Thank God for Snopes.
Without it, I’d be left rolling my eyes so far up, you’d look at me and run because, like, where are my pupils?
But thanks to Snopes, the will-not-die Facebook post below is at least getting the fact-finding it deserves. For instance, that cute girl we must presume was kidnapped and never seen again? According to Snopes:
Facebook commenters correctly identified the photograph’s origin on a page about children’s hairstyles.
What’s more:
The scenario presented is one that is exceedingly unlikely. Among other implausibilities, this warning makes it sound as though the bad guys are stymied in their search for victims and don’t know where to look for kids to abduct until they see pictures of them on Facebook
That’s not only a great point — that’s great writing. Go Snopes!
But perhaps it is time to show you the actual Facebook post that a reader sent in because it sounded so unlikely…to her. But not the world of worriers. So far it has been shared 45,000+ times:
She Accepted A Stranger’s Facebook Friend Request And She Will Regret It For The Rest Of Her Life
The new environment of social media and the associated liking, commenting, and friending may seem very routine nowadays even though it has burst onto the scene in just recent years.
Because of this sudden burst, we really haven’t taken the time to study the effects of this new environment we live in.
The following story could be a very likely scenario which will allow us to study the harsh disservices social media has.
One day you receive a friend request, as you often do every week or so. It’s a nice looking man who you don’t seem to recognize, but who knows, maybe you’ve met him before. You accept.
Later that day you decide to post photos of your little 6-year-old girls birthday party, and you tag all of her friends through their parents.
“Great birthday fun at McKinley park, Missy looks forward to thanking all you kids for the gifts you gave her at Jefferson elementary tomorrow morning!”
Meanwhile the guy you friended earlier receives your post and sends out a mass email to his associates, and would be customers:
“American females and males, ages 5-6. $8-10 grand, inquire on specific.”
You’ve essentially just given a trafficker and his customers multiple pickings not to mention the school they attend and the park which they frequent.
Read the rest here — if you can stand it. And note how the fear is not just that your child will be kidnapped, but that it will be YOUR fault and YOU WILL REGRET IT THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.
This is exactly why parents are so afraid: We are told not just that there’s random danger out there, but that a parent who does anything other than obsess about every possible way their kid could die (no matter how unlikely) will pay for their rational optimism with ceaseless remorse. The only way to avoid never-ending anguish is to ask yourself before doing ANYTHING: Is there some way, somehow that this could, in the very very worst case scenario, hurt my child?
From there it’s just a baby step to the Centers for Disease Control’s pronouncement a week or two ago that no woman of childbearing age should drink so much as a drop of alcohol unless she is on birth control — because what if she had a glass of wine before she knew she was pregnant? All bets are off! The CDC is saying the same thing as this Facebook post: Don’t take even the most microscopic of chances or YOU WILL REGRET IT FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.
Fear and regret go hand in hand in driving parents crazy. And even the non-crazy ones have to worry about everyone else judging them. Or sending along “helpful” Facebook posts. – L
.
.
53 Comments
Thank you so much for your post, as always a common sense based approach to parenting. I think that in order for this highly unlikely scenario to happen I would have to break a lot of social media etiquette and get a lot of party attendees furious at me. 1) I would never FB friend anyone who I didn’t know personally (maybe that’s just me) 2) I would never post photos on social media of friends children without their express permission. 3) I would never tag any child photos with their school name because that’s just random and the people at the party would never just be from their school, so it doesn’t even make sense.
So much fear…for what, so we can lock our children inside and force them to play video games instead of experiencing life. Yuck!
Of all the infuriating posts on the internet, this one has always annoyed me the most. Even if traffickers really did operate by random stranger kidnappings of well-cared-for, middle class white kids (not that those are the only people reading this post, but it’s certainly the little girl in the picture) do we really think that they manage an international child smuggling ring while being so dumb that they need some lady on facebook to clue them in to the facts that any given elementary school would have 5 and 6 year olds in its kindergarten classrooms?
I am so sad that the original post doesn’t allow comments!
And I don’t for a minute believe that anyone posted the “….at Jefferson Elementary” part. Like SaraBeth said it’s completely random, and any reader giving it just two seconds of rational thought would realize that most schools are clearly, well, schools, and no one needs FB to find one.
I find it amusing that the Source for that post comes from damn.com
http://damn.com/must-read-fb-friending/
…just the site itself made me go, huh? Just like the song.
