Human trafficking panic gets a holiday twist in the latest faux trafficking scare to hit social media.
In a December 16 Instagram post that received more than 190,000 likes, user Ernest Carter shared a video of a Coca-Cola delivery truck that he claimed was found “full of kids.” Carter said the truck was found in Cicero, Illinois, and that the video showed police getting the children off the truck.
“The same video and false claim have circulated elsewhere on Instagram, X, Facebook, Threads, TikTok, Bluesky, YouTube, Rumble and Gettr — including in Spanish and French,” AFP reports.
For his part, Carter apologized “for being mislead and misleading.” In a follow-up video, he said that his initial post about trafficked children was wrong but there were two abandoned kids found on the truck.
This was also wrong.
The truck and the police depicted were actually outside a mall in Davenport, Iowa, where the local police association was running a toy donation drive.
Davenport Police Department spokesperson Owen Farrell said that the video depicted “no criminal investigation” and reports about child trafficking were “false” and “fake news,” according to AFP.
“The Davenport Police Association is sponsoring and hosting the 22nd annual Christmas toy drive to support Family Resources Inc.,” local news station KWQC reported on December 15. “The annual event raises money and collects new toys at Christmas for children involved in Family Resources Domestic Violence Shelters, Child Advocate programs (victims of sex assaults and other at-risk programs), and supports the Family Resources Adopt a Family Program.”
I can’t make out anything about the toy drive that would have led any reasonable person to conclude that this was a child trafficking sting. But this is how far down the trafficking hysteria rabbit hole Americans have gone: the mere fact of police next to a truck is enough to spawn human trafficking claims.
Despite the story’s debunking, some commenters on Carter’s page still refuse to let it go. “Do not gaslight yourself,” one posted. “These companies do these types of things. Our world is darker and sicker than we know.”
All sorts of wild and untrue stories circulate on social media, of course. But unfounded trafficking claims seem to be an especially potent and prolific genre of social media misinformation. And while it’s tempting to simply chalk it up to gullibility, the power of sensational stories, and other individual factors, human trafficking panic wasn’t produced in a vacuum.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ claims about online sex trafficking (used to push for internet censorship and surveillance) and former/future President Donald Trump’s claims about sex trafficking at the Southern border (used to push for tougher immigration restrictions and enforcement) are just two of many examples of how politicians have used the specter of human trafficking to push their preferred policies. And far from only spreading on social media, mainstream media trafficked in these myths repeatedly.
So when we see a whole lot of social media users willing to believe that a charity toy drive is a child trafficking sting, remember that what we’re really looking at is the product of decades of political propaganda.
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