September 13, 2023 • 49 mins
Ashton Kutcher recently wrote a letter to a judge, asking for leniency for his friend and TV co-star Danny Masterson (Kelso and Hyde from That 70’s Show). It was surprising, because for the past decade Ashton Kutcher has been trying to rebrand himself as an anti-trafficking hero. Not just any anti-trafficking hero, but a tech guru type who could use the power of technology and venture capital to save the children. We take a look into his organization, Thorn. Like so many other “save the children” orgs before it, Thorn seems to be using rhetoric and misleading statistics about trafficked children to push laws that further criminalize and marginalize consenting adult sex workers.
Sex, lies, and surveillance: Something's wrong with the war on sex trafficking: https://www.engadget.com/2019-05-31-sex-lies-and-surveillance-fosta-privacy.html
Real Men Get Their Facts Straight: https://www.villagevoice.com/real-men-get-their-facts-straight/
Ashton Kutcher Claims He Helped Cops Save Way More Sex-Trafficking Victims Than Authorities Say They've Found: https://reason.com/2017/02/15/ashton-kutcher-plays-sex-worker-savior/
The bogus claim that 300,000 U.S. children are ‘at risk’ of sexual exploitation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/05/28/the-bogus-claim-that-300000-u-s-children-are-at-risk-of-sexual-exploitation/
SEX TRAFFICKING Online Platforms and Federal Prosecutions : chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/.css-j9qmi7{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;font-weight:700;margin-bottom:1rem;margin-top:2.8rem;width:100%;-webkit-box-pack:start;-ms-flex-pack:start;-webkit-justify-content:start;justify-content:start;padding-left:5rem;}@media only screen and (max-width: 599px){.css-j9qmi7{padding-left:0;-webkit-box-pack:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;justify-content:center;}}.css-j9qmi7 svg{fill:#27292D;}.css-j9qmi7 .eagfbvw0{-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;color:#27292D;}Mark as PlayedTranscript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Justin heads up, this episode talks quite a bit about
sex trafficking. There Are No Girls on the Internet as
a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridge Toad
and this is there Are No Girls on the Internet.
(00:22):
I am here with my producer Mike, and we have
to talk about anti trafficking work yet again. Specifically, we
have to talk about actor Ashton Kutcher's anti trafficking organization Thorn.
So we've talked about this a few times on the
show before. We did an episode with Michael Hobbs, formerly
of the podcast You're Wrong about digging into why anti
(00:44):
trafficking work lends itself so easily to inflated numbers and grandstanding.
We also did a recent episode about the anti trafficking
hero fantasy film Sound of Freedom and the dangers that
occur when anti trafficking work is treated as autumnally and
inherently good, because if you ask any questions too or
(01:05):
about the people who say they've dedicated their entire lives
to combating trafficking, you're basically on the side of the traffickers, right.
So I would argue that this is actually a very
harmful dynamic because trafficking is such a sensitive and important issue,
and because people pretty much all agree that trafficking is horrible,
(01:27):
and it creates this easy proxy to get people not
to mention money on your side if you say that
you're working on combating trafficking. So I would argue that
all of this means that if somebody says they work
on anti trafficking work, it actually should invite further scrutiny
into exactly what that work looks like. Case in point,
(01:47):
Ashton Kutcher's anti trafficking organization Thorn. So the reason that
I'm talking about this now is because actor Danny Masterson,
who played Hide on the very popular sitcom That seventy Show,
was convict did of raping two women, both of whom
were former members of the Church of Scientology. Danny is
also a scientologist, and survivors say that he used this
(02:09):
very powerful network of Scientology to avoid accountability for his actions.
Last week, Masterson was sentenced to thirty years to life
in prison. After his conviction, Masterson's friends and family wrote
letters to the judge asking for leniency in his sentencing.
The letters, frankly were not good. From my understanding at
(02:32):
this point, what judges are really looking for is less
of letters that are like, oh, he's such a nice guy,
he couldn't have done this, YadA YadA, but rather some
indication of contrition or some insight into the abuser's plan
to make better choices in the future. I have seen
some people say that these letters were leaked, but that.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Is actually not true.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
It sounds like those letters were always part of the
public record, and then it's just up to the judge's
discretion on whether or not to make those letters public,
which in this case, the judge did do that.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
So two of the people who.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Wrote letters on behalf of Danny Masterson asking for leniency
and his sentencing were fellow actors Mi Lacunis and Ashton Kutcher,
also from that seventy show. After public outcry about these letters,
they ended up releasing a video that basically apologized if
those letters were hurtful for people to hear, and saying
that they had only intended for the judge to see
(03:28):
those letters. Their letters basically read like a checklist of
all of the things and an abuser's friends say, after
he faces some consequences, you probably know the drill, right,
Like he's such a good guy. He's always been really
nice to me. He couldn't have done this, like he
has a daughter that's always a big one, like, oh,
(03:49):
his daughter. Ashton's letter talks specifically about how Danny never
did drugs and instructed the entire cast of that seventy
show to avoid drug use. I guess he was using
those drugs to incapacitate a woman that he wanted to assault.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
That is also probably because drugs are forbidden in scientology.
Ashton also wrote about how Danny Masterson was really supportive
of the firefighters after nine to eleven and how, to
his knowledge, he has never lied.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Like these are really I don't know the letters. You can.
You can find them online.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
I found them to be full of hyper specific information,
none of which are related to whether or not this
person as a rapist. Ashton ends his letter quote, while
I'm aware that the judgment has been cast as guilty
on two counts of rape by force, and the victims
have a great desire for justice, I hope that my
testament to his character is taken into consideration and sentencing.
(04:45):
I do not believe he is an ongoing harm to
society and having his daughter raised without a present father
would be a tertiary injustice in and of itself. So
those letters were pretty bad. Like if someone I knew
was convicted of two counts of forcible rape, you are
on your own, Like, I don't care how close we were,
(05:06):
I don't care how many times you told me not
to do drugs or how many times you like shook
hands with firefighters after nine to eleven, I probably wouldn't
be writing a letter like this on your behalf. So
here is where Ashton's anti sex trafficking work comes in,
because one thing that I keep reading online is people
asking why would Ashton Kutcher, someone who has dedicated his
(05:29):
life to combating sex trafficking and working with survivors, have
sexual violence, risk his reputation and the reputation of his
organization by writing a letter like this, And honestly, I
get it. I get that this looks like hypocrisy, but
I would actually argue that it speaks to hell when
someone is working to stop trafficking, it creates this sine
(05:50):
of automatic good doing, when in reality it should actually
be a sign for all of us to look deeper
into what their at work actually looks like. Because when
you do a lot of times what you see is
not work that is just working to combat the trafficking
of children, but rather working to further survey and criminalize
adult consensual sex workers. Then adult sex work is kind
(06:12):
of lumped in with the work to prevent sex trafficking
of children. They're kind of conflated. And that's what I
think is going on here. So let's start by a
little bit of a history around Ashton Kutcher's anti trafficking work.
So it might be a little bit hard to remember,
but back in the day, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore
were kind of a like power couple.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
That's the only way that I can describe it, Like
you kind of had to be there.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
Ashton was the first person to ever reach one million
followers on Twitter, and this was like a big deal.
I watched a clip from Good Morning America where I
think Ryan Seacrest actually comes out and presents him with
a framed award from the Guinness Book of World Records
because he was the first person to get a million
(06:57):
Twitter followers. At this point, Ashton like going on TV
and being asked to like wax philosophically about Twitter and
social media and technology. He was the person who was
sort of credited with getting a lot of other celebrities
to use Twitter too. This is a bit of a
side note and it's really just my opinion, but Ashton Kutcher,
(07:18):
like heretofore, he had kind of had a persona as
being a hot but stupid himbo frat guy, and I
think that this was definitely a move like him being
a tech guy. I think was definitely an attempt to
rebrand himself as like a serious tech guy.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
You know.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
He published a piece in Harper's called is Tech the
New Black?
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Where he wrote about all of his tech predictions.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
And I think it's really interesting how celebrities can use
certain issues like technology to really rebrand themselves, you know,
like pop on a pair of fake black rimmed glasses
and start talking tech wearing a blazer, and boom, you
are no longer the dude from Dude, Where's my car?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Now?
Speaker 1 (07:58):
You are smart and thoughtful and nuance. Then you have
an elevated persona. Do you know what I'm saying?
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Yeah, those fake glasses are really the key.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
The one person who I think is really rocking, like,
oh I'm smart now is Rick Perry. He He has
really been like all on the like, oh did you
see I'm wearing glasses now, I'm smart now Kick.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
It's like a total rebrand with those new glasses that
Rick Perry has started wearing. And it's I guess it's working.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Yeah, he's like Clark Kent in reverse. He puts on
the glasses. You don't even know what's him. Okay.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
So back in two thousand and nine, when Ashton Kutcher
was in a relationship with Demi Moore, they started the
DNA Foundation, an anti trafficking organization together. The name DNA
Foundation is a mix of their name Demi and Ashton Foundation.
They got the idea to do this work after Demi
Moore reportedly was watching a documentary about sex slavery in
(08:52):
Cambodia on MSNBC and wanted to start an organization that
combat in that kind of stuff in the United States too.
Folks listening might recall Ashton's Real Men Don't Buy Girls campaign.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Mike, do you remember this at all?
