“Super Bowl of Sex Trafficking.”
What lies beyond the public eye on the darker side of Super Bowl weekend.
Tomorrow is one of the biggest days every year that leads to the most
egregious of all crimes that can happen within our borders. We
are talking about the Super Bowl and the many hundreds and thousands of
victims of the sex trafficking activities that always surround these
large capacity type events.
Local and state authorities have dozens of agencies gearing up to
bust criminal networks and rescue sex trafficking victims tomorrow.
Minneapolis police stated they are working with 23 law enforcement
agencies on activities such as monitoring local hotel for suspicious sex
trafficking activities as well as online sex purchasing sites and ads.
[1]
[9]
While exact numbers of victims are impossible to determine, Nita
Belles, managing director of anti-trafficking nonprofit In Our Backyard
says anti-trafficking workers look for an increase in online classified
ads to determine an uptick in prostitution—which often includes women
and children forced into the sex trade. Around the Super Bowl, she
says, she’s seen the number of those sort of ads increase anywhere from
30 percent to 300 percent. [2]
“High-profile special events, which draw large
crowds, have become lucrative opportunities for child prostitution
criminal enterprises,” Ron Hosko, assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, said in a statement in 2014. “The
FBI and our partners remain committed to stopping this cycle of
victimization and putting those who try to profit from this type of
criminal activity behind bars.” [1]
The Super Bowl “increases the amount of prostitution and human
trafficking that is going to happen, more than any event we see,” Sam
Hernandez said, with Elijah Rising, a non-profit devoted to ending sex
trafficking and sexual exploitation through prayer, intervention and
awareness. [3]
Ahead of last year’s Super Bowl, U.S. police arrested about 750
people in nationwide sex-trafficking sting operations [1] including 723
sex buyers (or “johns”) and 29 pimps or sex traffickers.
“Traffickers know. Pimps know. They bring women in,” said Sam Hernandez, [3] ”People
want to go out after whatever brought them here to be entertained.
Strip clubs start advertising around things like that, conventions,
mostly sporting events, and people go out drinking,” Orput said. “If
statistics don’t bear it out, the facts bear it out. The victims bear it
out. And that’s all I really care about.” [4]
The
pre-game parties are commonly known as “SUPERB OWL” parties to avoid
trademark infringement. Some very interesting articles are available on
this subject but the symbolism is not lost on those that are fighting
the atrocities of child and sex trafficking. [12] Many include free
“pizza”.
Arrests of pimps running underage sex rings are reported at the
National Football League’s championship game almost every year, with
girls being trafficking from as far away as Hawaii to hook up with
clients via the Internet, hotels and strip clubs. [5] It was so
lucrative, even after it was over. “Pimps that came in for the event
stayed,” Hernandez said. [3]
“The SuperBowl just increases the concentration of people that are
willing to buy sex, it doesn’t mean that sex is a “bigger” problem than
unusual,” Martin said. But it is the type of “event” that increases this
type of activity that matters he believes. [4] “The same traffickers
that are committing trafficking … during the SuperBowl, they’re going to
wake up in the morning on Monday and do the same thing.” [5]
Some 1.5 million people in the United States are victims
of trafficking, mostly for sexual exploitation. The majority are
children, according to a U.S. Senate report published last year. [1]
[6]
Hernandez said Elijah Rising tracks down women and even children
trapped in the sex trade the same way people find prostitutes, by going
on-line. Another non-profit that is based in Washington, D.C., Airline
Ambassadors International, trains those in the airline and tourism
industries how to spot sex trafficking victims. “We really want them
to be aware of some of the warning signs,” said Rosalyn Parker, with
Airline Ambassadors. [3]
Recognizing the Signs
Common Work and Living Conditions:
- Is not free to leave or come and go as he/she wishes
- Is in the commercial sex industry and has a pimp / manager
- Is unpaid, paid very little, or paid only through tips
- Works excessively long and/or unusual hours
- Is not allowed breaks or suffers under unusual restrictions at work
- Owes a large debt and is unable to pay it off
- Was recruited through false promises concerning the nature and conditions of his/her work
- High security measures exist in the work and/or living locations
(e.g. opaque windows, boarded up windows, bars on windows, barbed wire,
security cameras, etc.)
