your gut. So one of the things you find in a lot of these stories is parents will say, well, you know, we thought it was a little bit weird that, you know, the priest asked our son to sleep over. But, you know, he's a priest.

How could he ever, you know, how could he ever harm our son? He's a pretty, like, this felt weird to us, but, you know, he has this sort of societally bestowed power that makes us not trust our gut. Like, this is what power does. And so the thing that we need to look for are places where we have power. power in society and we don't have accountability. And we already have so much accountability. Like, I don't want to imply that like there's no such thing as somebody in a white van who's kidnapping kids, whatever. But it's much more common for someone to abuse the trust of children and especially abuse the trust of marginalized children, right? Because if you don't feel safe at home,

you might turn to a soccer coach as somebody to talk to, as somebody who feels safe, even though they aren't, right? This is the process of sort of making somebody unsafe and physically threatening somebody often does come down to tricking them and looking for these elements of marginalization and looking for these aspects of marginalization that make them easier to trick. So at every level, it's the vulnerable kids, it's finding the vulnerable kids and giving them actual safe places to go and safe adults to actually talk to about this stuff. So again, boring. But like that's not something that you can see in Target, but it's, this is what society needs and it's what we've needed for decades.

We're just not doing. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL, late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform?

We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast.

Radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at IHeartadvertising.com. That's Iheartadvertising.com. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast's Point Game is about defying the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs.

I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nash would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He running up the court, licking his fingers, why he got the.

the bar like after you go through a training camp with that Isaiah you figure it out real quick get your ass up and down the court and you're going to get the ball so listen to point game on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hey i'm diana maria riva actress mother lover and a gen x woman walking through life one hot flash and hormonal crying jag at a time you ladies know what i mean i'll bet you a perimenopausal chin here you do so let's talk about it join me on my new podcast how hard can it be with diana Maria riva where I call on my Gen X squads from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate Midlife's most fantastic BS.

All of a sudden, I'd had hanginess happening on my own. I was like, what the hell is that? I was married when I had her, so I didn't even consider how empty that nest was going to be. Mood swings, night sweats, fupas, sex drive. Wait, what sex? Dating at 45, how can it be getting naked at 50 with the new guy. That one's kind of hard, you know?

Well, that's lighting. They say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears or tears of laughter, and dive into it unfiltered and unbothered and ask, How Hard Can It Be? I cannot believe I'm about to say this out loud in public. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Riva as part of My Cultura Podcast Network available on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. When women make videos on social media about them or their kids, narrowly escaping being hunted by, would-be traffickers, they often go viral. That's because we've deemed it okay to talk about the perceived threat of strangers or the other. But what about when women talk about people they know abusing their power? People in their communities or in their own homes.

Even though the actual threat is much more likely to be someone you know, not a stranger in a van, women are not always supported when we speak up about it. I do think as a society, it's okay for women and families to call out, like, quote unquote bad guys if they're scary monsters showing up in a van. But if it's somebody that lives with somebody in your family, somebody in your church, somebody in your community, like we're pretty uncomfortable with women, you know, calling out people in those positions who abuse their power. But somehow it's like totally fine if you're thinking of it as like calling out a bad guy in a van.

And that's also, that's another aspect of marginalization, right? That if it's a poor mother, maybe she's a single mom, maybe she's working two jobs and she doesn't see her kids that much. and she goes to some authority and she says, you know, I feel a little bit weird about this soccer coach. People might not believe her. They're like, isn't she a bad mother anyway?

Right? So at every level, marginalization makes it so much harder to address these problems because that just gives, you know, the priest is going to have a lot more credibility than the single mom who's not home as much as she'd like to be. So at every level, these are the things

that we have to address and setting up formal systems to investigate these things and actual accountability mechanisms. So I keep saying it. I only have one argument on the show, but like we just need to do boring stuff.

