why would 8 be brought up if it’s EVEN in a post about ODDS??????? the post said “every single ODD number has an ‘e’ in it” not “every single number with an ‘e’ is odd” what the fuck
He knew he'd be indicted because he deliberately ignored a request from the National Archives, refused to return all the documents required, did not secure the documents in his possession, told his lawyers to remove some documents before returning others, and lie to law enforcement about what was kept/returned. This goes above and beyond what Trumpsters accused Hillary Clinton of doing.
I encourage everybody to read the actual indictment document.
It's deliberately written as a narrative story and very easy to understand. The DOJ wanted us to see with our own eyes what the former guy did, when he did it, and why it was wrong.
Yes, it's 49 pages, but it's double-spaced with huge margins, crammed with photographs & tables. It only took me a few minutes, even accounting for the times I stopped to re-read some things because they are so batshit insane.
I guarantee you most people defending him haven't read it.
The long read: Our two-year investigation suggests that the tech giant Meta is struggling to prevent criminals from using its platforms to buy and sell children for sex
[TW: Child Sex Trafficking, Child Sexual Abuse]
Katie McQue and Mei-Ling McNamara at The Guardian:
Maya Jones* was only 13 when she first walked through the door of Courtney’s House, a drop-in centre for victims of child sex trafficking in Washington DC. “She was so young, but she was already so broken by what she’d been through,” says Tina Frundt, the founder of Courtney’s House. Frundt, one of Washington DC’s most prominent specialists in countering child trafficking, has worked with hundreds of young people who have suffered terrible exploitation at the hands of adults, but when Maya eventually opened up about what she had been through, Frundt was shaken.
Maya told Frundt that when she was 12, she had started receiving direct messages on Instagram from a man she didn’t know. She said the man, who was 28, told her she was really pretty. According to Frundt, Maya told her that after she started chatting with the man, he asked her to send him naked photos. She told Frundt that he said he would pay her $40 for each one. He seemed kind and he kept giving Maya compliments, which made her feel special. She decided to meet him in person.
Then came his next request: “Can you help me make some money?” According to Frundt, Maya explained that the man asked her to pose naked for photos, and to give him her Instagram password so that he could upload the photos to her profile. Frundt says Maya told her that the man, who was now calling himself a pimp, was using her Instagram profile to advertise her for sex. Before long, sex buyers started sending direct messages to her account, wanting to make a date. Maya told Frundt that she had watched, frozen, what was taking place on her account, as the pimp negotiated prices and logistics for meetings in motels around DC. She didn’t know how to say no to this adult who had been so nice to her. Maya told Frundt that she hated having sex with these strangers but wanted to keep the pimp happy.
One morning three months after she first met the man, Frundt says that Maya was found by a passerby lying crumpled on a street in south-east DC, half-naked and confused. The night before, Maya told her, a sex buyer had taken her somewhere against her will, and she later recalled being gang-raped there for hours before being dumped on the street. “She was traumatised, and blamed herself for what happened. I had to work with her a lot to help her realise this was not her fault,” said Frundt when we visited Courtney’s House last summer.
Frundt, who has helped hundreds of children like Maya since she opened Courtney’s House in 2008, says that the first thing she now does when a young person is referred to her is to ask for their Instagram handle. Other social media platforms are also used to exploit the young people in her care, but she says Instagram is the one that comes up most often.
In the 20 years since the birth of social media, child sexual exploitation has become one of the biggest challenges facing tech companies. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the internet is used by human traffickers as “digital hunting fields”, allowing them access to both customers and potential victims, with children being targeted by traffickers on social media platforms. The biggest of these, Facebook, is owned by Meta, the tech giant whose platforms, which also include Instagram, are used by more than 3 billion people worldwide. In 2020, according to a report by US-based not-for-profit the Human Trafficking Institute, Facebook was the platform most used to groom and recruit children by sex traffickers (65%), based on an analysis of 105 federal child sex trafficking cases that year. The HTI analysis ranked Instagram second most prevalent, with Snapchat third.
Grooming and child sex trafficking, though often researched and discussed together, are distinct acts. “Grooming” refers to the period of manipulation of a victim prior to their exploitation for sex or for other purposes. “Child sex trafficking” is the sexual exploitation of a child specifically as part of a commercial transaction. When the pimp was flattering and chatting with Maya, he was grooming her; when he was selling her to other adults for sex, he was trafficking.
Though people often think of “trafficking” as the movement of victims across or within borders, under international law the term refers to the use of force, fraud or coercion to obtain labour, or in the buying and selling of non-consensual sex acts, whether or not travel is involved. Because, under international law, children cannot legally consent to any kind of sex act, anyone who profits from or pays for a sex act from a child – including profiting from or paying for photographs depicting sexual exploitation – is considered a human trafficker.
Meta has numerous policies in place to try to prevent sex trafficking on its platforms. “It’s very important to me that everything we build is safe and good for kids,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder, wrote in a memo to staff in 2021. In a statement responding to a detailed list of the allegations in this piece, a Meta spokesperson said: “The exploitation of children is a horrific crime – we don’t allow it and we work aggressively to fight it on and off our platforms. We proactively aid law enforcement in arresting and prosecuting the criminals who perpetrate these grotesque offences. When we are made aware that a victim is in harm’s way, and we have data that could help save a life, we process an emergency request immediately.” The statement cited the group director of intelligence at the charity Stop the Traffik, who is former deputy director of the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, who has said “millions are safer and traffickers are increasingly frustrated” because of their work with Meta.
