[image descriptions: screencap of tweets from rahaeli @rahaeli 7/9/21.
Hello friends, your regular reminder that a not insignificant number of social media “missing person” efforts are actually someone’s abuser trying to get them back, especially with missing older teens. Please don’t share unofficial missing person flyers–
–and if you do spot/know the person in them, tell THAT PERSON someone is looking for them instead of providing any information to the person doing the looking.
I cannot tell you how many times I have seen a site wide “missing person” turn into the person writing in to ask us to enforce the restraining order, or the custodial parent begging us to shut down the non custodial parent’s attempted kidnapping
Every time I say this, someone says “but what if it’s real, better safe than sorry” and no, it absolutely is not. For a good while I got “this is my abuser, please make them stop” requests for 70-80% of the viral unofficial missing persons crossing my feed.
This number is obviously anecdata–I’ve never been able to find a peer reviewed study attempting to pin down prevalance. But based on those experiences, I absolutely advise never sharing one of those posts.
(I used to finish this PSA thread saying that if a missing person alert came from police or a federal agency, it had likely been screened for abusive tactics and was more likely to be real. I no longer say this.)
This should be your principle for any time someone wants you to connect them with someone else, btw. Never give someone’s info to the person who asked. Tell the asker you’ll give that third party THEIR contact info instead.
–and if you do spot/know the person in them, tell THAT PERSON someone is looking for them instead of providing any information to the person doing the looking.
I will probably be muting this in a bit, but some followup: for those questioning “just how often does this happen, even?”, I wasn’t keeping an exact count but I think we just hit double digits of people saying “this happened to me/a friend” in replies to QTs of this
As in, of the current 70 or so quote tweets, around 10% of them have a person telling a story about a time their abuser faked a social media post expressing concern over them as a missing/vulnerable person in order to continue abusing them.
It’s not rare. It’s not unusual. It is, in fact, vastly more common than *any* dangerous situation in which social media attention can do literally anything to improve the situation. (I’ve rarely seen a dangerous situation massive social media attention can improve, honestly.)
To the people who want to argue about this advice: I have, more than once, personally seen an abuser’s viral missing persons post end in suicide or homicide. I have never in 20 years seen a case of stranger kidnapping at all, much less one that’s resolved by virality.
All I’m asking you to understand is that the abusers who do this are very, very good at convincing you their “missing person” is irrational, in danger, or has diminished capacity. You will never be able to spot these situations by reading over a single post. Ever.
If you want to retweet missing personsviral alerts because you want to do good in the world, please understand that there is a much, much greater statistical chance you are *actually* contributing to making things much worse for the person instead. Please just think about that.
And to answer the “well why are you qualified to say this”, since this has gotten way out of my usual circles: hi, I’ve been working trust and safety/ToS on social media for 20 years now. I am never, ever the person with the worst stories when I go out drinking with others.
If you’re doubting this the thing you have to remember is that stranger kidnapping is very rare, for either children or adults. The vast majority of the time, when someone is kidnapped or held against their will, it’s by someone they already know, someone close to them: a parent, a partner, that sort of thing. So if someone has been kidnapped or whatever, the people closest to them (who are usually the ones to put up missing posters and whatnot) should be the first suspects, not the last. It’s possible that the person putting up the missing person fliers is the parent who has custody and the noncustodial parent kidnapped the kids … but it’s just as possible that the person putting up fliers is the noncustodial parent who is doing this as part of a plot to find the kids so they can kidnap them. You can’t tell which is which just from seeing the flyer.
And when people choose to leave voluntarily and cut all contact with people close to them, they don’t just do it on a whim. There’s pretty much always a reason. For example, the people they’re cutting contact with might be shitty and abusive. Now, the reason might also be “the person leaving is messed up by drugs” or whatnot, or “they’re being forced by an abuser to cut contact.” Those are also reasons. But a lot of people who cut contact with someone in their life do it for very good and valid reasons. You can’t tell which is which just from seeing the flyer.
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