Like, I wish it was more interesting than that. No, it's so true. And, you know, you talk a little bit, you talked a bit about like zip ties on your car and people hiding under your car. Like, what role do you think that local media and also law enforcement has to play in this? Because I've read articles where on its face, it would appear that a police officer or somebody in law enforcement has confirmed, yes, we saw this zip tie on the cars and this is a

trafficking thing. But actually when you like dig a little deeper into it, you're like, okay, this police officer is confirming that this person called the police and they came for this reason. But it's not actually, there's not actually any proof that like this was tied to a trafficking attempt. What role do you think that journalists and law enforcement should play in making sure that these panics don't spin out of control? One of the ones, I think it was last summer, maybe last fall, was these poor people had their wedding and they had some flowers left over from their wedding and they thought it would be cute to put them on people's car in a parking lot.

And then people came out to their cars and found a flower. And they freaked out. They're like, it's traffickers. I marked the traffickers there after me. And these poor people who were just trying to do something nice are like all of a sudden sort of smeared as traffickers. And what was amazing was the cops sort of like reinforced this. It's like, oh, you know, we've had threats recently of trafficking.

You know, we've heard rumors of trafficking. And, of course, the local media reinforces this too, that, you know, trafficking is a huge problem in this area. and it could happen to anyone, but not in this particular case. And there's no sort of attempt to debunk the meta myth here that people are staking you out in parking lots to kidnap you. Like that even for like truly evil people, that doesn't make that much sense. Parking lots are really, really public.

And it's like broad daylight. And why would you leave a flower to like communicate with the other traffickers? Like just text the other traffickers. Like it doesn't make any sense on any level. But we get this weird credulity. especially around this issue, that, you know, one of the tenets of journalism is you're supposed to do sort of both sides, right? We saw this for climate change for years, right? Like, there's the people that say that climate change is real, and then there's the whack jobs

who say that it's not, but we have to put both of them on the air, right? But then weirdly, when it comes to trafficking and these other stranger danger myths, there's no need to speak to like actual sex workers who are like, uh, this is not how sex work works. There's no need to talk to actual child advocates or social workers. There's no need to talk to anybody who's skeptical of this. It's just like, well, cops say there's a bunch of trafficking out there, so let's just tell people that. So it's just really frustrating that there isn't the same level of scrutiny and the same journalistic standards applied to these kinds of stories that hit something like really deep within us of like, oh, this is the danger I have to worry about.

Yeah, I think I hadn't even thought about that, but it's a good point. And I, part of me wonders if it's a little bit of hesitation because, and I struggle with this as well, you don't want to feel like you're invalidating somebody's experience, right? Like, if somebody feels like they were targeted or they were, like something sketchy was going on, I want people to feel like that experience is okay to talk about. But I also don't want someone to use that experience to feel something that's just not true that's going to result in more harm. Right.

And there's also, there are real cases of this happening. I mean, this is one of the challenges with moral panics is that most moral panics, they never come from nothing, right? We had this massive panic in the 1980s and 1990s. about quote-unquote stranger danger that, you know, kids were going to come and steal your kids. And like, there were some truly horrific, awful,

heartbreaking cases where this really did happen. This is why, this is how we got all of these, you know, Jacob's law and Megan's law and all these laws that are named after kids and things like the Amber Alerts. So there were real cases, but the problems that these very small number of truly heartbreaking true cases

get expanded into this massive national problem that we all need to be worried about. And it very quickly becomes this thing of like, well, if it saves one child, right? We can sacrifice our civil liberties. We can incarcerate a bunch of people on sort of spurious grounds if it saves one child.

And one thing, you know, as somebody who is a urban cyclist and somebody who takes like urban safety very seriously, this is not a standard that we apply to the lives of children in other contexts, right? If you want to save the life of one child, you'd crack down on guns. Guns kill 3,000 kids a year. Cars kill 6,000 kids.

a year, right? You could make the speed limit in every single city 15 miles an hour throughout the country, and you would literally save the lives of like 1,500 kids, because most kids are killed by speeding cars. But that's not a sacrifice that we're willing to make, because that's something that I would have to sacrifice. I would have to drive slower. Whereas whenever it comes to these, you know, if it saves a life of one child, these kinds of sacrifices, it's always somebody else who's going to make the sacrifice. It's somebody else who's going to go to jail. The effects of this are going to be inflicted on a societal outgroup. So this entire logic of like, you know, we must do this to save one child, that's great logic, but it's not a logic that we apply to any other social problem.

