Bridget Todd (00:03):

You're listening to Disinformed, a mini-series from There are No Girls on the Internet. I'm Bridget Todd.

Bridget Todd (00:13):

Bad guys are coming. They're coming for you, and they're coming for your kids. If you spend 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.

Bridget Todd (00:58):

Stories like these are especially common on social media. Just search the hashtag #sextraffickingawareness 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 a 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.

Bridget Todd (01:31):

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.

Bridget Todd (01:43):

The podcast You're Wrong About is kind of a gold 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 Libs 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 eighties and nineties, where parents were horrified that satanic cult were ritualistically abusing children, only that was never really happening. Basically, there was always some big, scary threat that we need to be watching out for.

Michael Hobbes (02:15):

My name is Michael Hobbes. I'm the co-host of a podcast called You're Wrong About and another podcast called Maintenance Phase.

Bridget Todd (02:22):

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 were either spreading bad information intentionally or unintentionally. When you started making You're Wrong About, where y'all setting out to give people the tools to push back against this kind of bad information?

Michael Hobbes (02:42):

No. 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, "It's all the same thing. It's like a tide that comes in and out. The satanic 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 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 out-group 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. They're coming to the border. They're trying to steal your kids and get them into street gangs."

Michael Hobbes (03:39):

It's like this Mad Libs, where you can just throw in like, "Okay, which societal out-group is it going to be? What are they doing to our kids today?" It's over and over again, the same thing. So we've both, me and my co-host, Sarah Marshall, have become these 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."

Bridget Todd (04:02):

So In my research around disinformation, particularly false panics around things that are rooted in people's identities. So whether it's trans folks, folks, immigrants, it is always sort of the same thing. 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."

Michael Hobbes (04:26):

Totally.And it's the same tropes, right? It's, "They're coming for your kids. They're recruiting your kids." This is the same thing that Anita Bryant said about gay people in the 1970s in the 1980s. We're just running exactly the same playbook.

Bridget Todd (04:38):

Anita Bryant was a singer and beauty queen who famously led the "Save Our Children" campaign that attempted to "save" children by cracking down on gay people having rights.

Michael Hobbes (04:47):

And we're just Mad Libbing in a new societal out-group.

Bridget Todd (04:51):

Absolutely.

Michael Hobbes (04:52):

At the beginning of the pandemic, I read a bunch of books about the black plague, 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 pogroms 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 shifty, 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."

Bridget Todd (05:42):

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.

Bridget Todd (05:58):

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?

Michael Hobbes (06:08):

It's hard to say, exactly. I think this really hit its peak last summer, all of this QAnon, #savethechildren stuff. And it really seems like there was a moment where we're in the middle of a pandemic; information was all over the place, right? 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 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.

Michael Hobbes (06:49):

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 white van driving traffickers who come from other countries and they're going to kidnap my kids and take them abroad." These narratives that just make no sense, right?

Michael Hobbes (07:14):

And at the heart of it, the little seed in the middle of it was this insane QAnon stuff, right? Where it's like adrenochrome, and Hillary Clinton is cutting the faces off a baby. Completely nuts stuff. But there's enough sort of plausible deniability around that, that you can very easily say, "Well, I care about children. What's the harm of sharing this little meme? What's the harm of taking this little thing on Facebook that says ..." Infamously, there was one that said the children are thousands of times more likely to die of trafficking than of COVID.

Michael Hobbes (07:46):

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? I might as well share that. If it helps save a kid or two, then I'm doing something good." 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 meme start just bouncing around the internet for months.

Bridget Todd (08:22):

Yeah. I think, honestly, listening to You're Wrong About was something that really helped make that transition for me because, you know, for awhile 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 traffic and about children, who is it hurting?" Now, I've come to see that, okay, well, if we overemphasize the risks of little kids being like snatched up or things like that, what are we under emphasizing? Like youth who are facing homelessness, youth who are put in precarious or 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.

Michael Hobbes (09:06):

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.

