UK to work with allies and social media to tackle people smuggling adverts
The UK has pledged further action with allies and social media platforms to tackle people smuggling adverts online as part of efforts to cut small boat crossings and other illegal migration services.
A new agreement made at the UK's Organised Immigration Crime Summit on Tuesday will see the UK, US, Albania, Sweden, Tunisia and Vietnam take more collective action to target criminal gangs advertising illegal migration online, and share more data on the issue.
The agreement will also see governments work with social media companies – including Meta, TikTok and X, who were present at the summit – to design out methods being used by criminal gangs to advertise and glorify their people smuggling activities online.
The Home Office said 18,000 social media accounts used to sell spaces on small boats have been taken down by the National Crime Agency (NCA) since last July – 10,000 more than the previous year – but that further action is still needed.
As part of the new collective action agreement, governments will work with online platforms to help improve detection and moderation tools for identifying content linked to people smuggling.
Border Security Commander Martin Hewitt said: 'Criminal gangs are exploiting online platforms to prey on vulnerable people, luring them into dangerous and illegal journeys that undermine our border security.
'This international agreement is a vital step in shutting down their online operations and dismantling their networks across the world.
'These organised crime groups operate across borders, which is why the UK has united with five nations to take decisive action – strengthening intelligence-sharing and taking away platforms that these criminals depend on for their business.
'Under the Government's Plan for Change, we will continue working with global partners to dismantle smuggling networks, bring perpetrators to justice, and protect vulnerable people from falling into their hands.'
The summit has also seen nations agree to increased intelligence-sharing, including between law enforcement agencies, while the UK is to lead work on investigating how criminal gangs are using online spaces.
Graeme Biggar, director-general of the NCA, said: 'Yesterday we saw law enforcement from over 40 nations come together in a shared endeavour to stop these criminal gangs.
'We have explored challenges, sought solutions, and reinforced our shared commitment to tackling the threat and harm caused by people smuggling.
'International intelligence-sharing and co-operation is absolutely crucial to track criminal activity across borders, allowing us to put a stop to these dangerous criminals, and this summit has ensured that we can build on our work to put a stop to these gangs, protect our borders and save lives.'
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Everybody knows that young women are not safe. They are not safe in the street, where 86% of those aged 18 to 24 have experienced sexual harassment. They are not safe at school, where 79% of young people told Ofsted that sexual assault was common in their friendship groups and almost a third of 16- to 18-year-old girls report experiencing 'unwanted sexual touching'. They are not safe in swimming pools or parks, or at the beach. They are not even safe online, with the children's safety charity the NSPCC reporting that social media sites are 'failing to protect girls from harm at every stage'. This will come as no surprise to any woman who has ever used social media. But it is particularly relevant as Meta, the operator of some of the biggest social platforms on the internet, is busily engaged in constructing a whole new world. The company is pumping billions of dollars a year into building its metaverse, a virtual world that it hopes will become the future not just of socialising, but of education, business, shopping and live events. This raises a simple question: if Meta has utterly failed to keep women and girls safe in its existing online spaces, why should we trust it with the future? Mark Zuckerberg has grandly promised: 'In the metaverse, you'll be able to do almost anything you can imagine.' It's the sort of promise that might sound intensely appealing to some men and terrifying to most women. Indeed, the deeply immersive nature of the metaverse will make the harassment and abuse so many of us endure daily in text-based form on social media feel 100 times more real and will simultaneously make moderation 100 times more difficult. The result is a perfect storm. And I am speaking from experience, not idly speculating: I spent days in the metaverse researching my book, The New Age of Sexism. Less than two hours after I first entered the metaverse, I saw a woman's avatar being sexually assaulted There is no single definition of the metaverse, but most people use the term to describe a shared world in which virtual and augmented technologies allow users (represented by avatars) to interact with people, objects and environments. Most of Meta's virtual world is accessible only to those who pay for the company's Quest headsets, but a limited number of metaverse spaces can be accessed by any device connected to the internet. Advanced technology such as 3D positional audio, hand tracking and haptic feedback (when controllers use various vibrations to coincide with actions you take) combine to make virtual worlds feel real. Your avatar moves, speaks and gestures when you do, allowing users to interact verbally and physically. Less than two hours after I first entered the metaverse, I saw a woman's avatar being sexually assaulted. When I approached her to ask her about the experience, she confirmed: 'He came up to me and grabbed my ass.' 