Facebook is a hub of sex trafficking recruitment in the US, report says By TIM DE CHANT “The Internet has become the dominant tool traffickers use to recruit victims. Facebook is the most commonly used social media platform for human sex trafficking recruitment in the US, according to a new report published by the Human Trafficking Institute. Last year, 59 percent of victims in active cases who were recruited through social media were found through Facebook, the report states, with 41 percent of all recruitment taking place online. “The Internet has become the dominant tool that traffickers use to recruit victims, and they often recruit them on a number of very common social networking websites,” Victor Boutros, CEO of the Human Trafficking Institute, told CBS News. “Facebook overwhelmingly is used by traffickers to recruit victims in active sex trafficking cases.” The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report draws its data from active federal criminal and civil human trafficking cases. Last year, there were 579 active prosecutions and 200 civil suits. Among criminal cases, there were 1,499 victims and 1,007 defendants, and 94 percent of criminal prosecutions were for sex trafficking—only 6 percent were for forced labor. Women and girls were overwhelmingly targeted by sex traffickers, with 98 percent of criminal cases involving female victims. Most victims—91 percent—were from the US, and a majority were burdened with pre-existing vulnerabilities, chiefly substance dependency or having run away from home. Facebook was the most common platform for child recruitment, with the report noting that “65% of child victims recruited on social media were recruited through Facebook.” Those findings run counter to trends in teen usage of Facebook. Though around 70 percent of American adults frequent the site, it’s no longer the favored platform among teens—only 51 percent used the network, while YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat took the top spots in a 2018 survey. Yet, the report says, “Despite Facebook’s reputation as a less popular platform among teenagers, it was a more common platform for recruiting child victims than adult victims in 2020 active sex trafficking cases.” Story continues here …

Facebook Post Misleads on Bipartisan Capitol Attack Report and Interview By D'Angelo Gore Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Gary Peters, as well as Republican Sens. Roy Blunt and Rob Portman, all have previously said that former President Donald Trump was at least partly responsible for the attack by a mob of Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. However, that was not among the conclusions of the bipartisan staff report the four senators released on numerous “security, planning, and response failures” leading up to and on the day of the attack. The 100-plus page report was the result of a months-long oversight investigation led by Klobuchar, Blunt, Peters and Portman, who are the respective chairpersons and ranking members of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. In addition to identifying widespread failures that preceded and occurred during the assault on Congress earlier this year, the report also included dozens of recommendations for the Capitol Police, the Department of Defense and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies to address the security lapses so that similar acts do not happen in the future. What the report did not do — as a June 8 Facebook post from Occupy Democrats may lead readers to believe — is assign blame to Trump. Story continues here …

Facebook acknowledges politicians can harm, but won’t let them be fact-checked By: Harrison Mantas Last week’s announcement by Facebook that it would keep former U.S. President Donald Trump off the platform for another two years also included a few tweaks to the way the platform moderates speech by political leaders. It laid out a more concrete explanation of how it would punish political leaders who violate platform policies during “times of civil unrest and ongoing violence,” and promised to speed up its review of potentially violating content during these designated periods. Missing from the announcement was any change to the exemption that bars its Third-Party Fact-Checking partners to fact-check the posts of political leaders. (Full Disclosure: Facebook requires its fact-checking partners to be verified signatories of the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles). Facebook has long argued that political leaders are some of the most scrutinized figures in society, and reasoned that they should be exempt from fact-checking so as to not limit their speech and deprive citizens of hearing from their elected officials. However, Facebook acknowledged in its statement that “public figures often have broad influence across our platform and may therefore pose a greater risk of harm when they violate our Community Standards or Community Guidelines.” Fact-checkers and researchers have cited this harm in the past as an argument for why Facebook should remove its fact-checking exemption for politicians. In fact, we talked about this in the Factually edition that followed the Oversight Board’s decision in early May. Responding to reports about this most recent announcement, Gordon Farrer, chief academic investigator for the Australian outlet RMIT ABC Fact Check, argued the ban should be lifted to help improve the public discourse. Story continues here …