I do agree with you about Snopes, usually I point my Dad there whenever he comes up with another one of his “Does this sound real to you?” email forwards…then I usually just say No and point him to Snopes where it says why.
I’m waiting for this to show up in my wife’s FB feed.
We have to call this sort of stuff out for what it is. No, it probably won’t change anyone’s mind (anyone who had a mind to spare wouldn’t be spending all their time on Facebook), but it’ll make me feel better. And in this era of “feelings are the new logic,” isn’t that what matters?
You’d think any trafficker smart enough to trawl Facebook would have long since exhausted the more obvious notions of Google maps or the phone book, or maybe just driving down the street, all of which make it ever so easy to find a school. And who knew — schools are fuil of *gasp* KIDS!
Traffickers must be really dumb or really lazy, since they evidently don’t even do that much.
K–Is it possible that there are some middle class white kids who are not “well-cared-for?” I grew up white and middle class and there was dysfunction in almost all my friends’ homes, not to mention a great deal in mine. Have you never heard of exceptions to this sacred bit of racial and class profiling?
Megan – Of course there are varying levels of dysfunction across the socioeconomic spectrum. I even included a parentheses to note that I’m aware that not everyone fits that description! I was only commenting on how I think people who post this sort of thing are not really aware of who is really at risk of being the victim of a trafficker (in this country at least). More seriously, I suspect that “well-cared-for” is actually the adjective that matters, regardless of race or class.
Megan- To be fair, as an adult white male who works in a very diverse school, the vast majority of the paranoia I see comes from white middle/upper class mothers.
People of color often don’t need to invent bogeymen, they have more pertinent concerns in their daily lives. They don’t usually have the luxury of being so safe and bored that they need to go out of their way to find something to fear, to find someone to demonize, to find something that makes them feel like a competent parent.
Thank you, thank you, thank you Lenore for invoking some common sense into this matter and thank you Snopes for giving me some much needed ammunition against paranoid people!!
Facebook, as well as Youtube, are excellent mediums for proud parents to showcase their children’s accomplishments, be it athletic, musical or academic. For many parents, this is somewhat therapeutic and I see nothing wrong with it! In fact, I enjoy seeing pictures and videos of their kids in athletic or life events and will often compliment the kids and/or the parents on the accomplishments. This is precisely why parents post their kids’ successes and they should not be vilified for it.
Child predator paranoia is getting waaaaaay out of hand in the United States!
I love Snopes! I check every single post that sounds even slightly untrue against their database. It’s a skeptic’s dream!!
So apparently child traffickers can figure out Facebook, but the ability to google school districts to get the name and address of any elementary school they desire eludes them. Got it.
It’s amazing how child sex trafficking is so massively widespread that everybody in America needs to worry about it when apparently these traffickers are too stupid to realize, without the help of moms on FB, that you can find children at elementary schools on weekday mornings.
I really think there’s a lot of narcissism in this: *MY* kid is so gorgeous/special/amazing that strangers all over the world would pay thousands of dollars for just a few minutes with them.
Megan–K is correct, though. The “abuse knows no socioeconomic boundaries” myth is probably part of the root of a lot of our hysteria about things like trafficking, and it’s simply not true. All forms of abuse, including sexual abuse, are much, much (like up to ten times) more frequent for children living in poverty than children who are not living in poverty. The idea that white middle-class kids are just as likely to be molested as poor minority children living in inner-city housing projects is simply untrue; the poor child is many time more likely to be a victim of sexual abuse (as well as physical abuse). And, studies have also indicated that poverty exacerbates the effects of abuse, so a child in poverty is likely to be more harmed, in the long-term, by abuse than a child who is not.
But, when child abuse came to the attention of the public in the 1980s, it was decided to frame it as a matter of individual pathology–to be combatted with harsh criminal penalties against individuals–rather than a matter of social pathology–to be combatted with more holistic social programs to help the children who are most at risk for abuse and their families. And that has become such a dominant cultural myth that many people do now think, as you do, that acknowledging the reality that abuse is far more prevalent for children living in poverty is somehow “profiling.”
Hubris. We have fallen for a need to be outrageous. Posting stupidity is a means to get attention.
When the two-year-old acts up and acts out, we ignore the little imps.
But when grown-ups go off the deep end, we line up behind them and cheer them on. We take every moronic word as gospel. If it’s on the internet–it must be true!
How silly we are! Just stop and think!
“Great birthday fun at McKinley park, Missy looks forward to thanking all you kids for the gifts you gave her at Jefferson elementary tomorrow morning!”