'Does that happen a lot?' I asked. 'All the time,' she replied, wearily. I used my haptic controller to 'pick up' a bright-yellow marker and moved towards a giant blackboard. 'HAVE YOU BEEN ASSAULTED IN THE METAVERSE?' I wrote. The response was near instantaneous. 'Yeah, many times,' someone shouted. 'I think everybody's been assaulted in the damn metaverse,' one woman replied immediately, in a US accent. 'Unfortunately, it is too common,' a British woman added, nodding. Both women told me they had been assaulted multiple times. During my time in the metaverse, sexual harassment and unwanted sexual comments were almost constant. I heard one player shout: 'I'm dragging my balls all over your mother's face,' to another and witnessed male players making claims about 'beating off', as well as comments about 'gang bangs'. My virtual breasts were commented on repeatedly. I did not witness any action taken in response – whether by a moderator or by another player. A damning TechCrunch report from 2022 found that human moderators were available only in the main plaza of Meta's metaverse game Horizon Worlds – and that they seemed more engaged in giving information on how to take a selfie than moderating user behaviour. The NSPCC said, where the means of communication was known, 47% of online grooming offences were on Meta products More worryingly still, I visited worlds where I saw what appeared to be young children frequently experiencing attention from adult men they did not know. In one virtual karaoke-style club, the bodies of the singers on stage were those of young women in their early 20s. But based on their voices, I would estimate that many of the girls behind the avatars were perhaps nine or 10 years old. Conversely, the voices of the men commenting on them from the audience, shouting out to them and following them offstage were often unmistakably those of adults. It is particularly incumbent on Meta to solve this problem. Of course, there are other companies, from Roblox to Microsoft, building user-generated virtual-reality gaming platforms and virtual co-working spaces. But, according to NSPCC research, while 150 apps, games and websites were used to groom children online between 2017 and 2023, where the means of communication was known, 47% of online grooming offences took place on products owned by Meta. These are not isolated incidents or cherry-picked horror stories. Research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that users were exposed to abusive behaviour every seven minutes in the metaverse. During 11 and a half hours recording user behaviour, the report identified 100 potential violations of Meta's policies. This included graphic sexual content, bullying, abuse, grooming and threats of violence. In a separate report, the CCDH found repeated instances of children being subjected to sexually explicit abuse and harassment, including an adult asking a young user: 'Do you have a cock in your mouth?' and another adult shouting: 'I don't want to cum on you,' to a group of underage girls who explicitly told him they were minors. Since its inception, Meta's virtual world has been plagued with reports of abuse. Users have reported being virtually groped, assaulted and raped. Researchers have also described being virtually stalked in the metaverse by other players, who tail them insistently, refuse to leave them alone and even follow them into different rooms or worlds. In December 2021, a beta tester of the metaverse wrote in the official Facebook group of the Horizon platform: 'Not only was I groped last night, but there were other people there who supported this behaviour.' What was even more revealing than the virtual assault itself was Meta's response. Vivek Sharma, then vice-president of Horizon at Meta, responded to the incident by telling the Verge it was 'absolutely unfortunate'. After Meta reviewed the incident, he claimed, it determined that the beta tester didn't use the safety features built into Horizon Worlds, including the ability to block someone from interacting with you. 