Statistics on child exploitation can be deeply misleading. Most notoriously, the commonly-cited data point that “over 100,000 children in the United States are commercially exploited each year,” which was mentioned in a 2010 congressional testimony by the then-president of NCMEC, is based on decades-old data. It relied on two studies, both collected during the 1990s, which included runaways, abandoned kids, and unhoused children. One of the studies, a Washington Post fact-check found, was compiled in a way that allowed some incidents to be counted two or three times. When challenged, the former NCMEC president Ernie Allen pointed to a third report which estimated an average of 1.7 million missing children reported each year. But his findings neglected that 99.8 percent of those kids were later recovered.
Despite its dearth of accurate data, #SaveTheChildren proved wildly popular—spurring summer-long protests across the country, many of them planned and promoted on Facebook. In recent years, the platform has become a hub for right-wing-oriented conspiracy groups—a trend documented by @FacebooksTop10, an automated Twitter account created by New York Times journalist Kevin Roose to track its most popular pages each day. “What sticks out, when you dig in to the data,” Roose wrote in an Aug. 2020 piece about the account, “is just how dominant the Facebook right truly is… The result is a kind of parallel media universe that left-of-center Facebook users may never encounter, but that has been stunningly effective in shaping its own version of reality.”
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