Michael Hobbes (09:30):

So when you look at things like the 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 means that are sort of blaming all of these societal problems on these societal others that we already don't like or a little bit wary of anyway, all we're really doing is contributing to these retributive solutions, which do not make children safer.

Bridget Todd (10:02):

Yeah. And I also think it does kind of come down to what you were talking about before. This idea of "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 to fall through the cracks. That's boring." It's so much more fun to be like, "Yeah, I'm going to track down these bad guys."

Bridget Todd (10:25):

Let's take a quick break.

Bridget Todd (10:26):

And we're back.

Bridget Todd (10:39):

An Instagram video made by a mom influencer, Katy Sorensen, where she said that two strangers tried to kidnap her kids in a Michaels craft store in California got over 2 million views.

Katy Sorensen - Audio (10:48):

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.

Bridget Todd (11:10):

Sorensen said that she overheard the couple making comments about her kid's appearance, and the man even tried to grab at her child's 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.

Bridget Todd (11:34):

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 preying 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.

Michael Hobbes (12:18):

... Be 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.

Michael Hobbes (12:33):

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." 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, is it by putting 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 satisfying to share online. But it's like we just need more places for kids to go who needs somewhere to sleep. Like, that's it.

Bridget Todd (13:10):

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. 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 scaring people about it. What do you think is going on there?

Michael Hobbes (13:49):

I wan to 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 ... 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 a razor blade in your hand, and then slice their Achilles' heel? 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 very important to just say, 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.

Michael Hobbes (14:28):

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. 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, we thought it was a little bit weird that the priest asked our son to sleep over, but he's a priest. How could he ever harm our son? He's a priest. Like this felt weird to us, but he has this sort of societally bestowed power that makes us not trust our gut." This is what power does. And so, the thing that we need to look for are places where we have power in society and we don't have accountability.

Michael Hobbes (15:14):

And we already have so much accountability. I don't want to imply that 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 making somebody unsafe, and physically threatening somebody often does come down to tricking them 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 that's not something that you can see in Target, but this is what society needs and it's what we've needed for decades, and We're just not doing.

Bridget Todd (16:18):

More after a quick break.

Bridget Todd (16:31):

Let's get right back into it.

Bridget Todd (16:32):

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 what 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.

Bridget Todd (17:00):

I do think as a society, it's okay for women and families to call out "bad guys" if they're scary monsters showing up in a van. But if it's somebody in your family, somebody in your church, somebody in your community, we're pretty uncomfortable with women calling out people in those positions who abuse their power. But, somehow, it's totally fine if you're thinking of it as like calling out a bad guy in a van.

Michael Hobbes (17:29):

That's another aspect of marginalization, right? That if the 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, "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 of marginalization makes it so much harder to address these problems because 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. We just need to do the boring stuff. I wish it was more interesting than that.

Bridget Todd (18:11):

No, it's so true. And you know, you talked a bit about zip ties on your car and people hiding under your car. What role do you think that local media and also law enforcement has to play in this? Because I've read articles where on it's face, it would appear that a police officer or somebody in law enforcement has confirmed, "Yes, we saw the zip tie on the cars, and this is a trafficking thing." But actually, when you 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 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?

Michael Hobbes (18:55):

Oof. One of the ones, I think it was last summer or 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 of their cars and found a flower, and they freaked out. They're like, "It's traffickers! I'm marked! The traffickers are after me!" And these poor people, who were just ready to do something nice, are all of a sudden smeared as traffickers. And what was amazing was the cops sort of reinforced this. It's like, "Oh, you know, we've had threats, recently, of trafficking. We've heard rumors of trafficking." And, of course, the local media reinforces this too that trafficking is a huge problem in this area, and it could happen to anyone, but not in this particular case.

Michael Hobbes (19:37):

And there's no attempt to debunk the meta myth here. That people are staking you out in parking lots to kidnap you? Even for 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 communicate with the other traffickers? Just text the other traffickers.

