The Cyber Effect (28 page)

Group dynamics are a powerful force. Individuals behave differently when part of a group than when they are alone. For example, it has been proven that teenagers in particular can be judgment-impaired when in a group of peers, due to what's called the
risky-shift phenomenon
. (And this is why in many jurisdictions in the United States, teenage drivers are restricted from riding in cars with more than one other teenager.) It was James A. F. Stoner who first discovered the tendency in groups toward riskier behavior. Stoner found that each participant's opinion became more extreme as a result of the group conversation.

Groupthink
is another way to look at how an individual's behavior
changes in a group. The larger the group, the more people tend to conform. Logically, the same thing is true online.

So it goes without saying that large groups of teens online, connected by social networks, are likely to behave in riskier ways, and they will also feel more peer pressure the larger their online social group is.

Consider the story of the “sexting ring” that was uncovered at Cañon City High School in Colorado. In November 2015, students in a small town of sixteen thousand were found to be circulating between three hundred and four hundred nude images of classmates as well as some eighth graders in the local middle school. Some of the photos were even taken on school grounds, and then uploaded onto a shared site.

The students used a “ghost app” that they'd downloaded to their mobile phones as a vault to store these images and then trade them like baseball or Pokémon cards. A ghost app hides itself on the screen of a device by appearing to be a calculator or something equally innocuous, which keeps parents or other authorities from noticing. And as with Snapchat, images can be permanent or created to disappear.

An undisclosed number of students were suspended for their participation in the sexting ring, including members of the football team—which led to the cancellation of a game. The alleged crimes, possession and distribution of child pornography, are both felonies. But due to the age of the students, who are all minors, local law enforcement wasn't sure how to respond. Said George Welsh, the school district's superintendent, “
There isn't a school in the United States probably at this point that hasn't at some point dealt with the issue of sexting.”

What would make hundreds of small-town kids behave in such a way? If you combine the effects of increased sexualization and attention-seeking, obsession with cyber self, new definitions of “privacy,” conformity and groupthink enhanced by the strong ties of social-networking connections, and a
cyber-risky-shift phenomenon
, the previously unthinkable becomes possible.

Cutting-edge journalism is more necessary than ever, as the speed of change in the cyber world outpaces academic studies. We have to thank
Wired
magazine for breaking the story of the indictment of Marvin Chavelle Epps, one of a growing number of sexual traffickers who use the Internet to find new young recruits and rent out their services in adult ads. To meet the supply and demand of the sex trade, there's nothing as fast and easy as cyberspace.

The beginning of
Wired
's 2009 story “Pimps Go Online” should send a flash of fear into the heart of any parent of a teenager:

Epps was a “new kind of pimp,” a tech- and Web-savvy guy who used sites like Craigslist to prostitute girls. On his chat log online, he even gave out free business advice to other potential pimps: “Get some professional, beautiful, elegant, glamor shots, put 'em on these escort websites, and her phone gone slap.”

Here's the forensics piece: You may say to yourself that the risk of your own daughter meeting a pimp online is small—and that could be true. But the demographic is shifting. “We're seeing kids who are getting into this stuff that do not match society's stereotype,” Ernie Allen, president and CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, told
Wired
. “These are not just kids in poor families who have no other options. We're seeing kids from the full spectrum of society, and a lot of that is due to recruitment over the Internet.”

Girls who were already at risk of recruitment into prostitution now face escalated circumstances and danger. They may be acting out. They may be looking for money. Already at a vulnerable age, they can be easy to find—and preyed upon. On social-networking sites, these girls give cues that they are vulnerable. And pimps have ways of knowing how to exploit them.

Asia Graves is a case in point. The daughter of a drug addict, Graves began working as a prostitute on the streets of inner-city Boston at the age of sixteen to keep her family afloat. She was picked up by her first trafficker in the middle of a snowstorm. He told Graves that he'd help her, take care of her. “
He showed me the ropes,” she told
USA Today
in an interview in 2012. “If we didn't call him Daddy, he would slap us, beat us, choke us.”

Sold from one trafficker to another, Graves was forced to sleep with men in New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and Miami. She posed for Craigslist and Backpage.​com ads and set up “dates.” She worked six days a week for up to $2,500 a night.

“You think what you're doing is right when you're in that lifestyle,” Graves said. “You drink alcohol to ease the stress. Red Bulls kept you awake, and cigarettes kept you from being hungry.”

I had a chance to meet Asia Graves in 2012, when I was recruited to work on a White House research initiative to find technological solutions to technology-facilitated human trafficking. Asia was a participant: A beautiful, intelligent, poised young woman, she silenced an entire room of power-suited White House working-group members as she told her moving story.

The phrase
human trafficking
is a broad umbrella. It is sometimes just called “trafficking in persons.” Either way, it is a term that describes any instance when one person obtains or holds another person in compelled service. The U.S. Department of State Report in 2011 described major forms of trafficking as forced labor, sex trafficking, bonded labor, debt bondage among migrant laborers, involuntary domestic servitude, forced child labor, child soldiers, and child sex trafficking. It has been proven that
technology has created a new dimension for these cybercriminals in which to operate, and has changed the way they do business.

On the White House project, I was introduced to and worked closely with Dr. Steve Chan, a big data scientist, in a research group that used machine intelligence to analyze huge volumes of online images publicly posted on escort sites. Our research was designed to help law enforcement identify young trafficking victims online.

