I would love to see better technology for identifying predatory users in social media.  Specifically, child abusers.  It is easy to set up a user account with bogus information such as your age and sex.  A predator could claim to be an 8-yr old girl and any other child in their chat circle (along with their parents) would not be able to tell if they are someone parents need to worry about their child talking to.  It can be very stressful for us parents to ensure our children’s safety when they are online.  If there was an addition to social media and online gaming software that could tell by the chats an older user types, that they are an adult and not a child.  The things predators ask such as grooming questions could be set as triggers to flag users.  

I do appreciate that some online games do not allow links or images to be posted in chats.  In a YouTube video, the speed at which predators reach out, engage, and send inappropriate photos is shocking (Bark, 2020).  It made me sick.  A predator sent a picture of his penis to an 11-year old girl!  Why would he think an 11-year old would want to see that?  I’m sure that was done more for shock value.  The good news is that this 11-year old girl was really a mom and the team she was working with was able to apprehend and arrest this predator.

Some inhibitors would be technological and ethical.  I understand that natural language processing may need to evolve more before making triggers happen as quickly as they need to.  For many internet advancements, the cost is a huge prohibiting factor.  The ethical issues come about regarding users being ok with their chats being monitored.  In my opinion, if users don’t want their chats monitored, they can stay off the chat.  Anyone who is not wanting to do nefarious things, shouldn’t mind their chats being monitored.  Another complication would be timing.  

In the previous example of the mom and her team, that operation dealt with a user that was obviously an adult.  Regarding a user that portrays himself as a child, the timing of when that type of offender would be apprehended would be extremely extended.  Any users that are suspected of being offenders would have to be researched before anything could be done.  This timescale could also affect the scaling of this technology.  There could be an overload of triggers and not enough humans to do the due-diligence necessary to find the real offenders.

I’m obviously very passionate about this topic and would love for something like this to be available in the near future.

 

References

Bark. (2020, February 20). Social Media Dangers Exposed by Mom Posing as 11-Year-Old. Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbg4hNHsc_8

 

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