What parent on FB writes this way – a journalist who can’t switch off? “Must… add… informative… details…”
It sounds just as fake as “normal” people in commercials who keep mentioning the brand name like ten times.
In my office building we used to have a modeling agency here. And every week or so they would have these open casting calls and the number of women (usually) who would show up with their little darlings (monsters) all salivating at the prospect of making a few bucks by getting Junior in a commercial or ad, was amazing. And annoying, if you were trying to get work done.
I have no proof of this, and I’m going on instinct alone, but I bet there is a big overlap between the knuckleheads who worry about child predators searching FB, and the women who have no qualms about selling little Spencer or Samantha’s image for a few bucks for the college fund.
I’m not one to say this very often, as a guy who is not to happy about slogans, and at best I’m a reluctant booster of feminists, but these types of scare tactics aimed at women are unbelievably sexist, and simply continue the tradition of blaming women for anything that goes wrong with their kids. The strange thing is, it’s more often the women who are slinging this shit around on social media.
Who is the “she” that accepted the friend request? Why is she regretting it the rest of her life…was her daughter kidnapped? Links to the media coverage of that kidnapping would be helpful, along with verification that the FB “friend” was involved in that crime.
Instead, we get a vague fiction story about “you”, the reader.
How about a facebook post that says if you have a kids photo on facebook and accept a friend request, then, the kid will be abductor by Mexican drug lords and shipped to Antartica to serve penguins?
z
I do agree with a couple of points in the article:
1) Stop posting everything about your life on Facebook. Why? Because nobody cares what you had for breakfast.
2) Stop adding strangers on Facebook. Why? Because why would you add someone you don’t know anyway? They’ll probably post annoying pictures of what they had for breakfast.
3) Don’t post your kid’s photo as your profile pic. Why? Because it’s annoying. I recently got a friend request from a friend from high school, but before I could approve the request, I had to dig through his profile to find a picture and make sure it was really him because his profile pic was his 5 year old daughter.
……..because what if she had a glass of wine before she knew she was pregnant? All bets are off!
I like that line. I think I will borrow it.
When the human brain is gripped with anxiety, all bet’s are off. The survival programs take over.
These automatic programs come from the cerebellum. It’s the same place where the normal bodily functions happen automatically such as heartbeat, breathing, and eyes dilate. These are uncontrollable.
Fear is like the current in the ocean. You need to learn about it to understand how it can consume you and how to get out of an undertow when swimming. How helpless you become depends upon how deep into the current stream you get. It can be the same with hysteria. Logic and rational thinking start fading. How much they fade depends on how deep into the current of fear that you get.
This explains is a bit better.
http://www.onmysoapboxx.com/puppet
Why did I write this blog? Why am I so hell bent on teaching about swimming safety and how to escape from an undertow?
I know VERY well how a person can become their own worst enemy. I speak from experience because I was my worst enemy. After I learned how to get out of this hell, I became a telephone counselor because I wanted to help others escape the hell.
BTW I don’t accept friend request from everybody. However it’s for a different reason.
In 1970 If you were to stand on the roof of your house and yell into a loudspeaker what you had for breakfast, people would think that you’re crazy. However now I see that those people wouldn’t have been crazy. The were just ahead of the times because Facebook wasn’t around yet.
I never thought about this before I just read YOU WILL REGRET IT FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, but now I am wondering how having these kinds of fears associates with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The people I have known with OCD need to do things like check the lock or the stove mutliple times because if a robber entered the house or the stove started a fire, the regret would be too much for them to bear. I wonder if the same people are more prone to worry that if they left a kid in a car for a minute and SOMETHIG HAPPENED or they posted a picture on Facebook and SOMETHING HAPPENED, then the potential regret would be the worst possible outcome for them. I hate to think that the people posting these warnings are preying on a fairly common disorder.
anonymous mom–What are the names of the reputable studies you draw your conclusions from? You say poor kids are “like up to ten times” more likely to be abused than those of the middle class; which studies came up with that number, and which studies followed kids of various statuses to figure out the relative long-term effects of abuse on them? I’m looking forward to learning about these studies.
Paul–You’re talking about moms and I’m talking about kids. That white middle/upper class moms seem to be safe and bored does not mean their children are. You appear to agree with majority opinion that kids from middle and upper class homes are virtually ineligible for problems, but not all problems are equally visible, and abusive parents who are educated know to cover their tracks. What you think you see at school is one thing; children’s experiences in their own homes are much more complex than that. Mine certainly was, and there were no social workers or researchers asking questions.
