Raffile and Erin West had just come back from tracking a scam network in Nigeria, and were asked what responsibility the US platforms carry. He said the criminals themselves named Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp as the platforms that enable the most crime, and described the reused profile pictures and scripted messages that make the operation machine-readable. His argument is that the repetition is itself the evidence.
…So they think they can keep getting away with it. And the fact that, as Aaron mentioned, the two of us in the span of a week can prepare to go to Nigeria and, you know, track down our scammer and nine others. You know, so can any law enforcement agency. So that's a challenge. Let's do it.
…platforms, right? Paul, what do you think about the responsibility of those platforms when it comes to either policing this sort of activity or assisting law enforcement or providing features that could mitigate the sort of issue? Like, what do you think the U.S. platform's responsibility is here?
Yeah, we asked these criminals what platforms enable you to commit the most crimes. And the first three answers that we heard across the board, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, they're all owned by Meta. In an honorary mention, fourth place, we heard TikTok quite a lot as well. So from the social platforms, they can do so much to prevent this. We're seeing these criminals use the same profile pictures, the same catfish identity, the same scripted messages, the same behavior of adding a whole bunch of teenagers and then sending them the same messages. This is a scaled abuse, and scaled abuse is detectable. And if it's detectable, it's preventable. So the onus is on them to do something about this.
Yeah. Erin, what do you think about that? About U.S. platforms' responsibility?
I've said it for a long time with the pig butchering scandal. But what I will also say is there is no question that American businesses could do a lot to keep teenagers more safe. And the fact is, the gravity of what's happening mandates that they need to do this. We have boys killing themselves…
Yeah, I mean, you will read national media reports or local media reports, or you'll just see stuff on Facebook as well. Or, you know, I just sometimes scroll through the sextortion subreddit and just every single day, if not every single hour, it is some kid saying, Hey, I'm getting sex storted…