We’re wrong about trafficking, with Michael Hobbes - BEST OF TANGOTI

check out while I'm there, please let me know. And if you are a listener and you want to maybe do an event or a live show or a meet up while I'm in Portugal, please reach out and maybe we can try to make it happen. There Are No Girls on the Internet. As a production of I Heart Radio and Unbossed Creative, I'm Bridget Todd and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. So this week we did the first part of our two part series looking at the claim that Lena Dunham sexually abused her sibling.

Episode one was all about the claim, where it came from and the cultural climate that fuelded. Next week we're looking more into the contest and one of my main reasons for wanting to talk about this issue is because I think it really shows what happens when lies, misleading, or inaccurate information is injected into conversations about what are really serious issues. You know, we're not even really able to have a real conversation about what actually happened because

it gets so muddled with the lies. And it's a problem. And this all really reminded me of an episode we did with Michael Hobbs, formerly of one of my favorite podcasts, You're Wrong About All about how the topic of trafficking has kind of suffered from the same thing. So let's listen in you're listening to Disinformed, a mini series from There Are No Girls on the Internet. I'm Bridget Todd. 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. Injers 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 or and flashing her high beams at night, but he's actually just trying to warn her that a man is in her back seat waiting to strike. Those stories definitely made a big impression on me. But instead of them just being passed around in home room, add in social media and stories like this can spread to peak virality online. Stories like

these are especially common on social media. Just search the hashtag sex, traffic and awareness on TikTok and you will find thousands of women making videos about how traffickers tied a ribbon or a zip tied 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 and social media, leading the impression that women should be afraid anytime they leave their homes to go to the store. In this two part episode, we'll explore the roots of online panics around trafficking, why they're so dangerous, and here from two

people who are fighting back with facts. 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 Hobbs and Sarah Marshall have found that in many ways, we're basically just doing a mad Lives 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 cults 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. My name's Michael Hobbs. I'm the co host of a podcast called You're Wrong About

and another podcast called Maintenance Phase 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 you all starting out to give people the tools to push back against this kind of

bad information. No, like this, 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. You know, it's all the same thing. It's like a tide that comes in and out, you know, the Satanic panic is always with us, q on is always with us. We had no idea that we would come up with that.

It's just sort of we we research sort of debunk able episodes in history, and when you start to bunking 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, right, 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, you know, they're coming to the border, they're trying to steal your kids and get them into street gangs. I mean, it's it's like this mad libs where you can just throw in like okay, which societal outgroup is it going to be? What are they doing to our kids today? Like it's it's over and over again the same thing. So we've both me and my co host Sarah Marshall have become these like

accidental insufferable debunkers who were like, nope, same one. We're doing this again, guys, Like, let's calm it down. We've done this seven times before. So in my research around disinformation, particularly like false panics, around things that are rooted in people's identities. So whether it's trans folks, queer folks, you know, immigrants,

it is always sort of the same thing. Like I feel right now we're seeing all of the legislations would have meant to make you think as if trans children are like running the world, Like children are totally and there and and it's the same tropes, right, So they're coming for your kids, They're recruiting your kids, Like this is the same thing that Anita Bryant said about gay people in the seventies and the nineteen eighties, Like we're

just running exactly the same playbook. 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. And we're just mad living in a new societal outgroup. So I mean, at the beginning of the pandemic, I read a bunch of books about the Black Plague, just out of like more, just out of like morbid curiosity. And you know what you find in these old panics, you know, 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? Like, 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, uh, there's this group here that seems

sort of shifting, 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, and isn't the perfect recipe for a very anxious society a global pandemic. It's probably

not a coincidence that has COVID worsened. We saw more and more content about Q and on and Save the Children, purporting to save kids from some perceived danger lurking out in the world. Why do you think right now the specific moment in politics and culture, why are we seeing this pursurgence of panic around sex trafficking and trafficking view thing.

I mean, it's hard to say exactly. I think you know this this really hit its peak last summer, all of this Q and on hashtag save the children stuff, and it really seems like there was a moment where, you know, we're in the middle of a pandemic. Information was all over the pace, right like, remember, we didn't 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 sort of 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. So all 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 you know, white van driving traffickers who come from other countries and they're going to kidnap my kids and take them abroad or these these these narratives that just make no sense, right, And you know, at the heart of it, the little seed in the middle of it was this insane Q and on stuff right where it's like a dren of chrome and like Hillary Clinton is like cutting the faces

off a baby, like completely nuts stuff. But there's enough sort of plausible deniability around that that you can very easily say, well, I care about children, and so what's

the harm of sharing this little meme? Like what's the harm of taking this little thing on Facebook that says, you know, infamously there was one that said that children are thousands of times more likely to die of trafficking than of COVID, and so it feels, you know, and it was in like the the Instagram aesthetic right where it's got like the little logo and it's in pink, and it's very share able, and it's like, well, what's the harm, Like I might as well share that, you know,

if it helps save a kid or two, then I'm doing something good. And that's some sort of 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 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 memes start

just bouncing around the Internet for months. Yeah, I think this out of listening to your wrong about with something that really helped make that transition for me, because you know, for a while, I'd like, well, if this person thinks it's going to do some good to share this unstrewn meme on their Facebook page about traffic and about child

