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  • 2016-02-26 (xsd:date)
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  • Down to Lunch Human Trafficking Rumors (en)
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  • On 25 February 2016, multiple high-volume Twitter accounts published warnings claiming that the meetup app Down to Lunch was a tool for human traffickers: It was an odd claim, since purpose of Down to Lunch was well documented, the app was hugely popular, and there was no information available to substantiate the allegations. A TechCrunch profile introduced the app in August 2015 as an alternative to group texts: Between August 2015 and February 2016, Down to Lunch remained a popular app for real-time networking, but on 24 February 2016, a tweet shared a screenshot of an App Store review from a few weeks earlier. The review claimed that Down to Lunch was a covert trafficking app, but the story that it offered (which featured strangers in sunglasses and trench coats, random middle-aged people crashing lunches and talking about photography, and — of course — a creepy van) wasn't substantiated by any evidence: We contacted Down to Lunch about the sudden viral rumors. Co-founder Nikil Viswanathan told us that the review (since removed) appeared to have kicked them off: Down to Lunch tweeted about the claims: In June 2015, Twitter was abuzz with rumors of human traffickers using job interviews to attract college students. There were two similarities between the individual rumors: they were of the always-popular human trafficking warning sort, and they took off after Common White Girl style accounts shared the rumor. Those accounts frequently shared such content to generate traffic for Twitter accounts: A November 2014 BuzzFeed article (Meet the Network of Guys Making Thousands of Dollars Tweeting As 'Common White Girls') included comments from Cameron Asa, a 21-year-old college student behind some of the accounts involved in the June 2015 claims. Asa explained to BuzzFeed how sharing breathless warning tweets was a lucrative content game for popular Twitter feeds: Warnings about human or sex trafficking are almost guaranteed to reach near-instant virality (the claim about Down to Lunch wasn't even the only rumor of that type that we saw circulating on 25 February 2016), and while the intent of the Down to Lunch reviewer remained to be seen, the rumor was predictably shared by opportunistic Twitter accounts which seem to exist solely to collect retweets and earn money. While the issue of human trafficking is real and extremely serious (explained here by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime), Down to Lunch was in no way a risk for users based on its functionality and the ways in which trafficking typically occur. The app uses a device's contact list to simplify the process of coordinating social meetings between friends, and no aspect of it appeared to expose user information in an unsafe way. (en)
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