Speaker 3 (09:06):
I wish I did. I know, we talked about it
a little bit earlier. I don't. I don't know where
I was when this campaign was happening.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Well, I remember like it was yesterday, and I searched
high and low, like I did a deep, deep search
to try to find an original video from the Real
Men Don't Buy Girls campaign. This is a little bit
of the conspiracy theory. I think they must have just
removed it, had it scrubbed from the Internet, because I
can't find anything.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
I can only find two.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Videos that were clearly user generated content that were not
representative of what the original videos were.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
Where were these videos airing? Were you everywhere everywhere like
television commercials.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
They were on YouTube, they were on TV, they were
on Facebook.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
This also was the early two thousands when we just
didn't have a lot of social media content. If a
celebrity was doing something online, it was like automatically newsworthy,
So I can't believe you don't remember them. Basically, the
point of the campaign was that it was showing all
of these like manly famous men like Bradley Cooper and
(10:12):
Sean Penn doing all kinds of manly things, but then
being like, oh, well, manly men make grilled cheese sandwiches
using an iron because they're manly. But real men don't
Buy Girls, and the commercials were I guess I will
just say. They were mostly panned for being cringey, which
(10:33):
is probably why I cannot find any of them now.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Like literally, when I Google, when I found a.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Website that had like six squares from YouTube like it
like embedded YouTube videos, each of those squares was like
video not found, Video not found, Video not found, video
not found. So Ashton Kutcher apparently has the power to
get these videos removed from the Internet.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
But they I remember them like they were yesterday.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
You can still find if you google real Men Don't
Buy Girls, you can still find the images of like
Ashton Kutcher. He's wearing like a nit beanie, like a
slouchy knit beanie, and he's holding the sign that says
real men don't Buy Girls.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
That still exists.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
But the commercials You'll just have to take my word
for it because I remember them like they were yesterday.
Speaker 4 (11:23):
Let's take a quick break at her back.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
So back then, DNA was really kind of centered around
celebrities raising awareness about trafficking, which, on his face, is
not like the worst thing in the world. If anything,
these ads were a little bit cringe, but they weren't
like the worst thing ever. But DNA was a little
bit tricky with their numbers. When the organization was first
(11:58):
getting started, they misreped and inflated stats and numbers around trafficking,
which is going to be a theme in this episode.
This will not be the first time that you're hearing
that this anti sex trafficking organization is misreporting and inflating
numbers around sex trafficking. So this part of the conversation
really ties into this one stat Ashton repeats this one
(12:18):
claim over and over that there are between one hundred
thousand and three hundred thousand child sex slaves in the
United States today. He said it unchecked on CNN's Pierce Morgan.
He testified before Congress and gave that same stat This
stat is repeated over and over and over again. If
you google it, you get lots and lots of hits.
(12:39):
But surprise, this is not an accurate stat not even close.
The Washington Post dug into this specific statistic and found
that it comes from a two thousand and one report
from Richard J. ST's and Neil Wiener of the University
of Pennsylvania. So this study was published in two thousand
and one, so it relied on data from the nineteen nineties.
But people have been parroting it well unto the twenty
(13:00):
tens and even sometimes today, so obviously it's already like
a little bit suspect. The report never said that one
hundred thousand to three hundred thousand children are being trafficked
in the United States. What they did say was that
one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand children are quote
at risk for commercial sexual exploitation. So that's a different
(13:20):
thing than how Ashton Kutcher reported it. That there are
one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand kids being trafficked
in the United States then was not true. But even
if that is just the number of young people at risk,
it's still not totally correct. The post dug into how
this figure came to be. The researcher started by compiling
(13:41):
the number of youth in fourteen different categories, such as
foreign children, children in public housing, or female gang members,
but many of these categories could overlap, such as a
female foreign born child and public housing who was part
of a gang that one person would count a S three.
The three hundred thousand figure also relied on a series
of guesses on the part of the researchers, such as
(14:01):
the assumption that thirty five percent of runaway youth away
from home at least a week were quote at risk,
or that one quarter of one percent of all youth
ages ten to seventeen we're at risk. So I should
say that the researchers themselves in their report, they say
that they're guessing at certain things, and they make it
very clear that they are not trying to give an
(14:21):
authoritative number. Yet that stat is often misreported as an
authoritative number.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
Yeah, that's like the eternal challenge and fear. I think
of scientists trying to communicate the results to a popular press, right,
Like anytime you take a like a training of how
scientists should talk to journalists, one of the things that
they highlight is the emphasis of scientists on precision and accuracy.
(14:50):
And you know, that's exactly what gets lost when things
get translated, results get translated to popular press. So it's
like they could have in that paper dotted all their eyes,
crossed all their t's to lay out every single assumption
and every kind They just had to guess at a
(15:11):
quantity to like really qualify it that this is our
best estimate. But there are all these different ways that
it could be inaccurate. But then either through people just
trying to be convenient or perhaps people trying to distort
statistics into to serve narratives that they're trying to push.
(15:32):
You know, that very careful, nuanced estimate becomes just a number, right,
which loses all of the nuance, and that I mean
all that aside. It also sounds like whoever changed one
hundred thousand of three hundred thousand children at risk to
one hundred thousand to three hundred child thousand children currently
(15:55):
being trafficked. That's not just like losing nuance, that's I
would say, an active distortion.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
So keep that in mind as we go on, because
that's going to be very relevant in just a moment.
So I think I know somebody who would agree with you,
which is SD's one of the researchers who worked on
this study who openly agrees that that number is bunk.
St says, I'm fully aware of the controversy that surrounds
my and other scholar's estimates of the number of children
(16:26):
at risk of sexual exploitation, he told The Post's fact checker.
He added, clearly a new, more current study is needed.
So in two thousand and eight, a year before Ashton
and Demi would start DNA, Michelle Stransky and David Finkelhor
of the respected Crimes Against Children Research Center at the
University of New Hampshire wrote a report explaining the problems
(16:47):
with SD's and Wiener's estimate, as well as other claims
about the extent of juvenile sex work. Their report said,
in all caps, please do not cite these numbers. The
report pleaded, the reality is that we don't currently know
how many juveniles are involved in sex work. Scientifically, credible
estimates do not exist. So I kind of feel for
(17:08):
these researchers who put together this like nuanced thing where
they were like, please don't use this number.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Somebody takes that number and they're like, this is the number.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
And then it's repeated over and over and over again,
and I kind of do need to give a little
bit of a caveat to hear that Astion was far
from the only person who repeated this bad statistic. In fact,
this number has been used by elected officials on both
sides of the aisle. After the Washington Post fact check
on it, Senator Rob Portman from Ohio pledged to stop
citing that number. I'm inclined to think like, maybe Ashton
(17:40):
and Demi didn't know that this number was like not
really a number that they should be repeating. I do
think if I were creating an organization entirely dedicated to trafficking,
I might not have gone on TV multiple times and
repeated a number that respected names who were already in
this space had loudly debunked and all caps asked people
(18:01):
to stop using.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
But the question really is.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Did Ashton and Demi know that they were repeating incorrect
statistics to champion their anti trafficking work, And to be honest,
it kind of sounds like maybe they did. The Village
Voice did a whole investigation where they actually contracted a
methodologist at Arizona State University to dig into the Demi
and Ashton Foundation for their record. This is probably because
(18:25):
The Village Voice was known for their prolific adult classified
section where people engaged in sex for money, So it's
probably one of the reasons why the Village Voice would
be very, very invested in debunking the claims made by
Demi and Ashton's foundation. So in the Village Voice piece,
they talk about Maggie and Trevor Nielsen, who run the
California based Global Philanthropy Group and worked as consultants to
(18:48):
celebrities who want to start charities. When confronted with the
inaccuracy of their numbers, Maggie Nielsen did not seem super faced.
She said, quote Versus most social issues I've worked on,
there's actually a dearth of data, so it was absolutely
cobbled together. All of the core data that we use
gets attacked all the time, She says. The challenge is
that it's that or nothing right, And I frankly don't
(19:11):
care if the number is two hundred thousand, five hundred thousand,
a million, or one hundred thousand. It needs to be addressed.
While I absolutely agree that there is a need for
better data, that people who want to spend all day
bitching about the methodologies used, I'm not very interested in,
she says.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
So as a methodologist, Mike is what are your thoughts
on that?
Speaker 3 (19:31):
Well, it's funny that she seems totally fine to use
the numbers but is actively hostile to questioning the methodology
behind them, Like, you can't have it both ways. You
don't get to use the numbers if they're not based
on a rigorous method. You can't have your cake and
eat it too well.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
There's a reason why she might be interested in using
the numbers when they sound very high, and that might
be money. You know, if you're able to use a
big number, that means that you're better able to fundraise.
According to Professor Steve doug Night, Chair of Journalism at
Arizona State University, who specializes in the analysis of quantitative methodology,
this is the person that the Village of Voice contracted
(20:13):
out to do their investigation into Demi and Ashen's foundation.
Dwig says, let's face it, a study or a story
saying several thousand young teens are being exploited in the
sex trade has a lot less impact than one suggesting
that several hundred thousand are at risk. Researchers, journalists, law
enforcement and politicians alike have incentives to focus on the
much bigger number, and I kind of can't help but
(20:36):
think that that's part of what's going on here. I do,
to be super clear, I do think that one of
the issues is that trafficking is such is the kind
of crime where it is legitimately hard to find hard,
accurate numbers around. And I also think that when you're
putting together a charity where you're fundraising, I can imagine
not balking at a number that's big when you're when
(20:59):
you're an organization that is like trying to raise fun
So I don't think that that they were entirely motivated
by using the biggest number for fundraising. But I also
don't think that was not a motivation, you know. And
I also think that, like when you're starting an organization
or charity that is dedicated to combating an issue that
is as sensitive and complex as trafficking, I think that
(21:22):
you really have to be invested in telling people the truth.
And if the truth is this is the kind of
crime where there aren't hard numbers, here's what we know.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
That's the truth that you gotta give.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Like you can't just cobble together numbers about something that
is as sensitive and important and as big of a
deal as trafficking.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
Absolutely, I mean it sounds like they really positioned this
nonprofit DNA, which is it's such a terrible name. They
just slapped their first names there with like acut C,
like not even the letter just an.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
N, Demi and Ashton.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Yeah, Like it feels like an issue that deserves a
little more respect, but even still, it seems like they're
trying to position it as like a population health organization
where they're talking about like this many American children are
subject to this harm. That's a population health argument, and
so there's an obligation to get the numbers right, to
(22:20):
like have real numbers if your numbers aren't made up,
Like there should be somebody at the organization who has
looked at the primary source that original article and reviewed
the methodology and is willing to like put their name
on the line and saying like, oh, yeah, this number
that we're using is a good one. And sounds like
they just like didn't have that at all, Like it's
(22:41):
just pure marketing.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
And I guess I just feel like this is me
on my soapbox. But people deserve the truth. If you
are raising awareness but you're not able to tell the truth,
what are you raising awareness for? If you knowingly are like,
I know, these numbers are cobbled together, but it's an
important issue. We just need to talk about it, and
like we have to have numbers attached to it, so
we're just gonna make them up. I don't think that
(23:04):
raising awareness, But that doesn't give people the awareness they need.
