Student affiliate Heesoo Jang released a new piece this week about South Korea’s Nth Room case, digital sex trafficking, ongoing ‘sextortion’, and what Western tech firms must do to confront their role in these crimes.
“These crimes have been only possible because of the co-existence of a variety of social media platforms that served different purposes in these series of crimes, including but not limited to Twitter, Telegram, Facebook, Discord, and even file-sharing services such as Google Drive and Mega Drive. Each platform is used for different purposes” writes Heesoo.
Twitter was used to find victims. Traffickers reportedly used hashtags and keywords to spot female users who had uploaded sexually explicit content. By impersonating members of the South Korean Cyber Terror Response Center, the traffickers approached the victims via Twitter direct messages.
Heesoo points out that the fact that these tech firms are headquartered in the West is not incidental—their safety practices are less strict for non-Western languages, such as Korean. Additionally, some platforms do not allow users to report issues in their native language.
According to the Korean digital sexual trafficking citizen auditing group – a voluntary group of 801 citizens recruited and trained by the Seoul Metropolitan Government to audit platforms for sexual abuse content – only 20% of their requests were handled within a day. 80% of the requests took more than 24 hours, with 42.5% taking more than a week.
Publications and appearances
“The administration is, I think, in a moment where one of their communication goals is to really point out what they see as the hypocrisy on the right and the danger of what they see as anti-democratic elected leaders. I think that means they are more on the offensive than they have been previously.” Shannon McGregor spoke to USA TODAY about what President Biden meant by “MAGA Republican” comments.
“Deplatforming and punitive defamation lawsuits are less of a solution than ‘harm reduction.’ When one individual conspiracist or conspiracy site loses its audience, replacements quickly emerge.” Shannon McGregor spoke to NPR about Alex Jones’ defamation trials and the effectiveness of “deplatforming”.
“TikTok’s algorithm tends to keep people on the app, making it harder for them to turn to additional sources to fact-check searches.” Francesca Tripodi spoke to the New York Times about how young people are turning to TikTok instead of Google to search for answers.
“Even more than that, they have to do something they’ve been historically unwilling to do — actually place political and social elites on a higher plane with a higher set of responsibilities than a lower one.” Daniel Kreiss participated in Election Matters 2022: Campaign Finance and Election Misinformation where he spoke about speech and threats to democracy on social media.
Student affiliate Bridget Barrett has a new report out with Dr. Samantha Bradshaw. They conducted interviews with representatives from 20 civil society organizations combatting influence operations on social media around the world about what data, tools, and access they need to do their work.
“Social media platforms play on the fear of missing out. You feel like you’re missing out on something if you’re outside of the social media world because there are trending keywords, hashtags and challenges, and those have a very short lifespan.” Student affiliate Heesoo Jang spoke to UNC’s The Well about news fatigue and doomscrolling.
“The end result will be worse products, more concentration in the tech market, and reduced rights online.” Affiliate Matt Perault has a new piece in Wired on how Dobbs will spark a digital civil war as states pass conflicting laws on privacy and speech.
Coming soon
September 21: The Center for Media Law and Policy’s First Amendment Day. The CITAP panel starts at 4:00pm.
September 22: Francesca Tripodi presents The Propagandists’ Playbook with a Q&A featuring Victor Ray. Register to attend in person!
September 23: The CITAP fall speaker series kicks off with Victor Ray discussing his new book On Critical Race Theory. In-person and livestream attendees are welcome! RSVP requested.
October 6: The CITAP fall speaker series continues with Nancy Leong discussing her new book Identity Capitalists: The Powerful Insiders Who Exploit Diversity to Maintain Inequality, Event information here.
Rest of Web
💼 We’re hiring a new postdoc who will work directly with Deen Freelon!
🔍 The Alliance for Securing Democracy introduced the Midtem Monitor this past week!