3/24/2024 0 Comments Chatbots online sexThe bots had about 19,000 conversations with 15,000 people. “The chatbot would sometimes add a little bit more colour to the conversation.” “There were lots of ‘Hello, where are you? What do you do? Where can I meet you?’,” he said. Beiser said that developing the chatbot was quite straightforward because the conversations were so repetitive. These would contain a mobile number to text, which would trigger a chatbot designed to pose as a sex worker. “That cut off a certain fraction of the population, but then there were the people who were still going to the websites,” said Beiser.īetween 20 the organisation also began to post fake ads apparently offering sex that would appear in response to keyword searches. During this period there was a 40-60% decline in keyword searches – a statistically significant decline when Seattle was compared with other US cities where the digital campaign had not taken place. Seattle Against Slavery won a Google ad grant, which allowed it to place free targeted adverts that would appear as sponsored links in response to common search terms such as “escort sex tonight”.īetween 20, 2.1m ads were placed that had simple deterrence messages such as “You could be arrested for buying sex online” or “By buying sex online you could be causing harm to a victim” and links to counselling services and other support groups. “In some cases, it would possibly be easier to order a sex-trafficking victim online than to order a pizza.” It was as simple as Googling it,” he said. “We found it really wasn’t a hidden dark web environment that people were using to buy trafficked sex. In Seattle, we were able to impact the marketplace pretty dramatically.”īeiser said that, while not everyone selling sex online was a trafficking victim, internet searches were targeted because survivors of trafficking had reported that transactions were typically initiated online. Robert Beiser, former executive director at Seattle Against Slavery, who is presenting the findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Seattle on Friday, said: “In a fairly short length of time we were able to reach hundreds of thousands of people who had searched for common terms.
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