If people are going to be aware of an issue,
they need to be aware of it accurately. And if
you're raising awareness for an issue and you're doing it
in a way that is not accurate, what are you
actually doing other than raising money?
Speaker 3 (23:18):
If you don't have any rigorous numbers that you can
point to as evidence that it's happening, maybe your first
step should be to like get some decent numbers and
some decent data to guide your efforts. Otherwise you're just
operating based on intuition and preferences.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Vibes. Yeah, that's what I think.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
All of the best anti trafficking work is just going
off vibes, you know.
Speaker 4 (23:47):
More. After a quick break, let's get right back into it.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
So in twenty twelve, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher have
a very messy, very public split following rumors of Ashton
being unfaithful and Demi's addiction issues, and amid that split,
the organization is rebranded from Demi and Ashton to Thorn
Colon Digital Defenders of Children, and this is where they
adopt a much bigger technology and data focus rather than
(24:26):
just sort of general celebrity awareness campaigns about trafficking, and
this is what leads to Thorn becoming a major player
in law enforcement and Internet regulation that they are today.
So Ashton and DEMI explained saying, quote, for the past
three years, we have focused our work broadly on combating
child sex trafficking. It has become crystal clear in our
(24:47):
effort that technology plays an increasingly large role in this
crime and in sexual exploitation of children overall. We believe
that the technology driven aspect of these crimes demands its
own attention and investment. Thorn's website that their motto is
we build technology to defend children from sexual abuse, and
I think it is really important to dig into what
that has actually looked like. So major, major shout outs
(25:11):
to Violet Blue, who wrote a great piece at n
Gadget called sex Flies and Surveillance. Something's wrong with the
war on sex trafficking. So earlier I talked about how
oftentimes anti sex trafficking work conflates a bunch of issues
the trafficking of adults for labor, the trafficking of adults
for sex, the trafficking of children for sex, and adults
(25:31):
engaging and consensual sex work, and then is essentially.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
What is going on with Thorn.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Violet Blue reports that of Thorn's thirty one nonprofit partners,
twenty seven of those groups target adults and vowed to
abolish consensual sex work under the banner of saving children
from sex trafficking. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Thorn was a champion of
SESTA Fasta, legislation that openly conflated adults, consensual sex work
(25:56):
and the trafficking of children. If folks don't know, a
pick and dirty way to understand Cesta Fasta is that
under SESTA Fasta, every website or online platform can be
held liable for posting what the law describes as sex work.
But sex work is undefined and there's no distinction between
human trafficking and consensual sex work. Even the Department of
(26:18):
Justice asked the House Judiciary Committee to change Foster's focus
to traffickers and not cases where there is minimal federal
interests like consensual sex work, and that request was ignored.
According to the Government Accountability Office, which is an organization
that provides fact based information to Congress, SESTA FOSTA and
the shuttering of the adult classified website Backpage actually made
(26:40):
it harder for authorities to track traffickers because quote it
disrupted the landscape of the online commercial sex market Cesta
Fasta and the shuttering of known sites where sex is
sold like Backpage, actually made it harder to tract traffickers,
the report reads, quote Gathering tips and evidence to investigate
and prosecute those who control or you online platforms has
(27:01):
become more difficult due to the relocation of platforms overseas,
platform's use of complex payment systems, and the increased use
of social media platforms. So when Sesta Fosta was passed,
Thorn released a statement saying, quote, the passage of Sesta
Fasta marks an important moment in the mission to defend happiness,
and we are encouraged that advocates, government and technology are
working together to prioritize the protection of youth online. So
(27:25):
if you've listening to this podcast, you probably already know
that whenever I hear someone say that they are working
to protect youth online, my Spidey senses are tingling, as
should yours be tingling, because that generally is basically code
for we are going to surveil sex workers, comma, everybody
in an effort to protect kids online. So Thorn has
(27:48):
two main tech products that they make. One is called Safer,
a content moderation tool that they offer to Internet companies.
The other is called Spotlight, a data mining and user
profiling tool offer to law enforcement. Now, both of these
tools use data sources and AI to automate policing of
sex content, but Spotlight is the one that I really
want to focus on. So at a police training video
(28:10):
for Spotlight, an analyst described that as quote the Google
for human trafficking or online escort activities. Thorn has been
a little cagey about exactly how Spotlight works, but it
is basically a data mining and facial recognition operation that
scrapes websites for adult content. Pre SESSTA Fasta, I would
have said that it scrapes websites like Craigslist and Backpage,
(28:32):
But after Sessta Fosta was passed, Craigslist removed their personal ads,
and then right before Sesta Foster was passed, Backpage shuttered
and it no longer exists. Spotlight's handout says Spotlight is
built on a data archive of millions of records of
escort ads and form data collected from various websites.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
So after Spotlight scrapes all of this data.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
They then take this massive amount of data and turn
it into an asset for law enforcement. The tool allows
on all sort of search or filter escort ads based
on phone number, email, keywords, age, and location. So the
first thing that I think is really worth zeroing in
on are these partnerships that Thorn and Spotlight have with
(29:13):
law enforcement. They're concerning because they open the door for
this use of a vast surveillance network to be done
totally unregulated. Forbes spoke to med Foster, who authored a
report for the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown
Law who released a research report saying that there was
no scientific validation for facial recognition as a reliable tool
(29:34):
in any criminal investigation. She writes, technology initially intended to
serve a narrow purpose like combating human trafficking, can easily
and quickly expand into a tool for mass surveillance, especially
when there is no oversight of these private and philanthropic
partnerships between technology creators and law enforcement agencies. Which Thorn
is a nonprofit, It is a philanthropic effort, and so
(29:57):
there is not a lot of oversight into how the
partners with law enforcement. You know, a public entity of
the state so we already know that Spotlight is using
facial recognition technology that might be less than effective. That
is because Spotlight uses a tool by Amazon called Recognition.
It's recognition with a K. So if you're googling this
(30:19):
to find more information, they're spelling it like edgy.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
It's not recognition with a C, is with OK.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Was it created by like nineteen nineties socialists.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
It's like the same branding as like really edgy energy
drinks or something. I was as they didn't throw an
X in there, you know, like we gotta get that
like edgy X branding. So Recognition Amazon's facial recognition technology
that is used by Ashton Cutcher's anti trafficking tools Spotlight
to text spaces in images and video. There was a
(30:52):
very very long, messy battle to pressure Amazon to stop
selling this technology that is used by Thorn to lawn enforcement.
I'll give you like a little like quick and dirty
history of what happened there. So that is because Amazon's
recognition is janki as fuck, especially when it comes to
marginalized people. Two researchers, doctors Joy Boloweni and Debra Vagee,
(31:17):
published a paper demonstrating that Recognition was classifying the gender
of dark skinned women thirty one point four percentage points
less accurately than that of light skinned men. Amazon responded
not by acknowledging these results, but by attacking the credibility
of these black women researchers. Amazon published two blog posts
claiming that Raji and Bolomwini's work was misleading. In response,
(31:40):
nearly eighty AI researchers defended their work and yet again
called for Amazon to stop selling face recognition technology to
the police. In twenty twenty, after the death of George Floyd,
House and Senate Democrats introduced a police reform bill that
included a proposal to limit facial recognition in law enforcement,
marking the flow largest federal effort ever to regulate this technology.
(32:03):
So in July, after IBM was like, we're not using
this tech anymore, the ACLU of Northern California conducted its
own study and found that the system falsely matched photos
of twenty eight members of the US Congress with mugshots,
which really got Congress's attention. The false matches were disproportionately
people of color.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
So after all of this.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
Outcry, Amazon did announce a one year moratorium on partnering
with law enforcement to use recognition, with one exception for
when police are using Thorn's spotlight. So they know that
the facial recognition technology used in spotlight is not great.
It's racially biased, this has gender biased. They know all
(32:44):
of this, so they're going to stop using that technology
unless it is being used for police to combat trafficking
via spotlight.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
So this technology, if it is being used.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
Purportedly to identify people who are potentially involved in exchanging
sex for money, but it's also really janky and misidentifies
the black and brown face as women's faces, you can
see why that would be a problem, right.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
Yeah, for sure, And like, how do you justify discontinuing
the technology because it doesn't work well, but we're gonna
keep using it for this one purpose, Like it just
doesn't even begin to make sense.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
I completely agree. And remember, despite Thorn's state admission of
helping kids who are being trafficked, they have conflated children
who are trafficked with adults who engage in consensual sex work.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Now, Thorn, I need to be.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Clear, does specifically say that their focus of the organization
is helping kids who are being trafficked, not adults who
engage in sex work. And that might be true at
an organizational level, but that is not what's going on
in practice. Thorn's CEO Julia Cordua told Forbes that Spotlight
was limited to officers who investigate child sex trafficking, saying
(34:05):
law enforcement has reported that with Spotlight they have seen
over sixty percent time saving in their investigative process, and
over twenty one thousand children have been identified using this tool.
Court filings and interviews with current and former police show
that Spotlight is frequently used to identify adults, a point
on which Cordia declined to comment. And this is what
(34:26):
I think is really going on at THORN. They can
say all day long that they do not exist to
target adult consensual sex workers, but their technology just is
being used to target those adult consensual sex workers who
they say they don't want to target. And this is
not just messed up because it's wrong to surveil and
criminalize adults who consensually engage in sex work, which it is,
(34:50):
but also adult sex workers have networks of support and
advocacy where they can help detect and prevent children from
being trafficked for sex. But sex workers not be a
resource to help combat trafficking if sex work is further
surveiled and criminalized. Like time and time again, we see
that sex workers are on the front line of seeing
(35:11):
when something non consensual or something is going on with
a minor, and they're the ones who frequently work with
law enforcement to help curb that. But they're not going
to be able to do that if they are continually
being surveiled and criminalized. Not only that, laws that surveil
and criminalize sex workers also make it harder for them
to do their work safely. It shuts down resources and
(35:33):
services used to research and vet clients. And so if
your whole thing is we want to prevent people from
being trafficked for sex, don't then make it harder to
engage in sex work, because actually you are going to
make it easier for people to be harmed and trafficked
and caught up in non consensual situations. Kate Diamato, a
(35:56):
sex worker advocate at Reframe Health and Justice, a queer
and trans people of color collective focused on harm reduction
and legal reform, said that by monitoring sex workers rather
than working with them, police are making it incredibly hard
to do sex work in any way. That is remotely safe.