Poor Mental Health or Abnormal Behavior:
- Is fearful, anxious, depressed, submissive, tense, or nervous/paranoid
- Exhibits unusually fearful or anxious behavior after bringing up law enforcement
- Avoids eye contact
Poor Physical Health:
- Lacks medical care and/or is denied medical services by employer
- Appears malnourished or shows signs of repeated exposure to harmful chemicals
- Shows signs of physical and/or sexual abuse, physical restraint, confinement, or torture
Lack of Control:
- Has few or no personal possessions
- Is not in control of his/her own money, no financial records, or bank account
- Is not in control of his/her own identification documents (ID or passport)
- Is not allowed or able to speak for themselves (a third party may insist on being present and/or translating)
Other:
- Claims of just visiting and inability to clarify where he/she is staying/address
- Lack of knowledge of whereabouts and/or of what city he/she is in
- Loss of sense of time
- Has numerous inconsistencies in his/her story
Note: According to federal law, any minor under the
age of 18 engaging in commercial sex is a victim of sex trafficking,
regardless of the presence of force, fraud, or coercion. [7]
**********
Lifesize Dollbox Exposes Superbowl Fans to Sex Trafficking
Shared Hope International brings sex trafficking awareness campaign
to Phoenix to highlight issue during SuperBowl. Child sex trafficking
affects an estimated 100,000 American children each year.
The “Children Aren’t Playthings” doll box campaign is intended to
challenge the dangerous objectification of prostituted individuals,
including victims of child sex trafficking. The exhibit was created by
Brunner, a creative agency in Atlanta, to offer a stark reminder that
despite a trafficker’s careful “packaging” of child trafficking victims
for sale, they are children. [8]
*************
Sandy Hook Choir & Super Bowl: Children Join Jennifer Hudson For ‘America The Beautiful’ [10]
SANDY HOOK BOMBSHELL: ENTIRE CITY HAD THEIR MORTGAGES PAID IN FULL!
New information has come to light about Sandy Hook and the residents who
resided there. It would seem their mortgages were paid off and they
received free homes. Why? Why would Sandy Hook give away houses? [11] https://youtu.be/a5dbk0zIiVo
Why Did Everyone in Sandy Hook Get Their Mortgages Paid Off? https://youtu.be/jWbk_xKCyME
SOURCES:
[1]
FoxNews
[2]
Relevant Magazine
[3]
KSAT.com
[4]
KARE11.com
[5]
Reuters
[6]
NY Post
[7]
Humantraffickinghotline.org
[8]
SharedHope
[9]
Commonsenseshow
[10]
Huffington Post
[11]
Secret of the fed
[12]
Superb Owl party
Censorship By Weaponizing Free Speech: Rethinking How The Marketplace Of Ideas Works
It should be no surprise that I'm an unabashed supporter of free speech.
Usually essays that start that way are then followed with a "but..."
and that "but..." undermines everything in that opening sentence. This
is not such an essay. However, I am going to talk about some interesting
challenges that have been facing our concepts of free speech
over the past few years -- often in regards to how free speech and the
internet interact. Back in 2015, at our Copia Summit we had a panel that
tried to lay out some of these challenges, which acknowledged that our traditional concepts of free speech don't fully work in the internet age.
There are those who argue that internet platforms should never do any moderation at all,
and that they should just let all content flow. And while that may be
compelling at a first pass, thinking beyond that proves that's
unworkable for a very basic reason: spam. Almost everyone (outside of
spammers, I guess) would argue that it makes sense to filter
out/moderate/delete spam. It serves no useful purpose. It clutters
inboxes/comments/forums with off-topic and annoying messages. So, as
Dave Willner mentions in that talk back in 2015, once you've admitted
that spam can be filtered, you've admitted that some moderation is appropriate for any functioning forum to exist. Then you get to the actual
challenges of when and how that moderation should occur. And that's
where things get really tricky. Because I think we all agree that when
platforms do try to moderate speech... they tend to be really bad at it.
And that leads to all sorts of stories that we like to cover of social
media companies banning people for dumb reasons. But sometimes it crosses over into the absurd or dangerous -- like YouTube deleting channels that were documenting war crimes, because it's difficult to distinguish war crimes from terrorist propaganda (and, sometimes, they can be one and the same).
An even worse situation, obviously, is when governments take it upon
themselves to mandate moderation. Such regimes are almost exclusively
used in ways to censor speech that should be protected -- as Germany is now learning with its terrible and ridiculous new social media censorship law.
But it's not that difficult to understand why people have been
increasingly clamoring for these kinds of solutions -- either having
platforms moderate more aggressively or demanding regulations that
require them to do so. And it's because there's a ton of really, really
crappy things happening on these platforms. And, as you know, there's
always the xkcd free speech
point that the concept of free speech is about protecting people from
government action, not requiring everyone to suffer through whatever
nonsense someone wants to scream.
