13yr old groomed publicly on Twitter and kidnapped, despite chances to stop it

&gt; In tweets reviewed by NBC News, the accused adult identified as a “map” — a common online abbreviation for “minor-attracted person.”<p>I&#x27;m both amused and horrified at how open people are about this stuff.<p>No longer do we have to divine intent from lists of ambiguous red flags, they&#x27;ll just outright broadcast their proclivities without fear of consequence. I also love the &quot;I&#x27;m mentally 13&quot; nonsense from people old enough to know better.<p>There was a bone-chilling moment when my (very young) kids were playing with toys together and when asked what they were doing, they responded with &quot;role-playing.&quot;<p>I keep seeing reports that online enticement cases sharply increased thanks to COVID. Can&#x27;t say I&#x27;m surprised. Somewhere along the way, [something] got kids to normalize the very verbiage the groomers use to steer online conversations in sexual directions. They <i>can&#x27;t</i> see it coming.<p>I don&#x27;t even try to teach mine to look for warning signs anymore and just tell them to assume everyone on the internet is Philip Garrido escaped from prison.

I was going to write a long response to this, but I&#x27;ll summarize it. This is not twitters problem and whether twitter has 10 or 10 million employees, their only responsibility is to respond to legal requests from law enforcement. NBC news and the parents are shifting blame to the wrong entity.

For all the blame put on Twitter, the parents are the key point of failure here. They clearly have not taught their child any semblance of safety if he&#x27;s conversing with an open and self proclaimed predator. And why you&#x27;d give your vulnerable kids totally unsupervised access is beyond me.

Our neighbor’s son is being groomed like this. He’s about twelve and thinks he has an older boyfriend. It’s a person on Discord who buys him gifts and talks about meeting. His parents give consequences slowly and gradually and don’t confront him because either they’re too afraid of misunderstanding, or of being cut off. Plus, they’re overworked and stressed.<p>The odds are low that it will go as far as in the article, thankfully. But children with certain aptitudes and personalities are hard to protect.<p>(I shouldn’t need to clarify this, but we’ve done everything we can for this kid.)