But over the past two years, through interviews, survivor testimonies, US court documents and human trafficking reporting data, we have heard repeated claims that Facebook and Instagram have become major sales platforms for child trafficking. We have interviewed more than 70 sources, including survivors and their relatives, prosecutors, child protection professionals and content moderators across the US in order to understand how sex traffickers are using Facebook and Instagram, and why Meta is able to deny legal responsibility for the trafficking that takes place on its platforms.
[…]
Meta acknowledges that human traffickers use its platforms, but insists that it is doing everything in its power to stop them. By law, the company is required to report any child sexual abuse imagery shared over its platforms to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), which receives federal funding to act as a nationwide clearing house for leads about child abuse. Meta is a major funder of NCMEC, and holds a seat on the company’s board.
From January to September 2022, Facebook reported more than 73.3m pieces of content under “child nudity and physical abuse” and “child sexual exploitation” and Instagram reported 6.1m. “Meta leads the industry in using the most sophisticated technology to detect both known and previously unknown child exploitation content,” said a company spokesperson. Of the 34m pieces of child sexual exploitation content removed from Facebook and Instagram in the final three months of 2022, 98% was detected by Meta itself.
But the vast majority of the content that Meta reports falls under child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) – which includes photos and videos of pornographic content – rather than sex trafficking. Unlike with child sexual abuse imagery, there is no legal requirement to report child sex trafficking, so NCMEC must rely on all social media companies to be proactive in searching for and reporting it. This legal inconsistency – the fact that child sexual abuse imagery must be reported, but reporting child sex trafficking is not legally required – is a major problem, says Staca Shehan, vice-president of the analytical services division at NCMEC. “It’s concerning across the board how little trafficking is being reported,” Shehan says. Social media companies “are prioritising what’s [legally] required”.
[…]
The moderators
As well as software, Meta uses teams of human moderators to identify cases of child grooming and sex trafficking. Until recently, Anna Walker* worked the night shift in an office of a Meta subcontractor. She would start each shift filled with dread. “We were just, like, shoved in a dark room to look at the stuff,” she said.
Walker’s job was to review interactions between adults and children on Facebook Messenger and Instagram direct messenger that had been flagged as suspicious by Meta’s AI software. Walker claims she and her team struggled to keep pace with the huge backlog of cases. She says she saw cases of adults grooming children and then making plans to meet them for sex, as well as discussions about payment in exchange for sex.
Walker’s managers would pass on such cases to Meta to decide if action should be taken against the user. In some cases, Walker claims: “Months would pass and then the automatic bot would send me an email saying it was closing this case, because nobody’s taken action on it.” She added: “I would cry to my manager about [the children I saw] and how I want to help. But it felt like nobody would pay attention to these horrible things.”
We talked to six other moderators who worked for companies that Meta subcontracted between 2016 and 2022. All made similar claims to Walker. Their efforts to flag and escalate possible child trafficking on Meta platforms often went nowhere, they said. “On one post I reviewed, there was a picture of this girl that looked about 12, wearing the smallest lingerie you could imagine,” said one former moderator. “It listed prices for different things explicitly, like, a blowjob is this much. It was obvious that it was trafficking,” she told us. She claims that her supervisor later told her no further action had been taken in this case.
When we put these claims to Meta, a spokesperson said that moderators such as Walker do not typically get feedback on whether their flagged content has been escalated. They stressed that if a moderator does not hear back about a flagged case, that does not mean no action has been taken.
Five of the moderators claimed that it was harder to get cases escalated or content taken down if it was posted on closed Facebook groups or Facebook Messenger. Meta “would be less stringent about something taking place behind ‘closed doors’,” claimed one team leader. “With Messenger, we really couldn’t make any moves unless the language and content was really obvious. If it was four guys who trusted each other and it was in a group it could just live on for ever.” Meta said these allegations “appear to be misleading and inaccurate” and said it uses technology to find child sexualisation content in private Facebook groups and on Messenger.
[Names marked with an asterisk have been changed to preserve anonymity.]
The Guardian’s two-year investigation uncovered child sex trafficking materials on Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram
I literally told some dude who had it in his apartment in college and he cursed me out. Then my white friend Jeremy explained it to him and he took it down. They just dont believe the people who tell them if they arent white bc being white is being American to them.
“So if little girls experience their menstrual cycle in 5th grade or 4th grade, will that prohibit conversations from them since they are in the grade lower than sixth grade?” asked state Rep. Ashley Gantt, a Democrat who taught in public schools and noted that girls as young as 10 can begin having periods.
The first ever suicide prevention hotline was created in 1935 bevause a man conducted a funeral for a 14 year old girl who ended her life because she got her period. She didn't know what it was and assumed it was a STD. Learning about periods and sexual health is life saving. Republicans are unapologetically just evil.
Fuck it, adding on: This is why it's frustrating to see criminal defense lawyers getting a bad rep.
The right to a fair trial is a human right. In practice, a fair trial necessitates a lawyer. This means that even if somebody committed the worst crimes you could possibly imagine, they still deserve a lawyer.
Somebody has to defend them as a matter of human rights. As one of my professors said, way back in my first semester at uni: "Everybody deserves to have somebody in their corner."
nb the source of criminal defense attorneys getting a bad rep is always, always copaganda. same with the incredibly bullshit narrative of “if you didn’t do anything wrong then why do you need a lawyer?” the purpose of both these terrible stupid pro-cop arguments are to deny you your legal rights.
