How Teens Are Falling Victim to Financial Sextortion

***This episode briefly discusses suicide.  If you or anyone you know needs support, Help is available 24 hours a day at the suicide and crisis lifeline by dialing 988
https://988lifeline.org/

Join journalist and professor Chris Moody as he shares his alarming findings on sextortion  scams that are victimizing thousands of teenage boys. Chris does an exceptional job illuminating the grim reality of these scams, the platforms they're most prevalent on, and how governments are responding. Most importantly, he underscores the urgent need for open dialogues with our children to help them navigate through this potential minefield.

This conversation is not only illuminating but also an urgent call to action for all parents and guardians to ensure the safety of their children in the digital world.

About Chris Moody:
Chris Moody is a freelance writer for The Washington Post and a lecturer in journalism and media at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He is a former senior political reporter for CNN. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Outside, The New Republic and more.

Resources from the episode:

Washington Post Article by Chris Moody

National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Cyber Tip Line

Snap Research About Gen Z and Extortion

"Take it Down" Assistance

Thorn

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

This podcast was created to be a space for conversation. The topics will vary, but the conversation will always be honest, authentic and sometimes even a little uncomfortable. My hope is that through these conversations we will build a community of people who might not always agree with each other, but will definitely feel less isolated and alone. So I'm Jessica Kidwell and this is. We Should Talk About that. Hi everyone, how are you? I'm doing pretty good.

Speaker 1: 0:44

Fall is definitely in the air and I am a total sucker for the colors of fall. The warmth of the reds, yellow oranges, of the trees completely contrast with that crispness in the air. We have been knee-deep in high school football Friday night lights around here. So I have been spending more and more time around the high school and kind of immersed in the social world of high schoolers and life. And I remember right after I became a mom I was feeling super overwhelmed by all that I didn't know and a dear friend of mine who was already through the other side of her parenting trajectory said to me don't worry, right now they're little, so the problems are little, everything is fixable. It's when they're older that the problems get big and can be much harder to solve. Little kids, little problems, big kids, big problems, and at the time this was extremely comforting to me because I was immersed in all of the little problems and, pretty much like Scarlett O'Hara, I kind of thought I'll think about that tomorrow on those big problems. And unfortunately tomorrow has become today and my guest today is here to talk with me about a really big problem that you might not think you need to be worried about, but let me tell you you absolutely do.

Speaker 1: 2:11

Chris Moody is a freelance writer for the Washington Post and a lecturer in journalism and media at Appalachian State University in Boone, north Carolina. His recent article IDK what to Do. Thousands of Teen Boys Are being Extorted in Sexting Scams was published October 2nd in the Washington Post and I think I DMed him, probably that day or maybe the next day, to see if he would please, please, please, come on the show to talk about this, and luckily he said yes. So, chris, welcome to. We Should Talk About that.

Speaker 2: 2:46

It's great to be here. Thank you for having me on the show.

Speaker 1: 2:49

I remember reading a personal interest story in People Magazine yes, a very serious publication Earlier this year about a teenage boy from Michigan, jordan DeMay, who had killed himself after this type of scam happened to him, and I remember being kind of shocked and feeling very sad but also thinking this is probably a pretty rare situation. And then it happened to someone I know. Luckily he came to his parents right away and they were able to help him navigate this, but clearly it's not a rare phenomenon. So can you talk to me about, first of all, how did you hear about this and how much is this happening?

Speaker 2: 3:35

It's happening a lot more than most of us realize. Let's look at some of the numbers. Just to start out, these are merely numbers that have been reported to authorities. In 2022, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which serves as a clearing house for a lot of this, saw 10,000 reports of what we call financial extortion, and that's where someone gets access to an intimate photograph that you have sent to someone who is purported to be a girlfriend or flirting with you someone online typically and a teenage boy sends them a photo a nude usually and then the person turns around and tries to blackmail them and says if you don't send me $500 or $300, I'm going to send this photo to all of your family and friends and ruin your life. And so there were 10,000 cases of it in 2022. And already in halfway into 2023, the last time numbers were available, it had gone up to 12,500. It has only increased since then as we round into the latter half of the latter part of the year.