And even if Thorn says that they do not want
to target adults who are consensually engaging against sex work,
(36:18):
it kind of sounds like they are including those same
adults in the numbers of trafficking victims that they report
that they have saved in scare quotes from trafficking, because
just like the previous iteration of Thorn DNA, they still
are kind of misrepresenting their numbers. Ashton Kutcher gave testimony
(36:38):
before Senator John McCain and other US lawmakers where he
said that Spotlight had helped save more than six thousand
US sex trafficking victims, including two thousand miners, in the
last twelve months.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
But according to a.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Report from Reason, these numbers wildly outpace the average number
of new criminal investigations into sex trafficking open in the
US each year, or average number of victims identified by
US law enforcement. For instance, between late two thousand and
nine and late twenty fifteen, FBI agents working with state
and local police across America identified an average of just
(37:11):
one hundred and seventy five minor victims per year. According
to the Attorney Generals twenty fifteen annual Report to Congress,
an assessment of the US government's activities to combat trafficking
in persons. The report also notes that in government fiscal
year twenty fifteen, the FBI identified around six hundred and
seventy two adult and child victims of sex or labor trafficking.
(37:31):
The FBI opened eight hundred and two human trafficking investigations,
resulting in four hundred and fifty three convictions that year,
while ICE opened one thousand, thirty four sex or labor
trafficking investigations and got fifty one sex trafficking convictions. In
addition to that, uniform crime reporting data from the United
States indicate that seven hundred and forty four investigations into
(37:52):
state level sex trafficking offenses were opened in twenty fifteen,
so there is probably overlap between state and FBI investigation,
But the report says, even if we count all of
those cases separately, we're looking at a total of two thousand,
five hundred and eighty investigations into sex or labor trafficking,
seven hundred and twenty five less cases than Thorn allegedly
(38:15):
helped identify in a one year period.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Yeah, I mean, based on those disparaities you just cited,
and their history of playing fast and loose with numbers,
one kind of has to suspect that, like, maybe they're
playing fast and loose with their numbers here. Do you
suppose it helps with their fundraising?
Speaker 2 (38:34):
Oh, I can imagine that it might.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
Basically, according to this report, it looks like Thorn is
inflating the numbers of trafficking arrests that their technology has
led to, and the most likely explanation for how they're
kind of being funny with the numbers is that they
are counting adults arrested for posting ads on places like
Craigslist or Backpage or other escort sites looking to engage
(38:57):
in the exchange of sex for money in the number
of people that their technology has saved from trafficking, whether
they were actually being trafficked or not. So back to
that reason report reason rights, the majority of adult ads
on Backpage are posted by sex workers themselves and people
arrested in cops human trafficking stings based on these ads
are predominantly sex workers and or people looking to pay
(39:18):
other adults for sex. Police might be looking for trafficking
victims when they contact ads featuring young looking women or
certain supposed code words, but when their hunches don't pan out,
and this is most of the time, they arrest the target.
Considering the data we do have on state and federal
human trafficking cases, the only way the numbers from Ashton
Kutcher's group could make sense is if a they're counting
(39:41):
every red flag ad Spotlight identifies, regardless of whether these
tips are ultimately deemed worthwhild enough to prompt a criminal investigation,
or B they're counting cases of consensual sex work between
adults and lumping all adult sex workers identified into adult
trafficking victim number, and in some way they are doing
(40:04):
something with their numbers. Either a anytime a law enforcement
looks into one of these ads, they're counting that as
somebody who has been saved from trafficking, or they are
just lumping in consensual adult sex workers as adult trafficking victims.
Either way, it's not great, and the fact that we
(40:24):
can't answer this question, the fact that these numbers don't
really make sense, and like they have not provided an
explanation as to how they've gotten these numbers and why
they're repeating them publicly, is a problem, and I want
to be very very clear that I am not saying
that thorn does not do any good. That is far
from what I am saying. I hope that nobody takes
that away. But what I am saying is that I
(40:46):
think that we need to push back against this dynamic
that says that all anti trafficking work is just by
nature above reproach, because trafficking and misrepresentations around trafficking has
been used to advocate for all kinds of harmful legislation
and surveillance that does not actually curb trafficking. That's because
these campaigns are often about curbing sex work, not trafficking.
(41:10):
After SESTA FOSTA was passed, trafficking actually increased.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
An in depth.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
Legal analysis of SESTA FOSTA and its impact published in
the Columbia Human Rights Law Review concluded that the law
has had a chilling effect on free speech, has created
dangerous working conditions for sex workers, and has actually made
it more difficult for police to find trafficked individuals.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
But when you say, like, oh.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
I'm doing an organization that's going to combat trafficking, people listen,
People open their checkbooks, people fund you, because everybody is
against trafficking. But if you were to say, oh, my
organization is about eradicating sex work through surveilling and criminalizing
people who engage in it, it would probably be a
lot less effective, and people like Ashton Kutcher continue to
(41:57):
be the people who are funding and profiting from tech futures.
So maybe it starts with surveilling and criminalizing sex workers,
but it certainly does not stop there. Here's Ashton Kutcher
on a recent episode of the podcast Hot Ones. If
he sounds a little funky, it's because he's eating a
hot wing, because like that's the point of the podcast.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Like, I have an app in my phone in my
pocket right now.
Speaker 4 (42:19):
It's like a big app.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
It's a facial recognition app.
Speaker 4 (42:22):
I can hold it up to anybody's face here and
like find exactly who you are, what Internet accounts are on,
what they look like.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
That's terrifying.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
So this whole conversation provides what I think is a
pretty good blueprint for how internet legislation can ostensibly be
about combating a very narrow, kind of reasonable sounding kind
of harm, particularly a harm against kids, but then that
definition is expanded such that more and more things are included,
(42:53):
the same way that when we talk about legislation like
the Kids Online Safety Act, where the legislation says that
it's about protecting kids from harmful one content, but then
the definition of that harmful online content is just expanded
to include all different kinds of content, both for miners
and adults. And so I say all of this to
say that when you hear that somebody is trying to
(43:16):
combat harm of kids on the internet, it should not
just be a sign of like, oh, that's a good person,
like we don't need to look at what that actually involves.
It should actually be the opposite. We should actually look
deeper into their actual framework, how they're actually.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Thinking about this.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
Is it punitive, is it surveillance base, Is it based
around further criminalizing people who are already surveiled and criminalized
and marginalized. So if you're listening to this and you're
wondering what exactly is the big deal? So what if
they inflate their numbers? Here's why this matters. Inflating the
danger around sex trafficking not only lends credibility to specific
(43:53):
harmful legislation, legislation like cesta fasta that can actually make
trafficking worse, but it all also makes it seem like
sex trafficking is more likely to be a situation where
a white child is like snatched off the street by
a stranger and forced into the sex trade. Now, this
is obviously a very sympathetic narrative and one that is
(44:15):
very easy to throw money and legislation at. But if
trafficking and sex crimes begin and end with strangers snatching
kids off the street and forcing them into the sex trade,
you are going to be trained that that is the
real threat, when in reality it's not. It is much
more likely that the threat is someone the victim knows,
or that they are groomed or coerced into being trafficked.
(44:39):
But if trafficking is your end all, be all for
sex crimes, you are going to be a lot less
likely to see your buddy who has always been really
nice to you, who seems like a really good guy
and always shakes hands with firefighters after nine to eleven
as a threat, because in your mind, the real threat
is strangers. So when we inflate the numbers around trafficking
(45:01):
and use that to justify all kinds of harmful practices
and laws, we are not actually keeping ourselves safe. And
so yeah, I think as people are talking about Ashton
Kutcher and why he would risk his reputation and his
work in the space to defend Danny Masterson from his
(45:22):
two forcible rape convictions. I hope this is a helpful
explanation as to why he might do that. And also
I hope this is a good invitation for folks to
listen to marginalize people when they speak up about what
they're experiencing online, because pretty much everything that I just
said I got from sex workers. Sex workers have not
been quiet about this. They have been speaking up about
(45:43):
harmful legislation on the Internet for a very long time,
and I think we really got to listen to them.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
And that's it. That's all I got.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
I learned a lot here. I had no idea Ashton
Kutcher was doing any of this. What a weird story.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
Yeah, I mean, let me just like before I let
you go.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
So, I just want to look up all the different
tech companies that he is investing in, because he was
an investor at Uber. He was tweeting about how like
it's good for tech companies like Uber, presumably tech companies
that he invests in. It's good when when they track
down dirt on journalists who are reporting on on those companies,
(46:22):
and then later he was like, oh no, no, no, no,
I was just speaking as myself. I wasn't speaking as
like an uber investor. I was just that's just my opinion.
Speaker 3 (46:32):
There's like a real paternalistic through thread of I'm going
to start this charity named after myself to protect girls
from trafficking, and also I'm going to make a lot
of money through investing in surveillance software. It's probably not
(46:56):
a coincidence that both of those things are happening here.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
Oh yeah, I And that's sort of like one of
the reasons that it was important to me to talk
about this is that Ashton Cutcher is propping up, profiting
from and funding a vast surveillance network and then like
going on podcasts and like going on hot ones and
like making it seem like it's cool and funny, and
(47:21):
I just I hate the idea that he has so
effectively been able to brand himself as like a smart
tech guy who will go on TV and sell our
own harm back to us in a way that looks
cool and like, oh my god, he really like, you know,
he's he's really like doing something interesting. People thought he
was a dumb stoner, but actually he's making millions off
(47:43):
of me. I mean, just a few months ago, Ashton
Kutcher launched a two hundred and forty million dollar AI
investment fund. And so somebody who goes on hot ones
and giggles and key keys about this like pretty creepy,
scary surveillance. I don't know that this is somebody that
I would trust with architecting something like AI. Like it
(48:06):
just is, it's it's concerning to me, Ashton Kutcher, what are.
