The New York Times Reveals the Predatory World of Child Influencers

[frejasface]

Seeking online stardom for their daughters, many mothers create Instagram profiles for them. The parent-run accounts can descend into a dark underworld dominated by men who admit on other platforms to being pedophiles, a New York Times investigation found. https://t.co/As0ZRNZRGt
- The New York Times (@nytimes) February 23, 2024
The New York Times

Comments

[la_petite_singe]

On the one hand I no longer trust the NYT to report honestly, esp on kids' issues, given their obsession with "are too many trans kids transitioning too fast?!?! There's no proof, but ARE THEY?????" pieces...but also the whole child influencer thing is so clearly a bad idea for many reasons and I have no doubt there are many provable horror stories. I hope someone screencaps so I don't have to give em a click.

[mayjailer]

there are literally screenshots in the tweet? i get being critical of the nyt, but this seems like an odd story to cast doubt on.

[la_petite_singe]

I'm not? As I said, this one's sadly very believable even if they write a lot of other trash these days. And I meant screencaps as in somewhere to read the whole piece without giving NYT a click.

[mayjailer]

my bad, then

[crazyfreakyaj]

i think they mean screenshots of the actual article, not screen shots of the gross commenters

[trynabme]

exactly. You might as well not read anything NYT or any other company says becuase you can always find that one article you disagree with and extrapolate that to everything else.

[hiimtish]

I’m not on board with the original comment but in this instance it definitely wasn’t one article…I actually cancelled my long time subscription with them because they really did make those anti-trans kid articles a whole ass thing

[iznanassi]

well i think the issue here is that anti-CSAM in the public eye is directly tied to anti-trans rhetoric. i forget what the specific word is but unfortunately when they put out an article like "CSAM is a very serious problem because kids and their parents are the ones supplying the material on social media" the next steps become saying that posting picture or talking about things related to being trans constitute grooming, making them against TOS of various websites, setting precedent for people to be charged with crimes etc. So if this is an organization that has already laid that foundation I think people have the right to question the intentions of the source.

[skankyoulater]

https://archive.ph/C2VxK

It felt like every paragraph got worse and worse.

[la_petite_singe]

Ah, fuck. But thank you.

Edit: "some so enthusiastic about her posts that they pay $9.99 a month for more photos." AND WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF PERSON DO YOU THINK WOULD PAY FOR THAT