Speaker 2: 4:43

Like I mentioned earlier, these kind of only scratch the surface. A lot of young we'll call them boys they're boys, they're teenagers who get targeted by this don't report this. They pay the scammer and hope that it goes away or they block the scammer and never tell anyone about it. It never reaches official numbers, but we do have reason to believe that the numbers are quite a lot higher. I heard about this when an editor at the Washington Post came to me and said that she was on a Facebook group for parents of not young children and not yet adults, kind of like that middle teenage time when you're trying to let them go free but you're also still their parent. They're still at home.

Speaker 2: 5:20

A mother posted about this scam that had targeted her son and she said has anyone else heard of this? We feel so alone. Why is this happening to us? Boy oh boy, there were so many more mothers and fathers on that Facebook group that said oh my gosh, this happened to me, this happened to my son's friend, and story after story poured in. We decided to investigate and speak to some of these families and try to understand under what circumstances this occurred. Who's doing the targeting, what are the implications, what are governments doing about it and what are the social platforms where this harassment is taking place? What are they doing about it? And we found quite a lot.

Speaker 1: 6:00

Yeah, I found the article very normalizing from the aspect of that. I think most people probably have a lot of embarrassment and shame associated, not only the boys themselves. Obviously that's hurdle one of. Will they even reach out to anyone that this is happening to them? And then parents, I imagine there's a lot of embarrassment about oh my gosh. I don't want to talk to other people about this, because did I fall down on the job? Did I not prep my kid enough? What did I screw up to let this happen to my kid?

Speaker 2: 6:37

That's exactly right. There's shame in the adults and shame in the teenagers as well. What is really really important about this? What experts say, and when trying to guide parents, rather is to tell parents that of course, you're going to have rules in your house about internet use and restrictions on talking to strangers and all these things. But let's be real teenagers do what teenagers do and they break the rules sometimes.

Speaker 2: 7:04

And it's super important for parents, regardless of what kind of home culture they've set up, whether they're permissive on social media or restrictive to say look, if you are in danger, if someone is trying to extort you, harass you or attack you online, you can come and tell us.

Speaker 2: 7:21

Please don't be worried about being in trouble and let that hinder you from coming to us for help, because what we have found in our reporting is that the young people that reached out to their parents and were honest and let's be real honest here, especially as a former teenage boy myself, it would be terrifying to tell my parents that I had sent a nude photo to someone I thought was a girl flirting with me and ended up being a stranger that's now extorting me. But you have to take a deep breath and be open with your parents. But parents need to create that space of openness Because it is in that time that those young people are going to be vulnerable and scared and not know what to do and they're going to need you to support them in that moment, not necessarily come down on them. And it is, unfortunately, in a lot of the cases where students or young people just felt that they had no one to go to, that they sought really terrible outcomes in the end.

Speaker 1: 8:18

As I referenced the story that I read in People, jordan DeMay. That's kind of the it hit the national news and his parents have kind of made it their mission to de-stigmatize it and talk about it so that what happened to Jordan and the feeling of isolation and fear and shame that he had that drove him to take his own life, won't happen to other kids. Did your research show why teenage boys are particularly susceptible to this type of scam?

Speaker 2: 8:57

Absolutely Traditionally, when we talk about extortion in the past several years, we're usually talking about girls. We're talking about scammers who somehow were able to get access to an explicit photograph of a young woman or a girl and they use that photograph to threaten them and say Send me more explicit content. That's traditional what's called sex distortion. Financial sex distortion, which is what we're talking about today, really goes after boys. We're talking boys 13 to 17 years old, and that age range is, you know, even higher. But you're dealing with a population of people where hormones are very strong and they are seeking out social opportunities online and can be easily fooled and tricked. Their life is on the phone. And we're even talking about digital native young people who Research has shown are as susceptible, if not more susceptible, to scams than even elderly folks online, because their whole life is wrapped up in that phone.

Speaker 2: 10:04

In the case of Jordan DeMay, his case was pretty typical of what many, many people are facing. A young woman comes online and, you know, starts a you know digital relationship, speaking, flirting with him. They get photos from him and then demand money. He was being targeted by an organized group of scammers out of Nigeria in West Africa, which is where we're seeing most of this activity take place the Ivory Coast and Nigeria and the United States government the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations are actually actively working in those countries, trying to build relationships with law enforcement to try to Find these networks of people targeting young men in the West. And, in the case of Jordan DeMay, the people who scammed him Actually were charged and have been extradited. At least two of them have been extradited to the United States and are facing trial.