But, it is becoming clear that we need to think carefully about how we truly
encourage free speech. Beyond the spam point above, another argument
that has resonated with me over the years is that some platforms have
enabled such levels of trolling (or, perhaps to be kinder, "vehement
arguing") that they actually lead to less free speech in that they scare
off or silence those who also have valuable contributions to add to
various discussions. And that, in turn, raises at least some questions
about the idea of the "marketplace of ideas" model of understanding free
speech. I've long been a supporter of this viewpoint -- that the best
way to combat so-called "bad speech" is with "more speech." And, you
then believe that the best/smartest/most important ideas rise to the top
and stomp out the bad ideas. But what if the good ideas don't even have
a chance? What if they're silenced before they even are spoken by the
way these things are set up? That, too, would be an unfortunate result
for free speech and the "marketplace of ideas".
In the past couple of months, two very interesting pieces have been
written on this that are pushing my thinking much further as well. The
first is a Yale Law Journal piece by Nabiha Syed entitled Real Talk About Fake News: Towards a Better Theory for Platform Governance.
Next week, we'll have Syed on our podcast to talk about this paper, but
in it she points out that there are limitations and problems with the
idea of the "marketplace of ideas" working the way many of us have
assumed it should work. She also notes that other frameworks for
thinking about free speech appear to have similar deficiencies when we
are in an online world. In particular, the nature of the internet -- in
which the scale and speed and ability to amplify a message are so
incredibly different than basically at any other time in history -- is
that it enables a sort of "weaponizing" of these concepts.
That is, those who wish to abuse the concept of the marketplace of ideas
by aggressively pushing misleading or deliberately misguided concepts
are able to do so in a manner that short-circuits our concept of the
marketplace of ideas -- all while claiming to support it.
The second piece, which is absolutely worth reading and thinking about carefully, is Zeynep Tufekci's Wired piece entitled It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech.
I was worried -- from the title -- that this might be the standard rant
I've been reading about free speech somehow being "dangerous" that has
become tragically popular over the past few years. But (and this is not
surprising, given Tufekci's previous careful consideration of these
issues for years) it's a truly thought provoking piece, in some ways
building upon the framework that Syed laid out in her piece, noting how
some factions are, in effect, weaponizing the very concept of the
"marketplace of ideas" to insist they support it, while undermining the
very premise behind it (that "good" speech outweighs the bad).
In particular, she notes that while the previous scarcity was the
ability to amplify speech, the current scarcity is attention -- and
thus, the ability to flood the zone with bad/wrong/dangerous speech can
literally act as a denial of service on the supposedly corrective "good
speech." She notes that the way censorship used to work was by stifling
the message. Traditional censorship is blocking the ability to get the
message out. But modern censorship actually leverages the platforms of free speech to drown out other messages.
The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with
trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t
look much like the old forms of censorship at all. They look like viral
or coordinated harassment campaigns, which harness the dynamics of
viral outrage to impose an unbearable and disproportionate cost on the
act of speaking out. They look like epidemics of disinformation, meant
to undercut the credibility of valid information sources. They look like
bot-fueled campaigns of trolling and distraction, or piecemeal leaks of
hacked materials, meant to swamp the attention of traditional media.
These tactics usually don’t break any laws or set off any First
Amendment alarm bells. But they all serve the same purpose that the old
forms of censorship did: They are the best available tools to stop ideas
from spreading and gaining purchase. They can also make the big
platforms a terrible place to interact with other people.
There's a truth to that which needs to be reckoned with. As someone who
has regularly talked about the marketplace of ideas and how "more
speech" is the best way to respond to "bad speech," Tufekci highlights
where those concepts break down:
Many more of the most noble old ideas about free speech simply don’t
compute in the age of social media. John Stuart Mill’s notion that a
“marketplace of ideas” will elevate the truth is flatly belied by the
virality of fake news. And the famous American saying that “the best
cure for bad speech is more speech”—a paraphrase of Supreme Court
justice Louis Brandeis—loses all its meaning when speech is at once mass
but also nonpublic. How do you respond to what you cannot see? How can
you cure the effects of “bad” speech with more speech when you have no
means to target the same audience that received the original message?
As she notes, this is "not a call for nostalgia." It is quite clear that
these platforms also have tremendous and incredibly important benefits.
They have given voice to the formerly voiceless. There are, certainly,
areas where the marketplace of ideas functions, and the ability to
debate and have discourse actually does work. Indeed, I'd argue that it
probably happens much more often than people realize. But it's difficult
to deny that some have weaponized these concepts in a manner designed
to flood the marketplace of ideas and drown out the good ideas, or to
strategically use the "more speech" response to actually amplify and
reinforce the "bad speech" rather than correct it.
And that's something we need to reckon with.
It's also an area where I don't think there are necessarily easy
solutions -- but having this discussion is important. I still think that
companies will be bad at moderation. And I still think government
mandates will make the problems significantly worse, not better. And I
very much worry that solutions may actually do more harm than good in
some cases -- especially in dragging down or silencing important, but
marginalized, voices. I also think it's dangerous that many people
immediately jump to the platforms as the obvious place to put
all responsibility here. There needs to be responsibility as well on the
parts of the end users -- to be more critical, to have more media
literacy.