Speaker 3 (48:10):
You doing, dude? Where's my privacy?
Speaker 2 (48:14):
That is a great place to end. Mike, thank you
so much for being.
Speaker 3 (48:17):
Here, Thank you for having me, Bridget, and thanks for
this deep background about Ashton Kutcher and surveillance capitalism.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
To save the Kids, got a story about an interesting
thing in tech. I just want to say Hi. You
can reach us at Hello at tengody dot com. You
can also find transcripts for today's episode at tengody dot com.
There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by
Me Bridget Toad. It's a production of iHeartRadio, an unbossed creative.
Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tarry Harrison is our
(48:50):
producer and sound engineer. Michael Almato is our contributing producer.
I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help
us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts a
podcast from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Justin heads up, this episode talks quite a bit about
sex trafficking. There Are No Girls on the Internet as
a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridge Toad
and this is there Are No Girls on the Internet.
(00:22):
I am here with my producer Mike, and we have
to talk about anti trafficking work yet again. Specifically, we
have to talk about actor Ashton Kutcher's anti trafficking organization Thorn.
So we've talked about this a few times on the
show before. We did an episode with Michael Hobbs, formerly
of the podcast You're Wrong about digging into why anti
(00:44):
trafficking work lends itself so easily to inflated numbers and grandstanding.
We also did a recent episode about the anti trafficking
hero fantasy film Sound of Freedom and the dangers that
occur when anti trafficking work is treated as autumnally and
inherently good, because if you ask any questions too or
(01:05):
about the people who say they've dedicated their entire lives
to combating trafficking, you're basically on the side of the traffickers, right.
So I would argue that this is actually a very
harmful dynamic because trafficking is such a sensitive and important issue,
and because people pretty much all agree that trafficking is horrible,
(01:27):
and it creates this easy proxy to get people not
to mention money on your side if you say that
you're working on combating trafficking. So I would argue that
all of this means that if somebody says they work
on anti trafficking work, it actually should invite further scrutiny
into exactly what that work looks like. Case in point,
(01:47):
Ashton Kutcher's anti trafficking organization Thorn. So the reason that
I'm talking about this now is because actor Danny Masterson,
who played Hide on the very popular sitcom That seventy Show,
was convict did of raping two women, both of whom
were former members of the Church of Scientology. Danny is
also a scientologist, and survivors say that he used this
(02:09):
very powerful network of Scientology to avoid accountability for his actions.
Last week, Masterson was sentenced to thirty years to life
in prison. After his conviction, Masterson's friends and family wrote
letters to the judge asking for leniency in his sentencing.
The letters, frankly were not good. From my understanding at
(02:32):
this point, what judges are really looking for is less
of letters that are like, oh, he's such a nice guy,
he couldn't have done this, YadA YadA, but rather some
indication of contrition or some insight into the abuser's plan
to make better choices in the future. I have seen
some people say that these letters were leaked, but that.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Is actually not true.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
It sounds like those letters were always part of the
public record, and then it's just up to the judge's
discretion on whether or not to make those letters public,
which in this case, the judge did do that.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
So two of the people who.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Wrote letters on behalf of Danny Masterson asking for leniency
and his sentencing were fellow actors Mi Lacunis and Ashton Kutcher,
also from that seventy show. After public outcry about these letters,
they ended up releasing a video that basically apologized if
those letters were hurtful for people to hear, and saying
that they had only intended for the judge to see
(03:28):
those letters. Their letters basically read like a checklist of
all of the things and an abuser's friends say, after
he faces some consequences, you probably know the drill, right,
Like he's such a good guy. He's always been really
nice to me. He couldn't have done this, like he
has a daughter that's always a big one, like, oh,
(03:49):
his daughter. Ashton's letter talks specifically about how Danny never
did drugs and instructed the entire cast of that seventy
show to avoid drug use. I guess he was using
those drugs to incapacitate a woman that he wanted to assault.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
That is also probably because drugs are forbidden in scientology.
Ashton also wrote about how Danny Masterson was really supportive
of the firefighters after nine to eleven and how, to
his knowledge, he has never lied.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Like these are really I don't know the letters. You can.
You can find them online.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
I found them to be full of hyper specific information,
none of which are related to whether or not this
person as a rapist. Ashton ends his letter quote, while
I'm aware that the judgment has been cast as guilty
on two counts of rape by force, and the victims
have a great desire for justice, I hope that my
testament to his character is taken into consideration and sentencing.
(04:45):
I do not believe he is an ongoing harm to
society and having his daughter raised without a present father
would be a tertiary injustice in and of itself. So
those letters were pretty bad. Like if someone I knew
was convicted of two counts of forcible rape, you are
on your own, Like, I don't care how close we were,
(05:06):
I don't care how many times you told me not
to do drugs or how many times you like shook
hands with firefighters after nine to eleven, I probably wouldn't
be writing a letter like this on your behalf. So
here is where Ashton's anti sex trafficking work comes in,
because one thing that I keep reading online is people
asking why would Ashton Kutcher, someone who has dedicated his
(05:29):
life to combating sex trafficking and working with survivors, have
sexual violence, risk his reputation and the reputation of his
organization by writing a letter like this, And honestly, I
get it. I get that this looks like hypocrisy, but
I would actually argue that it speaks to hell when
someone is working to stop trafficking, it creates this sine
(05:50):
of automatic good doing, when in reality it should actually
be a sign for all of us to look deeper
into what their at work actually looks like. Because when
you do a lot of times what you see is
not work that is just working to combat the trafficking
of children, but rather working to further survey and criminalize
adult consensual sex workers. Then adult sex work is kind
(06:12):
of lumped in with the work to prevent sex trafficking
of children. They're kind of conflated. And that's what I
think is going on here. So let's start by a
little bit of a history around Ashton Kutcher's anti trafficking work.
So it might be a little bit hard to remember,
but back in the day, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore
were kind of a like power couple.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
That's the only way that I can describe it, Like
you kind of had to be there.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
Ashton was the first person to ever reach one million
followers on Twitter, and this was like a big deal.
I watched a clip from Good Morning America where I
think Ryan Seacrest actually comes out and presents him with
a framed award from the Guinness Book of World Records
because he was the first person to get a million
(06:57):
Twitter followers. At this point, Ashton like going on TV
and being asked to like wax philosophically about Twitter and
social media and technology. He was the person who was
sort of credited with getting a lot of other celebrities
to use Twitter too. This is a bit of a
side note and it's really just my opinion, but Ashton Kutcher,
(07:18):
like heretofore, he had kind of had a persona as
being a hot but stupid himbo frat guy, and I
think that this was definitely a move like him being
a tech guy. I think was definitely an attempt to
rebrand himself as like a serious tech guy.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
You know.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
He published a piece in Harper's called is Tech the
New Black?
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Where he wrote about all of his tech predictions.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
And I think it's really interesting how celebrities can use
certain issues like technology to really rebrand themselves, you know,
like pop on a pair of fake black rimmed glasses
and start talking tech wearing a blazer, and boom, you
are no longer the dude from Dude, Where's my car?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Now?
Speaker 1 (07:58):
You are smart and thoughtful and nuance. Then you have
an elevated persona. Do you know what I'm saying?
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Yeah, those fake glasses are really the key.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
The one person who I think is really rocking, like,
oh I'm smart now is Rick Perry. He He has
really been like all on the like, oh did you
see I'm wearing glasses now, I'm smart now Kick.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
It's like a total rebrand with those new glasses that
Rick Perry has started wearing. And it's I guess it's working.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Yeah, he's like Clark Kent in reverse. He puts on
the glasses. You don't even know what's him. Okay.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
So back in two thousand and nine, when Ashton Kutcher
was in a relationship with Demi Moore, they started the
DNA Foundation, an anti trafficking organization together. The name DNA
Foundation is a mix of their name Demi and Ashton Foundation.
They got the idea to do this work after Demi
Moore reportedly was watching a documentary about sex slavery in
(08:52):
Cambodia on MSNBC and wanted to start an organization that
combat in that kind of stuff in the United States too.
Folks listening might recall Ashton's Real Men Don't Buy Girls campaign.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Mike, do you remember this at all?
Speaker 3 (09:06):
I wish I did. I know, we talked about it
a little bit earlier. I don't. I don't know where
I was when this campaign was happening.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Well, I remember like it was yesterday, and I searched
high and low, like I did a deep, deep search
to try to find an original video from the Real
Men Don't Buy Girls campaign. This is a little bit
of the conspiracy theory. I think they must have just
removed it, had it scrubbed from the Internet, because I
can't find anything.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
I can only find two.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Videos that were clearly user generated content that were not
representative of what the original videos were.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
Where were these videos airing? Were you everywhere everywhere like
television commercials.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
They were on YouTube, they were on TV, they were
on Facebook.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
This also was the early two thousands when we just
didn't have a lot of social media content. If a
celebrity was doing something online, it was like automatically newsworthy,
So I can't believe you don't remember them. Basically, the
point of the campaign was that it was showing all
of these like manly famous men like Bradley Cooper and
(10:12):
Sean Penn doing all kinds of manly things, but then
being like, oh, well, manly men make grilled cheese sandwiches
using an iron because they're manly. But real men don't
Buy Girls, and the commercials were I guess I will
just say. They were mostly panned for being cringey, which
(10:33):
is probably why I cannot find any of them now.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Like literally, when I Google, when I found a.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Website that had like six squares from YouTube like it
like embedded YouTube videos, each of those squares was like
video not found, Video not found, Video not found, video
not found. So Ashton Kutcher apparently has the power to
get these videos removed from the Internet.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
But they I remember them like they were yesterday.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
You can still find if you google real Men Don't
Buy Girls, you can still find the images of like
Ashton Kutcher. He's wearing like a nit beanie, like a
slouchy knit beanie, and he's holding the sign that says
real men don't Buy Girls.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
That still exists.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
But the commercials You'll just have to take my word
for it because I remember them like they were yesterday.