Speaker 1: 10:58

But that's kind of more on the rare side. It seems like, based on your article, in that the FBI is involved and they are they're looking at this organized situation. But when apparent, when it happens kind of in your local neighborhood and a parent is looking for help, it Seem like from your article that many of the local police forces don't really know what to do with this.

Speaker 2: 11:24

That's exactly right, and this is a point of real frustration among parents, to pointed frustration first, with local law enforcement. When something like this happens, who do you call? You call the local police. You don't think. Well, let me get the FBI on the phone. What's their number? Right, you know, and it speaks to the importance of reporting these abuses through their proper channels.

Speaker 2: 11:46

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has a cyber tip line where you can Report these instances and then they will route it to the appropriate law enforcement. Who does know what to do? If you just call the police, oftentimes they'll say, okay, we'll look into it, but our resources are limited. In fact, in the aftermath of this article, I've had members of police forces call me and say what do we do? Can you connect me with Department of Homeland Security to try to try to better serve my community? I mean, to their great credit, they read this and said, oh, we need to really step up here.

Speaker 2: 12:19

It's also really important to report it directly to the social app in which the abuse is happening, say whether it's a meta product like Instagram, facebook or Snapchat or even something else. They have increased their abilities to Directly report cases of financial Extortion and abuse and those are going to be the quickest ways to get responses. But you know, the families I spoke to, in addition to frustration with law enforcement, were frustrated with these platforms. One family reported abuse and didn't hear anything for three weeks. For three weeks the parents actually kept receiving threats from the scammer that had targeted their son and they felt that was completely inappropriate to take that amount of time to have any action against the person that was targeting their child right.

Speaker 1: 13:04

The account stayed active and there wasn't even a shutdown of the account.

Speaker 2: 13:09

Maybe while the platform was doing its investigation, the scammers account was able to continue to do what the scammer does yeah, and I asked meta about this and why these things take so long, and Part of the problem, I think, is in the reporting the family here. In this case, they just reported the account but they didn't report the individual direct messages, and so Facebook or excuse me, meta in this instance Ended up just looking at the public account and not seeing anything problematic. And, and meta said it's really, really important to speak, to report individual messages, and that'll allow us to go kind of further behind the curtain and and see issues that kind of gets into the weeds. I think parents would see them be like that's a little frustrating. I think I should be able to report a scammer and you should deal with it or at least protect or do better to protect our children.

Speaker 2: 14:02

This is something that tech companies are really trying to get ahead of. They're scrambling, they're, they're behind, they see Lawmakers both on the state and federal level ready to pounce and act. And if you know anything about tech policy, you know that that tech companies want to do their own Self-regulation as much as possible or at least have clear regulation that they have a hand in, and so meta Established policies just last year that said 16 year olds would automatically have higher privacy settings set up. They've also partnered with a group called thorn, which is a child's abuse advocacy group, and then snapchat has made it easier to report these things as well. So they are working on it, but parents and the children who are targeted here say that they haven't gone far enough.

Speaker 1: 14:47

I do want to kind of Obviously, the demographic of people listening are parents. I don't have a lot of teens listening but in the interest of maybe this getting passed on and someone saying, listen, I need you to listen to this. If, if you could talk to a teen boy who gets targeted by something like this, is there things that they can do themselves if they cannot get past the embarrassment, to kind of be first-line defense, to see if that shuts off the Targeting and and what does that look like if we're talking about an Instagram or a snapchat account?

Speaker 2: 15:27

Absolutely All right. Let's say you've already sent the photos. It's out there and they're demanding money or they're gonna send it, you know, to your school or your friends or family. It's really important to not pay them. Do not pay them, block them and report them immediately. If you pay them, they know that you have somebody who's willing to shell out money and, more importantly, maybe has access to money. They will not stop if you pay them. They will just demand more money and string you along as much as they can.

Speaker 2: 16:00

They are targeting several victims at once You're not the only one and they're gonna go for the lowest hanging fruit and If they can find someone who has easy access to money and can pay them, they're gonna keep Belying you. But if you block them and you move on, here's the risk. Yes, maybe they will send your photos, maybe they will, but the good news is, many times they do not. They don't bother, they don't have time. They've got other people to to try to get money from and they quite often move on. Once you've done that, report it to meta or whatever platform that you're on and then, if you wish and I think you should report it to the cyber tip line. That will help put this in the face of law enforcement. That's gonna go after the scammers. They're not gonna go after you.