I usually do call stuff out when similar posts make their way to my feed. I’m proud to say I’ve had several friends apologize for their panic and delete the posts.
Don’t forget, if you share this post with 10 of your FB buddies, your crush will fall in love with you but if you don’t, you’ll be haunted by the ghost of some random sex trafficking victim the FBI conjured up. So you can hold off replying to those Nigerian princes and princess marriage proposals until you hit Like and Share first. What would Raptor Jesus do?
If even a drop of alcohol during pregnancy is disastrous, I wonder how women in France and Southern Europe manage to deliver healthy babies.
Wine is part of their culture.
@Coasterfreak – I totally agree with the points you make, which is why I refuse to have a Facebook account. However, I was disappointed that you didn’t stick to your breakfast theme and say that the photo was of the 5-year-old eating breakfast 🙂
Yesterday morning I was listening to a show on NPR and then had to turn it off. It was apparently about keeping kids safe on the internet. I turned it off after listening to a woman who has some type of law enforcement job talk about a pedophile who had served his time and what he did after he got out of jail.
Apparently, he went online, found photos of fully clothed little girls and pinned them on Pinterest. Little girls with their mouths open. There were no photos of local children, only random ones from the internet. Yes, the guy is a prev, and probably showing behavior that makes it likely that he will re-offend. However, the woman’s concern was for the girls. Girls who will probably never know this happened, girls who came from stock photos for things like a party store or newspaper photos.
I just don’t get this concern. Yup, someone can lift the photo that the school took and had on their website. It really doesn’t do a thing to my child because my child will never know. Even if my child does find his or her own photo….maybe it will get the ball rolling and get the person help so that they don’t move on to real kids.
Coasterfreak, you won’t find my photo either. You will find a photo of a cute kitten. But…like you, I don’t accept friend requests from everyone. I don’t even accept them all from people that I do know.
I have friended a stranger. This guy from England with my same name (First and Last) sent me a request and so I did. I was bored, thought it’d be cool to have a ‘friend’ in another country and frankly I don’t have many friends. (I’m an introvert who doesn’t get out much.) If I had a kid, I wouldn’t allow them to add strangers, though. I would keep close track of FB friends of my kids.
David
@CrazyCatLady: That’s when we start getting into some serious thought policing, isn’t it? I just don’t get it. I have no idea what strangers are thinking when they see my kids, and I don’t care. It’s possible that some stranger would see my kids and have a sexual fantasy, I suppose. It’s also possible they might fantasize about shooting them, or eating them, or kidnapping them, or paying for their college educations. I have no idea. And, it doesn’t matter. What other people may or may not be thinking about my children, or my children’s pictures, is irrelevant to me and not something it’s ever occurred to me to give a second’s thought to. I really think, again, this is just an epidemic of narcissism, where somehow people are just obsessed with what other people might be thinking about them or their kids.
In reality, what nearly everybody is thinking about my kids, or your kids, is nothing. They are too busy with their own lives to give more than a passing thought to mine. And it’s pretty delusional to imagine that the world is full of people obsessing about my children.
@anonymous mom
“That’s when we start getting into some serious thought policing, isn’t it? I just don’t get it. I have no idea what strangers are thinking when they see my kids, and I don’t care. It’s possible that some stranger would see my kids and have a sexual fantasy”
Makes you wonder about legislators, prosecuting attorneys, and cops, doesn’t it?
Quote:
“I just don’t get this concern. Yup, someone can lift the photo that the school took and had on their website. It really doesn’t do a thing to my child because my child will never know.”
@CrazyCatLady:
Oh c’mon now cat lady…quit using basic common sense. You might upset the high strung child predator phobic masses we have here in America today.
Coasterfreak, there are legitimate reasons to friend/accept a friend request from a stranger on Facebook.
I’m a huge fan of an English musician who is massively famous in the UK and Europe but not well-known in America. I’ve visited Facebook pages devoted to following and discussing her music, and have indeed friended some folks from around the world whom I’ve never actually met in person.
I also have childhood friends and extended family living in various far-flung places and have friended individuals I’ve encountered through them (spouses, co-workers, etc.), even though I’ve never met them in person.
I don’t think this is uncommon.
And yet no one recognizes that our local governments are actually giving traffickers direction in the form of School Zone signs. Surely they should all be removed right now.