Speaker 4 (11:23):
Let's take a quick break at her back.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
So back then, DNA was really kind of centered around
celebrities raising awareness about trafficking, which, on his face, is
not like the worst thing in the world. If anything,
these ads were a little bit cringe, but they weren't
like the worst thing ever. But DNA was a little
bit tricky with their numbers. When the organization was first
(11:58):
getting started, they misreped and inflated stats and numbers around trafficking,
which is going to be a theme in this episode.
This will not be the first time that you're hearing
that this anti sex trafficking organization is misreporting and inflating
numbers around sex trafficking. So this part of the conversation
really ties into this one stat Ashton repeats this one
(12:18):
claim over and over that there are between one hundred
thousand and three hundred thousand child sex slaves in the
United States today. He said it unchecked on CNN's Pierce Morgan.
He testified before Congress and gave that same stat This
stat is repeated over and over and over again. If
you google it, you get lots and lots of hits.
(12:39):
But surprise, this is not an accurate stat not even close.
The Washington Post dug into this specific statistic and found
that it comes from a two thousand and one report
from Richard J. ST's and Neil Wiener of the University
of Pennsylvania. So this study was published in two thousand
and one, so it relied on data from the nineteen nineties.
But people have been parroting it well unto the twenty
(13:00):
tens and even sometimes today, so obviously it's already like
a little bit suspect. The report never said that one
hundred thousand to three hundred thousand children are being trafficked
in the United States. What they did say was that
one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand children are quote
at risk for commercial sexual exploitation. So that's a different
(13:20):
thing than how Ashton Kutcher reported it. That there are
one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand kids being trafficked
in the United States then was not true. But even
if that is just the number of young people at risk,
it's still not totally correct. The post dug into how
this figure came to be. The researcher started by compiling
(13:41):
the number of youth in fourteen different categories, such as
foreign children, children in public housing, or female gang members,
but many of these categories could overlap, such as a
female foreign born child and public housing who was part
of a gang that one person would count a S three.
The three hundred thousand figure also relied on a series
of guesses on the part of the researchers, such as
(14:01):
the assumption that thirty five percent of runaway youth away
from home at least a week were quote at risk,
or that one quarter of one percent of all youth
ages ten to seventeen we're at risk. So I should
say that the researchers themselves in their report, they say
that they're guessing at certain things, and they make it
very clear that they are not trying to give an
(14:21):
authoritative number. Yet that stat is often misreported as an
authoritative number.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
Yeah, that's like the eternal challenge and fear. I think
of scientists trying to communicate the results to a popular press, right,
Like anytime you take a like a training of how
scientists should talk to journalists, one of the things that
they highlight is the emphasis of scientists on precision and accuracy.
(14:50):
And you know, that's exactly what gets lost when things
get translated, results get translated to popular press. So it's
like they could have in that paper dotted all their eyes,
crossed all their t's to lay out every single assumption
and every kind They just had to guess at a
(15:11):
quantity to like really qualify it that this is our
best estimate. But there are all these different ways that
it could be inaccurate. But then either through people just
trying to be convenient or perhaps people trying to distort
statistics into to serve narratives that they're trying to push.
(15:32):
You know, that very careful, nuanced estimate becomes just a number, right,
which loses all of the nuance, and that I mean
all that aside. It also sounds like whoever changed one
hundred thousand of three hundred thousand children at risk to
one hundred thousand to three hundred child thousand children currently
(15:55):
being trafficked. That's not just like losing nuance, that's I
would say, an active distortion.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
So keep that in mind as we go on, because
that's going to be very relevant in just a moment.
So I think I know somebody who would agree with you,
which is SD's one of the researchers who worked on
this study who openly agrees that that number is bunk.
St says, I'm fully aware of the controversy that surrounds
my and other scholar's estimates of the number of children
(16:26):
at risk of sexual exploitation, he told The Post's fact checker.
He added, clearly a new, more current study is needed.
So in two thousand and eight, a year before Ashton
and Demi would start DNA, Michelle Stransky and David Finkelhor
of the respected Crimes Against Children Research Center at the
University of New Hampshire wrote a report explaining the problems
(16:47):
with SD's and Wiener's estimate, as well as other claims
about the extent of juvenile sex work. Their report said,
in all caps, please do not cite these numbers. The
report pleaded, the reality is that we don't currently know
how many juveniles are involved in sex work. Scientifically, credible
estimates do not exist. So I kind of feel for
(17:08):
these researchers who put together this like nuanced thing where
they were like, please don't use this number.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Somebody takes that number and they're like, this is the number.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
And then it's repeated over and over and over again,
and I kind of do need to give a little
bit of a caveat to hear that Astion was far
from the only person who repeated this bad statistic. In fact,
this number has been used by elected officials on both
sides of the aisle. After the Washington Post fact check
on it, Senator Rob Portman from Ohio pledged to stop
citing that number. I'm inclined to think like, maybe Ashton
(17:40):
and Demi didn't know that this number was like not
really a number that they should be repeating. I do
think if I were creating an organization entirely dedicated to trafficking,
I might not have gone on TV multiple times and
repeated a number that respected names who were already in
this space had loudly debunked and all caps asked people
(18:01):
to stop using.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
But the question really is.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Did Ashton and Demi know that they were repeating incorrect
statistics to champion their anti trafficking work, And to be honest,
it kind of sounds like maybe they did. The Village
Voice did a whole investigation where they actually contracted a
methodologist at Arizona State University to dig into the Demi
and Ashton Foundation for their record. This is probably because
(18:25):
The Village Voice was known for their prolific adult classified
section where people engaged in sex for money, So it's
probably one of the reasons why the Village Voice would
be very, very invested in debunking the claims made by
Demi and Ashton's foundation. So in the Village Voice piece,
they talk about Maggie and Trevor Nielsen, who run the
California based Global Philanthropy Group and worked as consultants to
(18:48):
celebrities who want to start charities. When confronted with the
inaccuracy of their numbers, Maggie Nielsen did not seem super faced.
She said, quote Versus most social issues I've worked on,
there's actually a dearth of data, so it was absolutely
cobbled together. All of the core data that we use
gets attacked all the time, She says. The challenge is
that it's that or nothing right, And I frankly don't
(19:11):
care if the number is two hundred thousand, five hundred thousand,
a million, or one hundred thousand. It needs to be addressed.
While I absolutely agree that there is a need for
better data, that people who want to spend all day
bitching about the methodologies used, I'm not very interested in,
she says.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
So as a methodologist, Mike is what are your thoughts
on that?
Speaker 3 (19:31):
Well, it's funny that she seems totally fine to use
the numbers but is actively hostile to questioning the methodology
behind them, Like, you can't have it both ways. You
don't get to use the numbers if they're not based
on a rigorous method. You can't have your cake and
eat it too well.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
There's a reason why she might be interested in using
the numbers when they sound very high, and that might
be money. You know, if you're able to use a
big number, that means that you're better able to fundraise.
According to Professor Steve doug Night, Chair of Journalism at
Arizona State University, who specializes in the analysis of quantitative methodology,
this is the person that the Village of Voice contracted
(20:13):
out to do their investigation into Demi and Ashen's foundation.
Dwig says, let's face it, a study or a story
saying several thousand young teens are being exploited in the
sex trade has a lot less impact than one suggesting
that several hundred thousand are at risk. Researchers, journalists, law
enforcement and politicians alike have incentives to focus on the
much bigger number, and I kind of can't help but
(20:36):
think that that's part of what's going on here. I do,
to be super clear, I do think that one of
the issues is that trafficking is such is the kind
of crime where it is legitimately hard to find hard,
accurate numbers around. And I also think that when you're
putting together a charity where you're fundraising, I can imagine
not balking at a number that's big when you're when
(20:59):
you're an organization that is like trying to raise fun
So I don't think that that they were entirely motivated
by using the biggest number for fundraising. But I also
don't think that was not a motivation, you know. And
I also think that, like when you're starting an organization
or charity that is dedicated to combating an issue that
is as sensitive and complex as trafficking, I think that
(21:22):
you really have to be invested in telling people the truth.
And if the truth is this is the kind of
crime where there aren't hard numbers, here's what we know.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
That's the truth that you gotta give.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Like you can't just cobble together numbers about something that
is as sensitive and important and as big of a
deal as trafficking.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
Absolutely, I mean it sounds like they really positioned this
nonprofit DNA, which is it's such a terrible name. They
just slapped their first names there with like acut C,
like not even the letter just an.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
N, Demi and Ashton.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Yeah, Like it feels like an issue that deserves a
little more respect, but even still, it seems like they're
trying to position it as like a population health organization
where they're talking about like this many American children are
subject to this harm. That's a population health argument, and
so there's an obligation to get the numbers right, to
(22:20):
like have real numbers if your numbers aren't made up,
Like there should be somebody at the organization who has
looked at the primary source that original article and reviewed
the methodology and is willing to like put their name
on the line and saying like, oh, yeah, this number
that we're using is a good one. And sounds like
they just like didn't have that at all, Like it's
(22:41):
just pure marketing.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
And I guess I just feel like this is me
on my soapbox. But people deserve the truth. If you
are raising awareness but you're not able to tell the truth,
what are you raising awareness for? If you knowingly are like,
I know, these numbers are cobbled together, but it's an
important issue. We just need to talk about it, and
like we have to have numbers attached to it, so
we're just gonna make them up. I don't think that
(23:04):
raising awareness, But that doesn't give people the awareness they need.
If people are going to be aware of an issue,
they need to be aware of it accurately. And if
you're raising awareness for an issue and you're doing it
in a way that is not accurate, what are you
actually doing other than raising money?
Speaker 3 (23:18):
If you don't have any rigorous numbers that you can
point to as evidence that it's happening, maybe your first
step should be to like get some decent numbers and
some decent data to guide your efforts. Otherwise you're just
operating based on intuition and preferences.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Vibes. Yeah, that's what I think.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
All of the best anti trafficking work is just going
off vibes, you know.