Speaker 2: 16:47

And If you can bring yourself to it and then and I hope you do it's worth telling your parents about it and just sucking that up, as Terrifying as that sounds. Tell them about it. Or if you don't have a safe place to talk to your parents, you can talk to. You know someone else, but it is really important to have community. In isolating times like this. It is in the isolation that you are vulnerable. There is a community on reddit of young mostly young men that share their stories. It's called the subreddit, is called sex torsion, and there's a pretty good group of people there that are helping each other out, trying to say, hey, you're not alone. I don't recommend them being your first line of defense, but if you're just so desperate for a little community and knowing that you're not the only one going through this, that is there. And there's also that you can call the National Center for Missing, exploded Children and speak with someone Anonymously who can help walk you through this, and we'll be there for you.

Speaker 1: 17:43

I am just glad that there is something positive about Reddit. I so very rarely hear a Reddit thread that we should send people to, so I am thrilled to hear that, but I also want to echo that that doesn't. Please don't let that be your first line of defense.

Speaker 2: 18:01

When.

Speaker 1: 18:01

I was prepping for talking with you today. I was talking to my husband about this issue that we have talked about various times since it happened to someone that we know, and then just kind of the article that you wrote, and I asked him what would you like me to ask, chris, when I'm with him? And he said well, I want you to ask him how do we, how do we make sure, as parents, that this doesn't happen? And I said to him ooh, I don't know. I don't know if that's the question because, like you said, chris, you know that developing brain and that impulse control is not necessarily something we as parents can over control. It seems like the thing that we as parents can do that is the most helpful is that culture of community, of when you have screwed up, when you have done something that we kind of warned you about, that we need you to talk to us and we are a safe spot for you to talk to about.

Speaker 2: 19:11

Yeah, and also just having conversations beforehand about safe online use. We are teaching our children to swim in the deep end of the pool, and it's important, so they know the strokes right. You know simple things like don't send explicit photos, but, more importantly, don't send explicit photos to someone that you do not know. But here's the catch to that A lot of times with these Nigerian scams, they have hacked other people's real social media sites and they might have hacked your friend's social media account and is posing as someone. Then they go after all of their friends, and so you know it's important to be safe online and not engage in these risky behaviors, because A you don't know who's out there, but you also.

Speaker 2: 19:59

Once you release those photos, even if you're doing so through an app where they're purportedly disappearing, it doesn't mean that they necessarily disappear. There are ways to still have copies of those kinds of things. I do also want to mention that there is a service called Take it Down that has a very high success rate. If you have photos out there that are explicit, that is able to track them down and have them removed throughout much of the internet and, in fact, within 24 to 48 hours. It happens very, very quickly. That is something. If you're worried about things being out there, they can use, basically, the fingerprint of the photo and find it and then have it taken down. But the open communication teaching your children how to live online, because we all live digital lives today and you need to talk to your kids about how to do so safely.

Speaker 1: 20:50

Now, when we talked about the kind of more organized groups that do it, do you have any idea the percentage of those reported cases that we talked about already 12,500 at this point in 2023? Is it mostly these types of organized groups or is it kind of the wild wild West and we have no idea who is making these types of scams?

Speaker 2: 21:17

It's hard to put a real tight number on it because a lot of these numbers are coming from individual reports. They're also coming from electronic service providers, so that includes Snapchat. If they catch wind of it, they're going to report it as well. They're actually mandated to do so, and so it's hard to say exactly what's coming from organized groups. But the organized groups have playbooks that they send around and there is a whole kind of script for how to get money out of teenagers and I should mention this is not just American teenagers. Right now the English-speaking world, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States all those countries are being targeted just because of the language ability, and so it is hard to say, but a lot of them, from what I'm told by federal law enforcement, comes from these West African countries.

Speaker 1: 22:11

And this is not usually something that happens instantaneously. What should kids be on the lookout for? As far as what these messages kind of start off as and where the red flag should come up? Obviously, the red flag should always come up anytime anyone asks you to send a nude picture, even if it is someone you know, because we do know that in the digital world, these pictures are forever and something that seems innocent at 16 years old. When you're 35, you may really regret sending that nude, even if it was someone that you know in trust at the time.

