Scandal of fake abduction posts
By Yang Jian |
June 24, 2011, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
MORE than 60 percent of "seeking missing children" notices posted online are fake, volunteers working to identify abducted children said yesterday.
The posts were seeking either to make money or to enhance posters' profiles on social networks, they said.
Volunteers found that money would be deducted from their phones when they rang some contact numbers left under snapshots of so-called abducted child beggars on microblogs, said Zhou Zhou, a researcher at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and one of the volunteers.
A nationwide microblog initiative launched in January asked the public to photograph child beggars and post their pictures online in a bid to reunite abducted children with their parents. Six abducted children have been rescued thanks to the online campaign.
But as more people joined the campaign, volunteers found an increasing number of fake notices appearing.
Zhou said they were finding about five fake notices every day where the snapshots were either of children who hadn't been abducted or online child stars whose photos were easy to find.
In one case, the snapshot of a "missing child" was later found to be a well-known South Korean boy whose photo featured on foreign websites, she said.
Most of the posters were aiming to increase their fame on social networks because the notices would be re-tweeted thousands of times in a day, said Yang Yi, 40, a real estate agent who is also a campaign volunteer in Shanghai.
Some other fake notices involved scams to cheat money if people dialed the numbers, Yang said.
"We suspected human traffickers might also post the wrong information online because the fake notices had greatly impacted the efficiency of volunteers," she said.
The city has about 300 volunteers, most of whom copy online information from social networks to a non-profit website called "Babies Go Home" (baobeihuijia.com) that was established in 2007 to reunite parents with their missing children.
Zhou said the volunteers now also had to collect the fake notices. They mark the snapshots as "fake," obscure the children's faces and re-post them online to warn people not to re-tweet the information or dial the numbers.
Zheng Zhangwei, an official with Weibo.com, where the online campaign was initially launched, said people should tell the website if they found fake notices.
The website would either delete the notice or deregister the posters, he said.
"It was a good campaign that has rescued many children, so we would not let online cheaters take advantage of it," Zheng said.
Blogs at Weibo.com and t.qq.com, created by Yu Jianrong, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, have gathered 220,000 followers and 4,700 photographs have been posted.
The posts were seeking either to make money or to enhance posters' profiles on social networks, they said.
Volunteers found that money would be deducted from their phones when they rang some contact numbers left under snapshots of so-called abducted child beggars on microblogs, said Zhou Zhou, a researcher at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and one of the volunteers.
A nationwide microblog initiative launched in January asked the public to photograph child beggars and post their pictures online in a bid to reunite abducted children with their parents. Six abducted children have been rescued thanks to the online campaign.
But as more people joined the campaign, volunteers found an increasing number of fake notices appearing.
Zhou said they were finding about five fake notices every day where the snapshots were either of children who hadn't been abducted or online child stars whose photos were easy to find.
In one case, the snapshot of a "missing child" was later found to be a well-known South Korean boy whose photo featured on foreign websites, she said.
Most of the posters were aiming to increase their fame on social networks because the notices would be re-tweeted thousands of times in a day, said Yang Yi, 40, a real estate agent who is also a campaign volunteer in Shanghai.
Some other fake notices involved scams to cheat money if people dialed the numbers, Yang said.
"We suspected human traffickers might also post the wrong information online because the fake notices had greatly impacted the efficiency of volunteers," she said.
The city has about 300 volunteers, most of whom copy online information from social networks to a non-profit website called "Babies Go Home" (baobeihuijia.com) that was established in 2007 to reunite parents with their missing children.
Zhou said the volunteers now also had to collect the fake notices. They mark the snapshots as "fake," obscure the children's faces and re-post them online to warn people not to re-tweet the information or dial the numbers.
Zheng Zhangwei, an official with Weibo.com, where the online campaign was initially launched, said people should tell the website if they found fake notices.
The website would either delete the notice or deregister the posters, he said.
"It was a good campaign that has rescued many children, so we would not let online cheaters take advantage of it," Zheng said.
Blogs at Weibo.com and t.qq.com, created by Yu Jianrong, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, have gathered 220,000 followers and 4,700 photographs have been posted.
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