Speaker 4 (23:47):
More. After a quick break, let's get right back into it.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
So in twenty twelve, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher have
a very messy, very public split following rumors of Ashton
being unfaithful and Demi's addiction issues, and amid that split,
the organization is rebranded from Demi and Ashton to Thorn
Colon Digital Defenders of Children, and this is where they
adopt a much bigger technology and data focus rather than
(24:26):
just sort of general celebrity awareness campaigns about trafficking, and
this is what leads to Thorn becoming a major player
in law enforcement and Internet regulation that they are today.
So Ashton and DEMI explained saying, quote, for the past
three years, we have focused our work broadly on combating
child sex trafficking. It has become crystal clear in our
(24:47):
effort that technology plays an increasingly large role in this
crime and in sexual exploitation of children overall. We believe
that the technology driven aspect of these crimes demands its
own attention and investment. Thorn's website that their motto is
we build technology to defend children from sexual abuse, and
I think it is really important to dig into what
that has actually looked like. So major, major shout outs
(25:11):
to Violet Blue, who wrote a great piece at n
Gadget called sex Flies and Surveillance. Something's wrong with the
war on sex trafficking. So earlier I talked about how
oftentimes anti sex trafficking work conflates a bunch of issues
the trafficking of adults for labor, the trafficking of adults
for sex, the trafficking of children for sex, and adults
(25:31):
engaging and consensual sex work, and then is essentially.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
What is going on with Thorn.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Violet Blue reports that of Thorn's thirty one nonprofit partners,
twenty seven of those groups target adults and vowed to
abolish consensual sex work under the banner of saving children
from sex trafficking. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Thorn was a champion of
SESTA Fasta, legislation that openly conflated adults, consensual sex work
(25:56):
and the trafficking of children. If folks don't know, a
pick and dirty way to understand Cesta Fasta is that
under SESTA Fasta, every website or online platform can be
held liable for posting what the law describes as sex work.
But sex work is undefined and there's no distinction between
human trafficking and consensual sex work. Even the Department of
(26:18):
Justice asked the House Judiciary Committee to change Foster's focus
to traffickers and not cases where there is minimal federal
interests like consensual sex work, and that request was ignored.
According to the Government Accountability Office, which is an organization
that provides fact based information to Congress, SESTA FOSTA and
the shuttering of the adult classified website Backpage actually made
(26:40):
it harder for authorities to track traffickers because quote it
disrupted the landscape of the online commercial sex market Cesta
Fasta and the shuttering of known sites where sex is
sold like Backpage, actually made it harder to tract traffickers,
the report reads, quote Gathering tips and evidence to investigate
and prosecute those who control or you online platforms has
(27:01):
become more difficult due to the relocation of platforms overseas,
platform's use of complex payment systems, and the increased use
of social media platforms. So when Sesta Fosta was passed,
Thorn released a statement saying, quote, the passage of Sesta
Fasta marks an important moment in the mission to defend happiness,
and we are encouraged that advocates, government and technology are
working together to prioritize the protection of youth online. So
(27:25):
if you've listening to this podcast, you probably already know
that whenever I hear someone say that they are working
to protect youth online, my Spidey senses are tingling, as
should yours be tingling, because that generally is basically code
for we are going to surveil sex workers, comma, everybody
in an effort to protect kids online. So Thorn has
(27:48):
two main tech products that they make. One is called Safer,
a content moderation tool that they offer to Internet companies.
The other is called Spotlight, a data mining and user
profiling tool offer to law enforcement. Now, both of these
tools use data sources and AI to automate policing of
sex content, but Spotlight is the one that I really
want to focus on. So at a police training video
(28:10):
for Spotlight, an analyst described that as quote the Google
for human trafficking or online escort activities. Thorn has been
a little cagey about exactly how Spotlight works, but it
is basically a data mining and facial recognition operation that
scrapes websites for adult content. Pre SESSTA Fasta, I would
have said that it scrapes websites like Craigslist and Backpage,
(28:32):
But after Sessta Fosta was passed, Craigslist removed their personal ads,
and then right before Sesta Foster was passed, Backpage shuttered
and it no longer exists. Spotlight's handout says Spotlight is
built on a data archive of millions of records of
escort ads and form data collected from various websites.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
So after Spotlight scrapes all of this data.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
They then take this massive amount of data and turn
it into an asset for law enforcement. The tool allows
on all sort of search or filter escort ads based
on phone number, email, keywords, age, and location. So the
first thing that I think is really worth zeroing in
on are these partnerships that Thorn and Spotlight have with
(29:13):
law enforcement. They're concerning because they open the door for
this use of a vast surveillance network to be done
totally unregulated. Forbes spoke to med Foster, who authored a
report for the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown
Law who released a research report saying that there was
no scientific validation for facial recognition as a reliable tool
(29:34):
in any criminal investigation. She writes, technology initially intended to
serve a narrow purpose like combating human trafficking, can easily
and quickly expand into a tool for mass surveillance, especially
when there is no oversight of these private and philanthropic
partnerships between technology creators and law enforcement agencies. Which Thorn
is a nonprofit, It is a philanthropic effort, and so
(29:57):
there is not a lot of oversight into how the
partners with law enforcement. You know, a public entity of
the state so we already know that Spotlight is using
facial recognition technology that might be less than effective. That
is because Spotlight uses a tool by Amazon called Recognition.
It's recognition with a K. So if you're googling this
(30:19):
to find more information, they're spelling it like edgy.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
It's not recognition with a C, is with OK.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Was it created by like nineteen nineties socialists.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
It's like the same branding as like really edgy energy
drinks or something. I was as they didn't throw an
X in there, you know, like we gotta get that
like edgy X branding. So Recognition Amazon's facial recognition technology
that is used by Ashton Cutcher's anti trafficking tools Spotlight
to text spaces in images and video. There was a
(30:52):
very very long, messy battle to pressure Amazon to stop
selling this technology that is used by Thorn to lawn enforcement.
I'll give you like a little like quick and dirty
history of what happened there. So that is because Amazon's
recognition is janki as fuck, especially when it comes to
marginalized people. Two researchers, doctors Joy Boloweni and Debra Vagee,
(31:17):
published a paper demonstrating that Recognition was classifying the gender
of dark skinned women thirty one point four percentage points
less accurately than that of light skinned men. Amazon responded
not by acknowledging these results, but by attacking the credibility
of these black women researchers. Amazon published two blog posts
claiming that Raji and Bolomwini's work was misleading. In response,
(31:40):
nearly eighty AI researchers defended their work and yet again
called for Amazon to stop selling face recognition technology to
the police. In twenty twenty, after the death of George Floyd,
House and Senate Democrats introduced a police reform bill that
included a proposal to limit facial recognition in law enforcement,
marking the flow largest federal effort ever to regulate this technology.
(32:03):
So in July, after IBM was like, we're not using
this tech anymore, the ACLU of Northern California conducted its
own study and found that the system falsely matched photos
of twenty eight members of the US Congress with mugshots,
which really got Congress's attention. The false matches were disproportionately
people of color.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
So after all of this.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
Outcry, Amazon did announce a one year moratorium on partnering
with law enforcement to use recognition, with one exception for
when police are using Thorn's spotlight. So they know that
the facial recognition technology used in spotlight is not great.
It's racially biased, this has gender biased. They know all
(32:44):
of this, so they're going to stop using that technology
unless it is being used for police to combat trafficking
via spotlight.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
So this technology, if it is being used.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
Purportedly to identify people who are potentially involved in exchanging
sex for money, but it's also really janky and misidentifies
the black and brown face as women's faces, you can
see why that would be a problem, right.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
Yeah, for sure, And like, how do you justify discontinuing
the technology because it doesn't work well, but we're gonna
keep using it for this one purpose, Like it just
doesn't even begin to make sense.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
I completely agree. And remember, despite Thorn's state admission of
helping kids who are being trafficked, they have conflated children
who are trafficked with adults who engage in consensual sex work.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Now, Thorn, I need to be.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Clear, does specifically say that their focus of the organization
is helping kids who are being trafficked, not adults who
engage in sex work. And that might be true at
an organizational level, but that is not what's going on
in practice. Thorn's CEO Julia Cordua told Forbes that Spotlight
was limited to officers who investigate child sex trafficking, saying
(34:05):
law enforcement has reported that with Spotlight they have seen
over sixty percent time saving in their investigative process, and
over twenty one thousand children have been identified using this tool.
Court filings and interviews with current and former police show
that Spotlight is frequently used to identify adults, a point
on which Cordia declined to comment. And this is what
(34:26):
I think is really going on at THORN. They can
say all day long that they do not exist to
target adult consensual sex workers, but their technology just is
being used to target those adult consensual sex workers who
they say they don't want to target. And this is
not just messed up because it's wrong to surveil and
criminalize adults who consensually engage in sex work, which it is,
(34:50):
but also adult sex workers have networks of support and
advocacy where they can help detect and prevent children from
being trafficked for sex. But sex workers not be a
resource to help combat trafficking if sex work is further
surveiled and criminalized. Like time and time again, we see
that sex workers are on the front line of seeing
(35:11):
when something non consensual or something is going on with
a minor, and they're the ones who frequently work with
law enforcement to help curb that. But they're not going
to be able to do that if they are continually
being surveiled and criminalized. Not only that, laws that surveil
and criminalize sex workers also make it harder for them
to do their work safely. It shuts down resources and
(35:33):
services used to research and vet clients. And so if
your whole thing is we want to prevent people from
being trafficked for sex, don't then make it harder to
engage in sex work, because actually you are going to
make it easier for people to be harmed and trafficked
and caught up in non consensual situations. Kate Diamato, a
(35:56):
sex worker advocate at Reframe Health and Justice, a queer
and trans people of color collective focused on harm reduction
and legal reform, said that by monitoring sex workers rather
than working with them, police are making it incredibly hard
to do sex work in any way. That is remotely safe.