Speaker 2: 22:54

Well, let's say here's one issue with the accounts that people are getting targeted by. They look real and many times they are real. They're hacked, but the scammers go to great lengths to making these accounts look pretty legit and you probably can't tell the difference between a fake account and a legit account. So here's a couple red flags. What's somebody you don't know that starts being very nice to you all of a sudden? I say she in air quotes right, saw your photo, thought you were cute. Hey, I'd like to talk with you. Okay, that could be any random person in the entire world. You should be suspicious.

Speaker 2: 23:28

Oftentimes they will also find you on, say, snapchat, and then say, hey, let's talk also on Instagram, and they'll find your other social media platforms and want to move from one social media platform to the other. That can be a red flag too, because they can more easily send money or things like that once the scam gets to the last stages. And then, of course, someone you don't know wants to see you naked. The odds of it being a real person that has this you know is pretty low, or by real I mean what you think it is at the time, but at that point it's almost certainly a scammer and you should just block them and walk away and just be finished with it. But those are really what you want to be looking out for.

Speaker 2: 24:17

And I also want to say that the flip switches so fast. This person is going to be so nice to you. This person is going to flatter you, going to try to stoke your ego, make you feel really good looking, that they like you a lot based on your looks, and the minute you send that photo, the chat will become a monster. They will start to be incredibly aggressive and it is night and day from the person you thought you were talking to. I want to quote from an indictment against some of the Nigerian scammers that we can actually see the chat logs. They are incredibly threatening. They say things like I will make this go viral, I will make you regret your life, I will make you commit suicide, I promise you. I swear they come really strong and it is terrifying to be in that position. Oftentimes it's gonna be late at night, you're gonna be all alone and you are gonna be in a really scared predicament here and it's hard to know how to respond when that happens, especially when they're so aggressive.

Speaker 1: 25:23

Yeah, it's understandable why, in the moment and with the speed at which you say that, the tone changes, you're kind of already back on your heels, shocked, and then just the language that is used it kind of has to really intensify the fear. That then is coupled with the shame and embarrassment which, because these brains are not fully developed, that is when terrible decisions and impulse control decisions that are life ending can be made.

Speaker 2: 26:03

Right and we talk about this as adults. And if you're a teenager listening you might think that we're coming down on you or something like that. And I am a former teenage boy. I know exactly what this is like and how vulnerable one can be. And I think every parent who has a child of this age needs to put themselves into a 16 year old position and let the grace that you have in you just overflow and drown out any frustration or anger. A lot of parents, I imagine, would respond initially like what's wrong with you and be negative. You have to take a deep breath and kind of swallow that those hard talks can come later. Now is the time to protect your children, to be their ally against a force coming after them, to shield and protect them and help them through this difficult time. And I'll say it again, it is important that that child knows that you know what. I have an escape hatch. I can tell my parents and they're gonna be there for me in this time of really great need.

Speaker 1: 27:05

And I just want to kind of review when and if this does happen and the very first step is to block the user.

Speaker 2: 27:19

Block them, report it directly through the platform on which it's occurring as detailed as possible and these platforms are allowing for far more detailed than they used to. Now, on Snapchat, you can directly say this person is trying to leak my nude photos, I'm being extorted, and Meta allows you to report individual messages, all kinds of things, and then after that I would go to the National Center for Missing Exploited Children cyber tip line and report it there. They will route it to law enforcement and then you can even file a police report. Here's also an issue that a lot of people don't think about.

Speaker 2: 27:58

In one case that I profiled, the parents were sent the explicit photographs. The scammer came through on his threat, sent it to them. Thankfully it was only them, but they were already helping their child through this. But then parents adults have explicit photographs of the minors on their phone. Now that puts the parent in a really terrifying situation. What are you supposed to do If you just delete it? Well, I mean, then you're deleting the evidence, right, and in that case they went to local law enforcement to say here is what happened. This is the situation. It's on my phone. You want a paper trail to protect yourself because you have this content on your device, and your device might be a personal device, but it might also be a work device that you use, that you have your Instagram account on, and so this doesn't only incriminate the kids. It can be terrifying for the parents as well.

