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  • 2018-06-11 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Snopes.com Ignore a Huge Child Trafficking Bust in Arizona? (en)
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  • On 7 June 2018, Neon Nettle — a web site that frequently weaves nonsensical allegations into its stories — pushed out a disingenuous article maintaining that we had ignored a huge child trafficking bust: This passage reproduced an accurate quote from a real FBI agent speaking about a legitimate trafficking bust — but that bust was part of an FBI sting operation which took place in Atlanta, 1,700 miles away from the site of the debunked child trafficking camp in Tucson. Neon Nettle deliberately and misleadingly conflated these two stories to make is seem as if we were disclaiming a successful child trafficking raid in Georgia rather than debunking a false report of child trafficking in Arizona. The FBI sting in Atlanta, code-named Operation Safe Summer, was specific to the state of Georgia and had nothing to do with the false report of a child trafficking bunker allegedly discovered by a group in Arizona: The Neon Nettle story was apparently sourced from fellow conspiracy theorists The Free Thought Project, who engaged in similar deceptive headlining: Free Thought Project insinuated, in an impressive combination of logical fallacies, that because we (and others) debunked the false pedophilia bunker in Arizona story, we must not believe child trafficking exists anywhere in the world at all: Child trafficking is, indeed, a horrifying reality, which is why we choose to cover it responsibly rather than making the job of law enforcement and advocacy groups immeasurably more difficult by irresponsibly propagating false information about child trafficking (as sites such as Neon Nettle and the Free Thought Project do). For example, the veterans' group that stumbled across the abandoned homeless camp on private property in Tucson decided that the presence of child's toys at one end of the camp and pornographic magazines elsewhere was obvious evidence of child sex trafficking, rather than ordinary detritus left behind at a temporary site where those migrating from one region to another chose to stop for a while and perhaps have a moment or two alone to tend to some rather common needs. That group also decided (again, without any evidence) that straps tied around trees were restraints for holding children in bondage, rather than for some other more prosaic use, such as tying up tarps to provide shade from the relentless Arizona sun. When local and federal authorities investigated the site and found nothing but an abandoned homeless encampment, the same veteran's group immediately accused law enforcement of orchestrating a massive cover-up. The Polaris Project provides information on recognizing genuine signs of human trafficking and responsibly reporting it. We recommend them as a resource, rather than clickbait-driven, irresponsible purveyors of misinformation. (en)
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