'That's good feedback still for us because I want to make [the blocking feature] trivially easy and findable,' he continued. This response was revealing. First, the euphemistic description of the event as 'unfortunate', which made it sound on a par with poor sound quality. Second, the immediate shifting of the blame and responsibility on to the person who experienced the abuse – 'she should have been using certain tools to prevent it' – rather than an acknowledgment that it should have been prevented from happening in the first place. And, finally, most importantly, the description of a woman being abused online as 'good feedback'. Much subsequent discourse has focused on the question of whether or not a sexual assault or rape carried out in virtual reality should be described as such; whether it might have an impact on the victims similar to a real‑life assault. But this misses the point. First, it is worth noting that the experience of being sexually harassed, assaulted or raped in the metaverse has had a profound and distressing impact on many victims. When it was revealed in 2024 that British police were investigating the virtual gang-rape of a girl below the age of 16 in the metaverse, a senior officer familiar with the case told the media: 'This child experienced psychological trauma similar to that of someone who has been physically raped'. We can't let tech companies off the hook because they claim the problem is too big or too unwieldy to tackle Second, technology to make the metaverse feel physically real is developing at pace. You can already buy full-body suits that promise to 'enhance your VR experience with elaborate haptic sensations'. They have sleeves, gloves and vests with dozens of different feedback points. Wearable haptic technology will bring the experience of being virtually assaulted much closer to the physical sensation of real-life victimisation. All the more reason to tackle it now, regardless of how 'realistic' it is or isn't, rather than waiting for things to get worse. But most importantly, regardless of how similar to or different from physical offline harms these forms of abuse are, what matters is that they are abusive, distressing, intimidating, degrading and offensive and that they negatively affect victims. And, as we have already seen with social media, the proliferation of such abuse will prevent women and girls from being able to fully use and benefit from new forms of technology. If Zuckerberg's vision comes to fruition and the boardrooms, classrooms, operating theatres, lecture halls and meeting spaces of tomorrow exist in virtual reality, then closing those spaces off from women, girls and other marginalised groups, because of the tolerance of various forms of prejudice and abuse in the metaverse, will be devastating. If we allow this now, when the metaverse is (relatively speaking) in its infancy, we are baking inequality into the building blocks of this new world. At the time of the aforementioned virtual-reality rape of an underage girl, Meta said in a statement: 'The kind of behaviour described has no place on our platform, which is why for all users we have an automatic protection called personal boundary, which keeps people you don't know a few feet away from you.' In another incident, when a researcher experienced a virtual assault, Meta's comment to the press was: 'We want everyone using our services to have a good experience and easily find the tools that can help prevent situations like these and so we can investigate and take action.' The focus always seems to be on users finding and switching on tools to prevent harassment or reporting abuse when it does happen. It is not on preventing abuse and taking serious action against abusers. But in the CCDH research that identified 100 potential violations of Meta's VR policies, just 51 of the incidents could be reported to Meta using a web form created by the platform for this purpose, because the platform refuses to examine policy violations if it cannot match them to a predefined category or username in its database. Worse, not one of those 51 reports of policy violation (including sexual harassment and grooming of minors) was acknowledged by Meta and as a result no action was taken. It's not much good pointing to your complaints system as the solution to abuse if you don't respond to complaints. Meta's safety features will no doubt continue to evolve and adapt – but, once again, in a repeat of what we have already seen happen on social media, women and girls will be the canaries in the coalmines, their abuse and suffering providing companies with useful data points with which to tweak their products and increase their profits. Teenage girls' trauma: a convenient building material. There is something incredibly depressing about all this. If we are really talking about reinventing the world here, couldn't we push the boat out a little? Couldn't we dare to dream of a virtual world in which those who so often face abuse are safe by design – with the prevention and eradication of abuse built in – instead of being tasked with the responsibility of protecting themselves when the abuse inevitably arises? None of this is whining or asking too much. 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#PreparedNotScared: How Black women are changing the prepper narrative
