Social Media “Predator Stings”: How can this be legal?
Over the last couple of days we’ve written about social media “predator stings”, where private individuals orchestrate these pretend stings seeking to catch people showing up to allegedly meet up with minors. These groups create fake profiles, pose as underage “decoys”, bait people into sexual conversations, lure them to a specific location, and then publicly confront them on video. The videos are uploaded to social media and the groups make money from clicks and advertiser revenue. Many of you have asked ‘how can this even be legal’? We checked and they probably are not!
Across YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook, a growing number of private individuals and groups stage these operations. They claim to be “exposing predators.” But what they’re doing may actually be illegal. Perverted-Justice, a popular group active since the early 2000s, used volunteers posing as minors to lure adults into online sexual conversations. But a former producer alleged in a lawsuit that Perverted-Justice volunteers “sometimes beg sting targets to come to the sting locations,” arguing that the approach involved inducing people to do things they didn’t want to do. Following a series of lawsuit against the group, as well as hundreds of failed prosecutions, the group ceased operations in 2019. In Kentucky, a leader of “Predator Poachers” was himself arrested for illegal conduct in connection with a citizen sting. That same group faced defamation lawsuits in a couple of jurisdictions and were found liable for false accusations and reputational harm. In Colorado, the founder of “Colorado Ped Patrol” was also arrested for misdemeanor charges because of his phony stings.
On our state, Florida Statute § 777.04(2) makes it a crime to encourage or request someone else to commit a crime. The law states, “A person who solicits another to commit an offense prohibited by law and in the course of such solicitation commands, encourages, hires, or requests another person to engage in specific conduct which would constitute such offense or an attempt to commit such offense commits the offense of criminal solicitation.” Isn’t that exactly what these vigilante groups do? For that matter, isn’t that what law enforcement is doing? The statute doesn’t appear to have a carve out for law enforcement!
Florida law is clear. Encouraging someone to commit a crime is itself a crime. It appears that this law applies to both private citizens and law enforcement. Nobody should be above the law. FAC calls on our State’s State Attorneys and Attorney General to do something to stop manufactured sex stings and prosecute those who orchestrate them.
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I almost wonder if they are breaking other laws also. If making underage AI or cartoon images are illegal then how is it legal for someone to pose as an underage person sending photos.
This is what I’ve been dealing with as far as Oconto Wisconsin goes. A very racist area in our country. The judge even lied stating that I met with a child when no meeting occurred. One big conspiracy going on up there and this was back in 2017 which likely had something to do with Wisconsin’s Business Court pilot project.
Those online sting operations they conduct have nothing to do with trying to save or protect any children from any real online threat or real abuse. They have everything to do with MONEY and egos and them using these stings to bring to life their own sexual fantasies about – the group they falsely claim to be protecting.
They always target men who they know are seeking a consensual adult to meet for a casual sexual hookup or even just to engage in a fantasy sexual conversation online – for sexual exploration purposes, etc. Adults who use the internet to find other like-minded, consensual adults to engage in sexual exploration, consensual casual hookups, etc. are not any more of a risk to minors than anybody else, like these morons have turned this into. In fact, the groups who are at the highest risk level for doing this kind of harm to children are those who work directly with children and those in authority positions, such as law enforcement and authority figures in religious institutions, etc. We’ve seen that most of the cases that involve real children are cases where the adult had access to the minor, and the minor trusted that adult. And none of the minors ever went online seeking random adult strangers to engage them in sexual conversations, much less invite those strangers to meet for sex, like the decoys do in these online sting operations.
We need more people speaking out about this. These online sting operations do not save or protect children. They simply sexualize children and sexually exploit men – pushing minors on men who were certainly not looking for minors. Those who conduct these stings, create and use very wild sexual fantasies about minors, and then they go around promoting those fantasies – encouraging men to participate in their fantasies about this. That’s what these stings are really about, and that’s where the focus needs to be. They do the exact opposite of what they claim to be doing. They do not save or protect children from any real online threat or real abuse. They simply promote and encourage the sexual abuse of minors – by forcing on men a wild sexual fantasies about minors being desperate for sex with random adult male strangers they can find online.
Nobody wants to talk about that, but that’s exactly what all the facts show about this. I can take just about any of these cases and show that’s exactly what was done.
Have you listened to our podcast about this?
https://youtube.com/@stingingback?si=8A5w9H0h2UcHxD5v