Who is it hurting? Now? I've come to see that. Okay, Well, if we over emphasize the risks of little kids being like snatched up or things like that, what are we under what are we under emphasizing you know, kids like youth who are facing homelessness, youth who are are put in precarious or you know, 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, right. And there's also this retributive aspect to where a lot of those memes that went around we're 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 a very few youth homeless shelters in most cities in America, there's also a completely broken foster care system. So when you look at things like the sort of Missing and Exploited Child hotline, 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. Yeah, and I also think it does kind of come down to what you were talking about before, this idea of like wanting to catch the bad guys. That's so much more exciting and fun. Then, Oh, we need to confront some of these systemic ills in our society that allow for already marginalized people of fault with the cracks. That's boring. It's so much more fun to be like, yeah, I'm gonna track down these bad guys. Listen a quick break.

They're back on Instagram. Video made by a mom influencer, Katie Sorenson, where she said that two strangers tried to kidnap her kids in a Michael's craft store in California, got over two million views Monday of this week. My children were the targets of attempted kidnap, which is such

a weird thing to even vocalize. Um, but it happened, um, 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. Sorenson said that she overheard the couple making comments about her kid's appearance, and the man even tried to grab

at her child stroller. But when the couple saw their picture being posted on saved the children forms 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. Their daughter says Sorensen's allegations were racially

motivated because their 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 over emphasizes 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 praying 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. 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, then the number of confirmed cases of that you can almost count on one or two hands. It's extremely rare. 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. Like 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 isn't 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 meimable, that's less sort of 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, 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 scrawled in TikTok, the people who are taking up the most space in terms of talking about the risk that trafficking poses are white women, you know, 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. Ins but of like scaring people

about it. What what do you think is going on there? I will just 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 the razor blade. I mean, the minute you google, or even like 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 like a razor blade in your hand

and then slice their achilles heel? Like 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 just it's very important to just say, like 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 dad's 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. Like these are 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 his parents will say, well, you know, we thought it was a little bit weird that, you know, the priest asked our son to sleep over,

but you know he's a priest. How could he ever, you know, how could he ever harm our son. He's like, this felt weird to us, but you know he has this sort of societally bestowed power that makes us not

trust our gut. Like this is what power does. And so the thing that we need to look for our places where we have power in society and we don't have accountability, and we already have so much accountability, like I don't want to imply that, like there's no such thing as somebody in a white van who's kidnapping kids whatever. It It's much more common for someone to abuse the trust of children and 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 sort of making somebody unsafe and physically threatening somebody often does come down to tricking them and looking for these elements of marginalization that 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 like that's that's not something that you can see and target, but it's this is what society needs, and it's what we've needed for decades. We're just not doing well. After a quick break,

let's get right back into it. 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 when women talk about people they know of using 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. I do think as a society it's okay for women and families to call out like, quote unquote bad guys if they're scary monsters showing up in a van. But if it's somebody that lives with, somebody in your family, somebody in your church, somebody in your community, Like, we're pretty uncomfortable with women, you know, calling out people in

those positions who abuse their power. But if somehow it's like totally fine, if you're thinking of it is like calling out a bad guy at a van. And that's also that's another aspect of marginalization, right that if it's a 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, you know, 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. Marginalization makes it so much harder to address these problems because that just gives you know, 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 I only have one argument on the show, but like we just need to do the boring stuff, Like I wish it was more interesting than that. No, it's so true. And you know, you talk a little bit. You talked a bit about like zip ties on your car and people

hiding under your car. Like what role do you think that local media and also law enforcement has to play in this because I I've read articles where on its face it would appear that a police officer or somebody in law enforcement has confirmed, yes, we saw this zip gi on the cars and this is a trafficking thing. But actually when you like dig dig, 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 it's not actually, it's not actually any proof that like this was tied to a trafficking attempt. What world do you think that journalists and law enforcement should play and making sure that these panics don't spin

out of control. If one of the ones I think it was last summer 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 to their cars and found a flower and they freaked out there like it's traffickers. I marked the traffickers after me, and these poor people who are just trying to do something nice or like

all of a sudden sort of smeared as traffickers. And what was amazing was the cops sort of like re enforced this. It's like, oh, you know, we've we've had threats recently of trafficking, and you know, we've we've heard rumors of trafficking, and of course the local media reinforces this too that you know, trafficking is a huge problem in this area and it could happen to anyone, but not in this particular case, and there's no sort of attempt to debunk the meta myth here that people are