Michael Hobbes (19:59):

It doesn't make any sense on any level, but we get this weird credulity, especially around this issue, that one of the tenants of journalism is you're supposed to do both sides, right? We saw this for climate change for years, right? 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 really deep within us. Of like, "Oh, this is the danger I have to worry about." Yeah. I think

Jessica (20:50):

Yeah. I hadn't even thought about that, but it's a good point. 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 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 fuel something that's just not true, that's going to result in more harm.

Michael Hobbes (21:21):

Right. And there are real cases of this happening. 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 "stranger danger." That kids were going to come and steal your kids. And there were some truly horrific, awful, heartbreaking cases where this really did happen. 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, we can sacrifice our civil liberties. We can incarcerate a bunch of people on sort of spurious grounds if it saves one child."

Michael Hobbes (22:11):

And one thing, as somebody who is a urban cyclist, and somebody who takes 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 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.

Michael Hobbes (22:42):

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 "if it saves the 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 out-group. So this entire logic of like, "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.

Bridget Todd (23:11):

Hmm. That's so true. Yeah, I think the idea that the people who are going to be further criminalized, harmed by this by when we make laws kind of quickly, as long as it's not like me feeling that repercussion, 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? How can we avoid this on a wider scale?

Michael Hobbes (23:41):

I mean, I want to say like, "Be careful with what you share," but I'm not all that careful with what I share. There's a lot of information out there. It's really hard. 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 these kinds of monomyths, 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, 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 turned out to be true, so we should just stop sharing them. Don't feel like you have to warn people about anything involving a parking lot. If a parking lot is involved, people are safe.

Bridget Todd (24:32):

I mean, they're all videotaped at this point.

Michael Hobbes (24:34):

Exactly. People are safe in parking lots. Just leave the parking lots alone. It's fine.

Bridget Todd (24:40):

It's so funny because I went back and listened to the episodes 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 gothy, goth-adjacent, altie-adjacent, I knew two different people who had barcode tattoos.

Michael Hobbes (25:04):

Right? All of the warning signs of trafficking are teenage stuff. It's like, "Oh, she's moody," or like, "Her taste in music changes." You're like, "That's not a sign of trafficking. That's a sign of teenagerness."

Bridget Todd (25:17):

Yeah. It's a sign of adolescence.

Michael Hobbes (25:19):

Yeah. Another like rule of thumb is just don't share anything involving trafficking, basically. 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. Until we know more, just hold off on the trafficking stuff, gang.

Bridget Todd (25:38):

Yeah. That's that's great advice. I would also say, 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? Ashton Kutcher, I'm sure you're a good guy. It upsets me when I see celebrities who I'm sure like their heart is in the right place, but getting involved in trafficking campaigns that are tied to specific legislation like SESTA, FOSTA, it's like, "Ooh," it just has such a bad look on such a complicated issue.

Michael Hobbes (26:10):

Yeah. I think the biggest thing is that 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 anytime we have any bills being pushed by these super Republican legislators, I think just be careful with that stuff. Anytime you have the religious right and the Republican party pushing one of these bills, just slow down and ask actual sex workers like, "What is in this bill, and are you in support of it?" 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. they are not mad about this kind of stuff. They're mad about the legislators that are trying to take their rights away again.

Bridget Todd (27:17):

So much to say about how we talk about trafficking online, especially on TikTok, were so many viral claims about trafficking take off. Next, we'll hear from Jessica, who goes by Bloodbath & Beyond on TikTok, about her use of TikTok to spread accurate information about trafficking.

Jessica (27:33):

When we start drowning out that conversation, not only are we not letting that get the spotlight, where it really needs to be the forefront of this conversation, we're 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 white women getting kidnapped from Target.

Bridget Todd (28:11):

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Bridget Todd (28:18):

Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi? We'd love to hear from you at hello@tangoti.com. Disinformed was brought to you by There are No Girls on the Internet. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our supervising producer and engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. For more great podcasts, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.