I think a lot of HNers are letting their guard down for sensationalized news stories like this one because it invokes Mark Zuckerberg in the headline.

Scrolling through the claims I thought the "79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms" claim sounded odd, given what I know from a friend who worked in prosecution of sex trafficking crimes. So I clicked the link to their source, which says this:

> 79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms. In 2019, the National Society For The Prevention of Cruelty to Children found that Instagram was the leading platform for child grooming in the U.K. The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report found that 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram

The study they're quoting isn't about all sex trafficking, it's specifically about sex trafficking victims who were recruited on social media. The statistics are basically a breakdown of the popularity of social media platforms in the UK at the time the study was done.

In other words, they're lying. They're hoping you don't look at the claims too closely.

It's really sad to see so many HN comments from people calling for regulation and taking this all at face value, when just last week everyone was upset that Discord might require some accounts to present ID to remove content filters. Sensationalized reports like this are how we end up with those requirements.