The CIA backed Facebook and Twitter are perfect tools not only for deepening the brainwashing that everyone already has, but triggering any kind of response to any event that is desired. The behavior of the brainwashed is very predictable and very easy to manipulate.
I have said many times that Facebook, Twitter and other social media is the worldwide version of Radio Television Libre Des Mille Collines
Outrageous posts often ask people to like or share them (to build up their popularity.)
Posting a link to Snopes on a fear-monering post therefore gives them what they are seeking.
This goes for whether it is a rumor or the latest political rant.
Better to share a Snopes or other fact-checked link separately.
All of this also assumes that this post was written by an actual mother. It might be a PSYOP, written by an operative to create a specific reaction and response. Watch with suspicion for responses or comments to that post that add fuel to the emotional fire and provoke additional emotional reaction.
It will really help to educate yourself on the topic of Psychological Operations. (No, Wikipedia is not a reliable source for this kind of research)
I don’t FB friend anyone I don’t know personally. If you can’t explain where we met, you don’t get friended and depending on how sketchy you seem I’m likely to block you completely. I had this policy well before I had children. Who actually accepts random friend requests from total strangers?
Matt. the people you’re talking about aren’t really strangers, they’re more like the equivalent of pen pals — people you know through some connection and have interacted with, but haven’t met.
Accepting friend requests from strangers means accepting requests from people you’ve never heard of and know nothing about. Doing so will almost certainly not get a person sold into trafficking or otherwise physically harmed, but it can get them hacked, it may very likely result in stuff on their feed that they don’t want, and there’s really no good reason to do it.
Self-interest is a common theme in fear-mongering. “I would feel so bad, I would never forgive myself, I, I, I.”
Anonymous mom–The studies you base your information on…?
Anonymous Mom has a big part of it right: The epidemic of narcissistic parenting (really.. narcissism in general)
I work a lot in cafes and overhear conversations all the time from the tables of moms competing with each other, all trying to “out-mom” the next one.. “look at me.. I’m special” That is at the root of so many problems. The desperation to be ‘special’. I should write a book on this.
@Matt: Hey! Don’t make me all curious without saying who you’re talking about! Who is not well-known in the USA? Adele? Lily Allen? Amy MacDonald? Who?
Coastermom and others – many of us use Facebook at least in part for business connections, online sales of products we make or services we provide, and so forth. eaning that we do indeed need to add people we may not know by name to our friends lists. Lots of us moms are busting our humps to make a living using those FB connections and not friending “strangers” is basically like putting up a “closed” sign. I make my child’s picture my profile because I like to and I’m sane and rational and know that it is highly unlikely that anyone is stalking my child on my FB page. I don’t see the point of using this obviously redonk situation to then turn around and lambaste other people for things that are aesthetically displeasing to you. If you don’t like doing those things, don’t do them. Why take the opportunity to wax judgemental on another woman’s business or personal choices?
I do know someone who posted her address on Facebook, with a message to her friend saying exactly when she was going on holiday. Really dumb. But she didn’t get burgled and her beautiful kids weren’t abducted.
Given the choice of loitering in areas where kids hang out vs spending hours trawling people’s Facebook pages – which probably DON’T have their home addresses published – I think the chances of having your kid abducted because of Facebook is SLIM…
Papillo,
Kate Bush is the musician I was referring to. It still boggles my mind that she is largely unknown here in the States.
@Matt – Ah, the woman from Wuthering Heights. Didn’t even know she’s British.
Bad boys use their conversational skills to keep a girl interested and wanting more – so you can too.
Before you determine to skip the festive fun this coming year and offer lottery tickets on your employees instead,
consider trying again keeping some commonsense tips in your mind.
Does weed go bad It could possibly be difficult to educate your partner,
however you’ll know with your heart so it’s the correct thing
to try and do.
When they’re in season (July to September), keep blueberries within the
fridge for tossing into cereal, whipping into fruit
shakes, or making pies, crisps, and cobblers. If you pick the grape leaves
alone, stuff them brown rice and tomato juice for just a vegan treat.
Conversely, how this works, is that to the same given room space, it is possible to install a
significantly larger tv whether it’s wide screen. This operating
technique is different from windows but it is possible to
still do almost exactly the same things by it.
Component converter box With just an instant browse of HDMI products it will
become obvious until this is not simply a case of obtaining a HDMI
cable and adding it in your online shopping basket.
GAEMS believes that gaming can be a personal experience even in the event the gamer chooses
to discuss that exposure to others inside the same room or online.
A few hours later, your going through everything again, however
you don’t mind much this time.