And even if Thorn says that they do not want
to target adults who are consensually engaging against sex work,
(36:18):
it kind of sounds like they are including those same
adults in the numbers of trafficking victims that they report
that they have saved in scare quotes from trafficking, because
just like the previous iteration of Thorn DNA, they still
are kind of misrepresenting their numbers. Ashton Kutcher gave testimony
(36:38):
before Senator John McCain and other US lawmakers where he
said that Spotlight had helped save more than six thousand
US sex trafficking victims, including two thousand miners, in the
last twelve months.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
But according to a.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Report from Reason, these numbers wildly outpace the average number
of new criminal investigations into sex trafficking open in the
US each year, or average number of victims identified by
US law enforcement. For instance, between late two thousand and
nine and late twenty fifteen, FBI agents working with state
and local police across America identified an average of just
(37:11):
one hundred and seventy five minor victims per year. According
to the Attorney Generals twenty fifteen annual Report to Congress,
an assessment of the US government's activities to combat trafficking
in persons. The report also notes that in government fiscal
year twenty fifteen, the FBI identified around six hundred and
seventy two adult and child victims of sex or labor trafficking.
(37:31):
The FBI opened eight hundred and two human trafficking investigations,
resulting in four hundred and fifty three convictions that year,
while ICE opened one thousand, thirty four sex or labor
trafficking investigations and got fifty one sex trafficking convictions. In
addition to that, uniform crime reporting data from the United
States indicate that seven hundred and forty four investigations into
(37:52):
state level sex trafficking offenses were opened in twenty fifteen,
so there is probably overlap between state and FBI investigation,
But the report says, even if we count all of
those cases separately, we're looking at a total of two thousand,
five hundred and eighty investigations into sex or labor trafficking,
seven hundred and twenty five less cases than Thorn allegedly
(38:15):
helped identify in a one year period.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Yeah, I mean, based on those disparaities you just cited,
and their history of playing fast and loose with numbers,
one kind of has to suspect that, like, maybe they're
playing fast and loose with their numbers here. Do you
suppose it helps with their fundraising?
Speaker 2 (38:34):
Oh, I can imagine that it might.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
Basically, according to this report, it looks like Thorn is
inflating the numbers of trafficking arrests that their technology has
led to, and the most likely explanation for how they're
kind of being funny with the numbers is that they
are counting adults arrested for posting ads on places like
Craigslist or Backpage or other escort sites looking to engage
(38:57):
in the exchange of sex for money in the number
of people that their technology has saved from trafficking, whether
they were actually being trafficked or not. So back to
that reason report reason rights, the majority of adult ads
on Backpage are posted by sex workers themselves and people
arrested in cops human trafficking stings based on these ads
are predominantly sex workers and or people looking to pay
(39:18):
other adults for sex. Police might be looking for trafficking
victims when they contact ads featuring young looking women or
certain supposed code words, but when their hunches don't pan out,
and this is most of the time, they arrest the target.
Considering the data we do have on state and federal
human trafficking cases, the only way the numbers from Ashton
Kutcher's group could make sense is if a they're counting
(39:41):
every red flag ad Spotlight identifies, regardless of whether these
tips are ultimately deemed worthwhild enough to prompt a criminal investigation,
or B they're counting cases of consensual sex work between
adults and lumping all adult sex workers identified into adult
trafficking victim number, and in some way they are doing
(40:04):
something with their numbers. Either a anytime a law enforcement
looks into one of these ads, they're counting that as
somebody who has been saved from trafficking, or they are
just lumping in consensual adult sex workers as adult trafficking victims.
Either way, it's not great, and the fact that we
(40:24):
can't answer this question, the fact that these numbers don't
really make sense, and like they have not provided an
explanation as to how they've gotten these numbers and why
they're repeating them publicly, is a problem, and I want
to be very very clear that I am not saying
that thorn does not do any good. That is far
from what I am saying. I hope that nobody takes
that away. But what I am saying is that I
(40:46):
think that we need to push back against this dynamic
that says that all anti trafficking work is just by
nature above reproach, because trafficking and misrepresentations around trafficking has
been used to advocate for all kinds of harmful legislation
and surveillance that does not actually curb trafficking. That's because
these campaigns are often about curbing sex work, not trafficking.
(41:10):
After SESTA FOSTA was passed, trafficking actually increased.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
An in depth.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
Legal analysis of SESTA FOSTA and its impact published in
the Columbia Human Rights Law Review concluded that the law
has had a chilling effect on free speech, has created
dangerous working conditions for sex workers, and has actually made
it more difficult for police to find trafficked individuals.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
But when you say, like, oh.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
I'm doing an organization that's going to combat trafficking, people listen,
People open their checkbooks, people fund you, because everybody is
against trafficking. But if you were to say, oh, my
organization is about eradicating sex work through surveilling and criminalizing
people who engage in it, it would probably be a
lot less effective, and people like Ashton Kutcher continue to
(41:57):
be the people who are funding and profiting from tech futures.
So maybe it starts with surveilling and criminalizing sex workers,
but it certainly does not stop there. Here's Ashton Kutcher
on a recent episode of the podcast Hot Ones. If
he sounds a little funky, it's because he's eating a
hot wing, because like that's the point of the podcast.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Like, I have an app in my phone in my
pocket right now.
Speaker 4 (42:19):
It's like a big app.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
It's a facial recognition app.
Speaker 4 (42:22):
I can hold it up to anybody's face here and
like find exactly who you are, what Internet accounts are on,
what they look like.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
That's terrifying.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
So this whole conversation provides what I think is a
pretty good blueprint for how internet legislation can ostensibly be
about combating a very narrow, kind of reasonable sounding kind
of harm, particularly a harm against kids, but then that
definition is expanded such that more and more things are included,
(42:53):
the same way that when we talk about legislation like
the Kids Online Safety Act, where the legislation says that
it's about protecting kids from harmful one content, but then
the definition of that harmful online content is just expanded
to include all different kinds of content, both for miners
and adults. And so I say all of this to
say that when you hear that somebody is trying to
(43:16):
combat harm of kids on the internet, it should not
just be a sign of like, oh, that's a good person,
like we don't need to look at what that actually involves.
It should actually be the opposite. We should actually look
deeper into their actual framework, how they're actually.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Thinking about this.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
Is it punitive, is it surveillance base, Is it based
around further criminalizing people who are already surveiled and criminalized
and marginalized. So if you're listening to this and you're
wondering what exactly is the big deal? So what if
they inflate their numbers? Here's why this matters. Inflating the
danger around sex trafficking not only lends credibility to specific
(43:53):
harmful legislation, legislation like cesta fasta that can actually make
trafficking worse, but it all also makes it seem like
sex trafficking is more likely to be a situation where
a white child is like snatched off the street by
a stranger and forced into the sex trade. Now, this
is obviously a very sympathetic narrative and one that is
(44:15):
very easy to throw money and legislation at. But if
trafficking and sex crimes begin and end with strangers snatching
kids off the street and forcing them into the sex trade,
you are going to be trained that that is the
real threat, when in reality it's not. It is much
more likely that the threat is someone the victim knows,
or that they are groomed or coerced into being trafficked.
(44:39):
But if trafficking is your end all, be all for
sex crimes, you are going to be a lot less
likely to see your buddy who has always been really
nice to you, who seems like a really good guy
and always shakes hands with firefighters after nine to eleven
as a threat, because in your mind, the real threat
is strangers. So when we inflate the numbers around trafficking
(45:01):
and use that to justify all kinds of harmful practices
and laws, we are not actually keeping ourselves safe. And
so yeah, I think as people are talking about Ashton
Kutcher and why he would risk his reputation and his
work in the space to defend Danny Masterson from his
(45:22):
two forcible rape convictions. I hope this is a helpful
explanation as to why he might do that. And also
I hope this is a good invitation for folks to
listen to marginalize people when they speak up about what
they're experiencing online, because pretty much everything that I just
said I got from sex workers. Sex workers have not
been quiet about this. They have been speaking up about
(45:43):
harmful legislation on the Internet for a very long time,
and I think we really got to listen to them.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
And that's it. That's all I got.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
I learned a lot here. I had no idea Ashton
Kutcher was doing any of this. What a weird story.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
Yeah, I mean, let me just like before I let
you go.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
So, I just want to look up all the different
tech companies that he is investing in, because he was
an investor at Uber. He was tweeting about how like
it's good for tech companies like Uber, presumably tech companies
that he invests in. It's good when when they track
down dirt on journalists who are reporting on on those companies,
(46:22):
and then later he was like, oh no, no, no, no,
I was just speaking as myself. I wasn't speaking as
like an uber investor. I was just that's just my opinion.
Speaker 3 (46:32):
There's like a real paternalistic through thread of I'm going
to start this charity named after myself to protect girls
from trafficking, and also I'm going to make a lot
of money through investing in surveillance software. It's probably not
(46:56):
a coincidence that both of those things are happening here.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
Oh yeah, I And that's sort of like one of
the reasons that it was important to me to talk
about this is that Ashton Cutcher is propping up, profiting
from and funding a vast surveillance network and then like
going on podcasts and like going on hot ones and
like making it seem like it's cool and funny, and
(47:21):
I just I hate the idea that he has so
effectively been able to brand himself as like a smart
tech guy who will go on TV and sell our
own harm back to us in a way that looks
cool and like, oh my god, he really like, you know,
he's he's really like doing something interesting. People thought he
was a dumb stoner, but actually he's making millions off
(47:43):
of me. I mean, just a few months ago, Ashton
Kutcher launched a two hundred and forty million dollar AI
investment fund. And so somebody who goes on hot ones
and giggles and key keys about this like pretty creepy,
scary surveillance. I don't know that this is somebody that
I would trust with architecting something like AI. Like it
(48:06):
just is, it's it's concerning to me, Ashton Kutcher, what are.
Speaker 3 (48:10):
You doing, dude? Where's my privacy?
Speaker 2 (48:14):
That is a great place to end. Mike, thank you
so much for being.
Speaker 3 (48:17):
Here, Thank you for having me, Bridget, and thanks for
this deep background about Ashton Kutcher and surveillance capitalism.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
To save the Kids, got a story about an interesting
thing in tech. I just want to say Hi. You
can reach us at Hello at tengody dot com. You
can also find transcripts for today's episode at tengody dot com.
There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by
Me Bridget Toad. It's a production of iHeartRadio, an unbossed creative.
Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tarry Harrison is our
(48:50):
producer and sound engineer. Michael Almato is our contributing producer.
I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help
us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts a
podcast from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
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