Our recent freedom work in Thailand shows how social media can often be a double-edged sword — a tool for exploiting people and ultimately bringing that exploitation to an end.
Our investigators discovered a teenager being advertised for sexual services on X (formerly Twitter). Just 17 years old, her young age was touted as a selling point.
Working closely with law enforcement, our team went to work. They used those tweets as the starting place to build a comprehensive digital case that proved this teenager was being trafficked. This allowed police to take action, to remove her from the trafficking situation, and to arrest the adult who had been advertising her online.
Around the same time, some of our investigative team deployed to an area where police had long suspected the selling minors were sold for sex. They found two teenage girls working on the premises.
But they had to confirm that they were teenagers before law enforcement could act. Yet again, including social media as part of their strategy, investigators used expert tactics to gather evidence proving that these girls they’d met were only 14 and 17 years old. Police were able to recover the girls and arrest the perpetrator.
All of these girls are in government care, being kept safe while they heal. Their stories prove that when it comes to sex trafficking, social media can both harm and help. Traffickers can use it — but so can we. And in these and many other cases, our use of these platforms led to freedom.
Thank you for being a part of empowering our experts to keep finding teenage girls and bringing justice to their abusers!