In one month alone—April 2013—the leading U.S. publisher of online
prostitution published 67,800 listings for “escorts” and “body rubs,” both considered euphemisms for “prostitution”—in twenty-three U.S. cities. But prostitution can also be a proxy for human trafficking, and, in yet another cyber evolution, what was once visible on street corners and in hotel bars is now an increasingly invisible online activity.

According to a 2015 police report, it has been established that
online classified adult advertising facilitates trafficking. The sheer volume of online classified adult advertising and potential human trafficking activity, along with the increasingly tech-savvy cybercriminal, is resulting in a problem of epic proportions. Human trafficking is not confined to a specific geographic locale. With more than 20 million victims of human trafficking around the world, it has become an issue of global importance.

We published our paper for this work in 2015. Using a corpus of publicly available big data, we were able to move toward big insights and contribute to scientific knowledge in this area. Indeed, the implications of our research may extend far beyond the problems posed by human trafficking and into the realm of tackling other technology-facilitated exploitative crimes, such as the generation and distribution of child abuse material.

Courage and resolve propelled Asia Graves to finally escape from the control of traffickers. She joined a group of former prostitutes who had founded FAIR Girls (which stands for Free, Aware, Inspired, and Restored), a girl-empowerment and anti–human trafficking organization based in Washington, D.C. They were behind the development of an app called the Charm Alarm, which girls on the street can use to call for help. FAIR Girls has also been instrumental in getting trafficking sites shut down.

Craigslist was dubbed “the Walmart of child sex trafficking” and vilified for years for allegedly fostering sexual abuse. But it finally shut down its “adult services” section in September 2010.
Backpage picked up where Craigslist left off, making an estimated $22.7 million annually from thousands of ads for young women—many of them teenagers—claiming to be escorts, strippers, or massage therapists. They are photographed wearing very little clothing and in suggestive poses. The good
news is that advocates like FAIR Girls study the advertisements and reach out directly to offer victims jobs, housing, legal support, medical treatment, and a new life. In late 2015, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to file civil contempt
proceedings against Backpage. The action followed the site's refusal to attend a Senate hearing to provide information regarding online child sex trafficking. This is the first time in more than twenty years that the Senate has taken such extraordinary action. I'm delighted to see a proactive stance on a contemporary cyber problem.

We owe teenagers an apology. That's what I think. We are failing to protect and defend them in cyberspace. We are failing to understand and therefore protect their developing selves. Tech companies have made billions of dollars while looking the other way. Opportunistically, they have jumped in to offer solutions to emerging obstacles, creating social platforms such as Snapchat, Wickr, Confide, and the German-based Sicher, where risqué images can be sent and viewed.
While they supposedly can disappear almost as soon as they are posted, in fact there are many ways they can be saved. I have serious issues with the facilitation of covert and potentially illegal behavior of minors. I find it inherently unethical.

Do teenagers need to explore and have adventures? Yes. And we should let them. But the risks in the cyber environment are real: sextortion, predation, cyberbullying, and harassment.

And what about the more nuanced and much-harder-to-study risk of harm to a developing identity? Juggling two selves, the real one and the cyber one, is a lot to expect of young individuals who are still figuring things out, about themselves and the world. We are likely a decade away from seeing the cyber effect on psychological and emotional well-being and the formation of a sturdy and sustainable self. We can see signs and clues coming already, I believe, in the new norms of sexting, the obsession with the cyber self, premature sexualization, the plastic surgery among younger people, the escalation of body and eating disorders, and the rise of narcissistic behavior (if not true narcissistic personality
disorder). These trends should be cause for alarm. Narcissism and excessive self-involvement are both known attributes of those who suffer chronic unhappiness.

Eighty years ago, the American philosopher and social psychologist George Herbert Mead had something very relevant to say about how we think about ourselves—and express who we are. Like William James before him, Mead studied the use of first-person pronouns as a basis for describing the process of self-reflection. How we use
I
and
me
demonstrates how we think of self and identity.

A child learning English has to master the distinction between
I
and
me
and know when to use them.

The self-referential pronoun
I
is appropriate only when speaking for yourself, from yourself, delivering authentic expressions subjectively. The objective pronoun
me
is appropriate only when the child is talking about himself or herself as the object. Mead showed that these two pronouns point to two complementary views that each person has of the self.

There is
I
.

And there is
me
.

By using
I
, a child shows that he or she has a conscious understanding of the self on some level. When using
I
, the child speaks directly from that self. The use of
me
requires the child to have an understanding of himself or herself as a social object. To use
me
means figuratively leaving one's body and being a separate object.

Where is the
I
in contemporary times? It is the authentic subjective and conscious real-world self. The selfie, the frontline cyberspace expression of the cyber self, is all
me
. It is an object—a social artifact that has no deep layer. This may explain why the expressions on the faces of selfie subjects seem so empty. There is no consciousness. The digital photo is a superficial cyber self.

It's also interesting to note how
me
as a self-referential pronoun has expanded its hold on language, despite grammatical rules otherwise. The overuse of
me
has spread like wildfire. Teenagers, teachers, even broadcasters on TV, can be heard saying, “Me and my BFF” or “Me and my mom…”

A teenager may think he or she is creating a better “self,” a better
object, with each selfie. But I would argue that every selfie taken, and improved upon, causes an erosion or dismissal of the true self. With each selfie taken, and invested in, the true self is diminished. In a way, it reminds me of the aboriginal cultures that believe each portrait photograph robs the soul. And when I think of cyberbullying and read accounts of the self-harm associated with it, I can't help but wonder if the cyber self isn't punishing the real one.