Speaker 1: 28:52

I thought that was a really interesting part of your article, because I live right outside of Washington DC, so the number of government employees that I know is through the roof. And of course, yes, you mirror some of your accounts onto your government device and then all of a sudden you're looking at a completely different vulnerability when you are a parent trying to help your child. So your advice on that is to get the law enforcement involved so that you yourself are also protected from any further liability.

Speaker 2: 29:33

Yeah, exactly right. You want them to know what happened. And as information about this kind of scam gets out, local, police and federal are you know? They know what to look for. They're educating themselves as we go along and they have heard this before. I guarantee you they have heard this before. You would be shocked how prevalent this is in communities. If it hasn't happened to you, it's probably. If you ask your child today, you know anybody this happened to. They're probably like oh yeah, I know a couple folks because they talk. They might talk to each other more than they talk to parents, but it's in every community. It's happening because, look, this is the first time in all of human history when our children have had access to the entire world and random people in the entire world. Our brains are not evolved in a way that allow us to handle this. We don't really. I mean, I remember AOL chat rooms in the late 1990s.

Speaker 2: 30:24

Oh, my gosh right and boy, was I excited to talk to people all over the world, especially girls, right, who knows if I was actually talking to girls, but man, that really excited me, and I was the first person in the history of my family ever, going back millions of years, that it could ever do this, you know. And so we're not necessarily ethically prepared to know how to handle this, whether you're a child or an adult, and so this is kind of a scary transition time where we have to be extra vigilant.

Speaker 1: 30:59

I think it's important the point that you made that this is happening a lot more often than we think, because there's a really good chance that parents who are listening to this episode and thinking, oh my gosh, I can't believe this is happening, I'm going to go talk to my child about this. We need to be prepped, you need to be prepped that your child will say, yeah, this is absolutely like six or seven of my friends this has happened to, because there was a study that you quoted in your article that I think it was a pretty high percentage, but I can't fully remember. Do you know what? Do you remember?

Speaker 2: 31:33

Yeah, snap, the parent company of SnapChat, spoke to Gen Z all over the world and found that 65% had or knew someone who had been targeted for some kind of catfishing or a scam through some of these social apps.

Speaker 2: 31:51

It goes beyond SnapChat, just kind of any of the social apps. I mean 65% of people. They found that half of respondents said that they or their friends were targeted of catfishing. 47% of those cases targeted respondents directly just over the past three months. They also said that 47% said that they or their friends' devices or social media accounts were hacked, and 39% of those happened just in the last couple of months. The numbers are increasing and it's why we have to be digitally literate and digitally aware that, with these devices, we have access to billions of people or, to think of it to differently, billions of people have access to our children and to us. That is a sobering thought and we need to know, if we're going to engage with this digital world and we will, because it is the 2020s how to do so safely and try to stand against attacks like this, which are going to happen.

Speaker 1: 32:49

From when you kind of started your process of researching and getting the data for this article to now. Do you feel hopeful, Chris, that the social platforms are really trying to get ahead of this and putting good safeguards in place, or do you think this will have to be a regulation issue?

Speaker 2: 33:17

I am always skeptical of the social platforms because the users are not the customers. The advertisers are the customers and they are incentivized to protect the advertisers and, in doing so, that might make sure that they can protect users. If anyone has ever tried to get customer service on these social apps, you know how abysmal it is. That's my personal bias. I'm very skeptical and thoroughly annoyed and angered by a lot of things that have happened on these apps. I think the good news, though, is that, as awareness spreads through articles like this, the bravery of families that come out in public and tell their story through articles or online, that gives comfort to your community that is hurting, that is privately suffering and thinking that they are the only ones that this is happening to. But those kinds of voices help amplify it, and, let me tell you, the social apps will hear it if they hear that children are being victimized or targeted, and they are going to want to do something about it, and obviously they are.

Speaker 2: 34:29

Some people think it's too little, too late and they're keeping their kids from these apps, and that's a personal decision that they should make, but I think that the social media companies can always go further in protecting kids. We're having a debate right now about whether teenagers should be on this at all, and that's something left, I think, to individual families. Some people want to legislate it. Some states are banning social media for teenagers. We'll let that be hashed out. Everyone has their personal opinion about it but for now, teenagers do have access to it, and so it's vital for the social platforms to put policies in place that protect them while they're on the platforms.