And, of course, I think that there is a space for technology to
potentially help solve some of these issues as well. As I've discussed
in the past, greater transparency can help, as would putting more
control into the hands of end users, rather than relying on the
platforms to make these decisions.
But it is an area that raises some very real -- and very different --
challenges, especially for those of us who find free speech and free
expression to be an essential and core value. What do we do when that
free speech is being weaponized against free speech itself? How do you
respond? Do you need to weaponize in response and flood back the "bad
speech" or does that just create an arms race? What other ways are there
to deal with this?
This is a discussion that was started a while back, but is increasingly
important -- and I expect that we'll be writing a lot more about it in
the near future.
Another Day, Another Flimsy Report Claiming TV Cord Cutting Won't Save You Money
Once a month like clockwork, somebody in the tech press proudly decides
to inform their readers that you can't save any money by cutting the
traditional TV cord and going with cheaper, more flexible streaming
alternatives. The logic in these reports almost always goes something
like this: "Once I got done signing up for every damn streaming video
service under the sun, I found that I wasn't really saving much money
over traditional cable."
Writers leaning into this lazy hot take almost always tend to forget a few things.
One, the same broadcasters dictating cable TV rates dictate streaming
video rates, so in some ways pricing will be lateral. Two, adding a
dozen streaming services to exactly match your bloated, 300 channel
cable subscription misses the entire point of cord cutting, which is
about customization and flexibility. Three, if writers actually stopped
and talked to real consumers (like in the cord cutting subreddit),
they'd be told (repeatedly) how customers routinely save money each
month by breaking free of the traditional, bloated cable TV bundle.
Last week it was Quartz's turn to prop up the flimsy narrative
that "streaming’s live-TV bundles aren’t actually saving cord-cutters
money." Their report was at least somewhat more scientific in nature,
leaning heavily on data provided by a research firm by the name of M
Science, which acknowledged that the average cord cutter saves around
$20 per month by going with a streaming alternative. But the firm then
tried to claim that this savings disappeared when you factored in cable
company "triple play" bundles:
"When paired with the cost customers continued to pay their cable
providers for things like internet, phone, or additional TV packages,
the savings vanished altogether. The average virtual pay-TV subscriber
paid about $15 more in aggregate than the average cable customer in
2017, based on M Science’s data.
That’s in part because customers can often get a better deal bundling
two or three services from a cable provider, like TV, internet, and home
phone service, than paying for internet alone. It’s marketed by cable
operators as the double or triple play. “The cable companies will
incentivize aggressively for bundling and penalize for unbundling,” said
Corey Barrett, senior analyst for technology, media, and telecom at M
Science. “They’ll have attractive rates for a double-play bundle and if
you decide to go to broadband only, it’s going to cost more than
broadband bundled with other services.”
The problem with this take is that while cable operators claim you're
getting "savings" by bundling multiple services you may not even want
(cable digital phone service, especially), these savings are often part
of a temporary promotion. And when that promotion expires you're usually
left paying a dramatically higher rate.
While new customers tend to get offered promotions in order to get them
to switch, existing customers who've been with the company for a while
often have trouble getting a new, comparable promo when the contract
expires.
In reality, ISPs like to artificially jack up the price of standalone
broadband to make it as unpalatable as possible in the hopes of
upselling you to additional services. That doesn't necessarily equate to
saving money. The report is also likely relying on these companies' advertised prices, which isn't the actual price. Cable companies are facing all manner of lawsuits
for using bogus fees to jack up the advertised rate post sale, a bit of
creative marketing regulators from both parties have turned a blind eye
to for decades. That's before you get to the broadband usage caps and overage fees used to punish cord cutters for leaving the cable walled garden.
Another tendency I've enjoyed observing in these reports is that they almost always ignore the fact that piracy exists
and is aggressively common in the Plex and Kodi era. Countless
consumers save money via piracy, but acknowledging this reality is seen
by most news outlets and analysts as a tacit approval of it -- resulting
in them comically omitting it from the discussion entirely. Because you
don't approve of piracy doesn't change the fact that it
routinely occurs as a cost-cutting measure among consumers. Piracy is,
as Techdirt readers have long understood, something you have to compete
with whether you like it or not. If you ignore it in your analysis of TV
costs you're painting an incomplete picture.
All told, if you prefer a massive bundle of religious programming,
horrible reality television, live sports and infomercials -- you may
want to stick to paying an arm and a leg for cable. But if you spend
even a small amount of time talking to those that have taken the leap and ditched traditional cable,
you'll find absolutely no debate that cutting the traditional TV cord
routinely saves you a significant chunk of change each and every month.
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