That's so true. And I think, yeah, I think the idea that the people who are going to be further criminalized, harmed by this, by like when we make laws, you know, kind of quickly, as long as it's not like me feeling that repercussion, you know, as long as it's someone else dealing with it, I think that we're much more comfortable with that. what can we do to avoid falling into moral panics, even ones that are like well-intentioned? Yeah. You know, how can we avoid this on a wider scale? I mean, I want to say, like, be careful with what you share, but like I'm not all that careful with what I share. Like, there's a lot of information out there.

It's really hard. Like people, you know, we shouldn't all be having to read the nutrition label on every single piece of information. I will say just on these kinds of things, it's never strangers. It's never, like these kinds of monomists, anything that looks like the sort of, remember the flashing your high beams, gang initiation stuff, those are totally bunk. Anything involving like random targeting of civilians, it's that really never happens. Anything with strangers kidnapping you in broad daylight, I think there's like certain categories

of anecdotes that are just like, these ones never turn out to be true. So we should just stop sharing them. Like don't feel like you have to warn people about anything involving a problem. parking lot. If a parking lot is involved, people are safe. I mean, they're all like videotaped at this point. Exactly. Like people are safe in parking lots. Just like leave the parking lots alone. It's fine. It's so funny because they went back and listened to the episode that y'all did about sex trafficking and the list of things that they tell young people to look out for that could be signs of trafficking, things like if somebody is moody or if somebody all of a sudden starts dressing different or wearing

different clothes or if they get a barcode tattoo. As somebody who grew up kind of, you know, gossy, goss-adjacent, altie-adjacent, I knew two different people who had barcode tattoos. Right. All of the warning signs of trafficking are like teenage stuff. It's like, oh, she's moody. Or like, her taste and music changes. You're like, that's not a sign of trafficking. That's a sign of teenagerness. Yeah, it's a sign of adolescence. Yeah. So another, I mean, another like rule of thumb that just don't share anything involving trafficking, basically. Like, I think this word, this whole field is so tainted at this point that it's just not useful to share any of the viral post statistics.

Like, until we know more, just like hold off on the trafficking stuff, gang. Yeah, that's great advice. I would also say, like, not that I think that any celebrities listen to my podcast, but when well-meaning celebrities get involved in a trafficking campaign, shut it down, right? Like, Ashton Cuthier. I'm sure you're a good guy. Don't use it. It upsets me when I see celebrities who I'm sure, like, their heart is in the right place.

But, like, getting involved in trafficking campaigns that are tied to specific legislation, like Sesta Fasta. It's like, ooh, like, it just does such a bad look on such a complicated issue. Yeah. I think the biggest thing is that, you know, the trafficking field right now is this weird, unholy alliance between very well-meaning celebrities and I think well-meaning people. And not well-meaning mostly Republican legislatures who want to use this as an excuse to crack down on immigration, to crack down on sex work, to crack down on children, anything that they perceive as posing a threat to children, which is mostly like trans people. So I think any time we have any bills being pushed by these super Republican legislators, I think just like be careful with that stuff. Like, anytime you have the religious right and the Republican Party pushing one of these bills, like, just slow down and, like, ask actual sex workers. Like, what is in this bill and are you in support of it?

Like, over and over again, we end up talking over the groups that actually get affected by this and just, like, know some sex workers, follow a bunch of sex workers online and see what they're mad about. And, like, they are not mad about this kind of stuff. They're mad about the legislators that are trying to take their rights away again. There is so much to say about how we talk about trafficking online, especially on TikTok where so many viral claims about trafficking take off. Next, we'll hear from Jessica, who goes by Bloodbath and Beyond on TikTok about her use of TikTok to spread accurate information about trafficking. When we start drowning out that conversation, we're not only are we not letting that get the spotlight where it really needs to be the forefront of this conversation. we are also hurting the actual victims directly themselves because we're creating this idea and this culture around what trafficking looks like

and what the average victim looks like. So when a victim comes forward and says, I think I was sex trafficked or I need help, people are less inclined to believe them because we've created this narrative that most trafficking victims are innocent, upper middle class of white women getting kidnapped from Target. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please help us grow by subscribing. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say,

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