Speaker 1: 35:11

Well, I share your skepticism of the goodwill of tech companies in general, but I also feel pretty cynical that legislation really is something that can fix all problems, especially from the speed in which anything is able to be done, certainly these days. So I think we really have to lean into this culture of openness and willingness to talk about it and being there for each other and being in community with each other when bad things happen, because they're going to happen. Even if every legislation piece in the world was put into place, bad actors are going to find ways to make bad things happen.

Speaker 2: 36:04

Can we talk a little bit about the community aspect, because there's a tendency for when parents do make themselves vulnerable and ask for help online or say that this happened to their child, there's a cacophony of voices online, usually anonymous, that say, well, you're a bad parent.

Speaker 2: 36:19

They shame those parents and they say, well, it's just because you let your kid use this, and whatever the criticism is, if you're a real person in those anonymous chat logs or you're an anonymous Twitter user, don't come down on parents who are pouring out their soul and asking for help. This is not the time to do that. Or if it happens to your friends and you want to say I told you so, or come down on them, you know, over coffee or whatever, resist that urge. Listen to them. You might learn something, because no matter how much of a better parent you are than your friend, this could happen to your child, and it is a time to be there for each other and to not come down on each other when we want to feel high and mighty about somebody else's parenting, because I think most parents are doing their best and this is so ubiquitous that it is happening to people with very restrictive rules on their children and those that are more permissive. So it's pretty widespread.

Speaker 1: 37:21

I mean, I don't think I could have said anything better than what you just said. Yes, please take a beat before you feel the need to judge someone else. Chris, I'm really curious to find out how you are going to answer my question that I ask everybody in this season with the theme of we should talk about that season five being evolution. The show has evolved. I'm in a state of constant evolution, it feels like, with your work with this particular topic, with you personally, whichever way you want to go with it, what does evolution mean to you?

Speaker 2: 38:05

We're living at a time where new information is coming at us constantly and we must always be reconsidering our prior notions about things.

Speaker 2: 38:18

One thing I love about being a reporter is that I'm constantly forced to speak to people that I disagree with or have prior convictions about or prior notions, and I have the opportunity to be able to listen to people or a good reporter should and then reconsider whether all of my preconceived notions are where they should be.

Speaker 2: 38:42

And I think, in terms of answering question about evolution, being open to that ability to rethink the things that you have always considered to be absolutely true it doesn't mean you don't have convictions or that you're some kind of squish, but it is really helpful, I think, to be able to take in information and let it kind of settle within you and then say, huh, I'm open to changing my mind on this. Wouldn't that be amazing if more people were willing to do that? And it's hard because, look, I'll be completely honest. When I get a new piece of information, I go well, it's not true. My initial reaction, I put up a big wall. And I have to take that deep breath and go well, let me look into this and maybe it'll change the way I think about things Wow.

Speaker 1: 39:28

Well, I am so grateful to you for writing the article first of all, and for being open to saying yes to me so that we could talk about it. I think there's going to be a ton of information that I need to provide in the show notes for this episode, so I will be sure to link to Chris's article and some of the resources that Chris has talked about as far as first steps, follow-up steps and places to go for support. Chris, thank you so much for your work and for your time. This has been an incredibly valuable conversation for me personally, and I can imagine it will be extremely valuable to many other people as well.

Speaker 2: 40:07

Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Speaker 1: 40:09

We Should Talk About. That is hosted and produced by me, jessica Kidwell. The audio engineering is done by Jarrett Nicolay at Mixtape Studios in Alexandria, virginia. The theme song Be when you Are is courtesy of AstraVIA. Graphic design is by Kevin Adkins.

Speaker 1: 40:28

Do you have a topic we should talk about? Let me know. Comment your idea on our website, wwwweestatpodcom. There's a form right on the main page for you to get in touch with me. And if you don't have a topic but you want to let me know what you thought about the show, think about leaving me a voicemail. You can call Weestat at 631-4-Weestat, that's 631-493-7828. Or you can send me a comment on any of our social links Facebook, instagram, linkedin, threads, that platform formerly known as Twitter. On all of these you can find me at Weestatpod. You may even hear your comments on the air. And finally, there is no we without your participation. I really couldn't do this podcast without your support. So thank you for being here, and if you or your business want to monetarily support the show, I'd appreciate that too. Tell me at info at weestatpodcom for more information.