staking you out in parking lots to kidnap you. Like that even even for like 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 like communicate with the other traffickers, like just text the other traffickers, Like it doesn't make any

sense on any level. But we get this weird credulity, especially around this issue that you know, one of the tenants of journalism is you're supposed to do sort of both sides. Right. We saw this for climate change for years, right, Like there's the people that say the 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 whore like, 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 hits something like really deep within us of like, oh, this is the danger I have to worry about. Yeah, I think I hadn't even thought about that. But it's a good point, and I part of me wonders if it's a little bit of hesitation

because and I struggled with this as well. You don't want to feel like you're invalidating somebody's experience, right, Like, if somebody feels like like they were targeted or they were like 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 feel something that's just not true that's going to a result in more harm. Right, And there's also there

are real cases of this opening. I mean, 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 nineteen eighties and nineties about quote unquote stranger danger that you know, kids were gonna come and steal your kids, and like, there were some truly horrific, awful, heartbreaking cases where this really did happen.

This is why, 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 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, right, we can sacrifice our civil liberties. We can incarceerate a bunch of people on sort of spurious grounds if it saves one child and one thing, you know, as somebody who is a urban cyclist and somebody who takes like urban safety very seriously. This is not a standard that we apply to the lives of children in other contexts. Right, If you if you want to save the life of one child, you crack down on guns. Guns kill three thousand kids a year, cars kill six

thousand kids a year. Right, you could make the speed limit in every single city fifteen miles an hour throughout the country, and you would literally save the lives of like kids, because most kids are killed by speeding cars. 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 I would have to drive slower. Whereas whenever it comes to these you know, if it saves a 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 gonna go to jail. That the effects of this are going to be inflicted on a societal outgroup. So this this entire logic of like, you know, 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. That's so true, And I think, yeah, I think the idea that the people who are going to be further criminalized harmed by this by when we make laws, you know, kind of quickly, as long as it's not like me feeling that repercussion, you know, as long as 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? You know, how can we avoid this

on a on a wider scale. I mean, I want to say, like, be careful with what you share, but like I'm not all that careful with what I share. Like, there's a lot of information out there, it's really hard like people, you know, 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 it's never strangers. It's never like these kinds of mono myths.

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, it's that really never happens. Anything the stranger is kidnapping you in broad daylight. I think there's like certain categories of anecdotes that are just like these ones never turn out to be true,

so we should just stop sharing them. Like, don't don't feel like you have to warn people about anything involving a parking lot if a parking lot is involved, people are safe. I mean they're all like videotaped at this point exactly like people are safe and parking lots just like leave the parking lots alone. It's fine. It's so funny because I went back and listened to the episode 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 bar code tattoo as somebody who grew up kind of you know, gothy goth adjacent, ALTI adjacent. I know two different people who had bar code tattoos. Right, All of the warning signs of trafficking are like teenage stuff. It's like, oh, she's moody, or like, like her taste

in music changes. You're like, that's not a sign of trafficking, that's a sign of teenager nous. That's a sign a sign of adolessis Yeah. So another I mean another like rule of thumb that just don't share anything involving trafficking basically, like, I think this, 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 like until we know more, just like hold off on the trafficking stuff. Gang. Yeah,

that's that's great advice. I would also say, like, not that I think that any celebrities listen to this, listen to my podcast, but when well meeting celebrities get involved in a trafficking campaign, shut it down right, Like, I'm

sure you're a good guy, don't use you, don't. It sets me when I see celebrities who I'm sure like their hardest in the right place, but like getting involved in trafficking campaigns that are tied to specific legislation like Sesta Fosta, It's like, oh, like it just does such

a bad look on such a complicated issue. Yeah. I think the biggest thing is that, you know, the trafficking field right now is this weird, unholy alliance between very well meaning celebrities and anything well meaning people and not well meaning, mostly Republican legislatures who want to use this as an excuse to crackdown 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 any time we have any bills being pushed by these super Republican legislators, I think, just like be careful with that stuff. Like any time you have the religious right and the Republican Party pushing one of these bills, like just slow down and like ask actual sex workers, like what is in

this bill and are you in support of it? Like 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, and like they are not mad about this kind of stuff. They're mad about the legislators that are trying to take their rights away. Again, there is so much to say about how we talk about trafficking online, especially on TikTok, where so many viral

claims about trafficking take off. Next we'll hear from Jessica, who goes by blood Bath and Beyond on TikTok about her use of TikTok to spread accurate information about trafficking. When we start drowning out that conversation we're We're 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 kdnapped from target. If you enjoyed this podcast, please help

us grow by subscribing. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi, We'd love to hear from you at Hello at tango dot com. Dis Informed is brought to you by There Are No Girls on the Internet. It's a production of I Heart Radio and Unbossed. Creative Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Toy Harrison is our supervising producer and engineer. Michael Amatto

is our contributing producer. I'm your host Bridget Tod For more great podcasts check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.