Shortly after the November election, Zani Sunshine filmed a TikTok video for her more than 400,000 followers about 'what you need to do in order to be prepared for the madness.' With her long blonde braids tumbling over a simple gray zip-front pullover, Sunshine then outlined the fundamentals of what is widely known as 'prepping,' or the work of proactively preparing for disaster, whether natural or manmade. In her post-election video, the veteran off-grid prepper emphasizes the need to gather shelf-stable food, store water, have a first aid kit and a trauma kit, take firearm lessons and prepare for an emergency exit, which requires a go-bag for each family member with enough personal supplies to last them 48 to 72 hours. As of today, the nearly 2-minute video has been viewed 1.6 million times. 'The current political climate is definitely bringing people to my account,' said Sunshine, who often appears on her social channel in colorful, comfortable clothing. 'People are really scared and my predominant demographic is Black women because Black women are like, 'OK — what can I do to prepare my family? To think ahead?'' A Black woman who lives off the grid with her husband and youngest child surrounded by greenery and birds in rural New Mexico, Sunshine may not fit the stereotype of a survivalist or prepper. Her easy, calm demeanor exudes through her popular videos in which she makes jokes with her husband or gathers eggs from her chickens. A self-described introvert, she playfully parodies TikTok trends as she shares preparedness advice and promotes her books, which focus on risk assessment, self-sufficiency and self-reliance. A quick search for 'prepping' on social media will turn up countless accounts detailing plans like those Sunshine discusses in her post-election video. The majority of these accounts are run by White men, often with military-adjacent aesthetics: Men with sweeping beards dressed in camo model their tactical gear in their doomsday bunkers. But there are more and more people who do not fit that mold. Beyond those first search results are a small — but growing — community made up of people who look very much like Sunshine: Black women who are gaining social media prominence by influencing on preparedness, especially for an audience of other Black women. And given the current political climate, this audience has never been bigger or more invested. In the r/preppers community on Reddit, the conversation is largely dominated by worry over whether President Donald Trump's tariffs — amid the chaos of international talks and court rulings — will cause shortages of everything from toilet paper and toothpaste to basic food items. On this platform, people who have never prepped before describe loading up their SUVs at Costco, trying to anticipate what they most need in imagining a world with empty shelves. But for women like Sunshine, thinking about being prepared happened long before Trump took office for a second time — even if his reelection has also meant a marked increase in interest in her content. For the Black women who have been involved in prepping since before November 5, 2024, nothing about this moment feels surprising — it's literally what they have been preparing for. Sunshine is from Atlanta originally, and began making moves into prepping in the lead-up to the 2016 election between now-President Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Feeling 'that something was going to happen in society and that we weren't going to be prepared,' she started doing the kinds of things she now advises her followers to do — buying an extra bag of rice when they go to the grocery store, picking up an extra flat of bottled water. Five years later when COVID-19 hit, she felt compelled to make even bigger changes. She and her husband bought a travel trailer and with their youngest son, then 8, drove from Atlanta to New Mexico — where her husband is from — and bought land where they constructed a homestead. They now have their own septic system, a large solar system, a bigger, two-bedroom, full bathroom travel trailer, an additional guest trailer for visitors and a chicken coop. Sharon Ross is another Black woman — and seasoned survivalist — who was thinking about preparedness well before Trump took office. Online, she is known as the Afrovivalist, a persona she often deploys as part of her preparedness consulting business. Ross said that through her work, she is hearing from a lot of people of all races, ethnicities and ages who are reaching out for preparedness information. 'White people saying, 'I didn't know this was going to happen. I shouldn't have voted for that president,' she said of many of these calls from those newly concerned about shortages. For Ross, the wake-up call was Hurricane Katrina: She was living in Portland, Oregon, at the time and found herself glued to the news as the storm decimated New Orleans, and in particular the Lower Ninth Ward, a predominantly Black neighborhood. She watched as survivors — including many Black women — said they regretted not preparing and not thinking that anything was actually going to happen. She decided she needed to start preparing — stockpiling rice and beans and building up her supplies — for whatever might happen next. 'It opened up my eyes to the fact that I wasn't ready for something like that.' Preparing for the next disaster — of any kind — feels even more imperative today, according to Ross. She remembers after the 2016 election when Trump's 'followers were so proud. You can obviously tell who was racist and who wasn't. People started coming out of the woodwork,' she said, as she heard more and more racist slurs. It was what first inspired her to get firearms training. And like Sunshine, the pandemic also changed everything for Ross. As a member of the state of Oregon's radiological emergency response team, Ross was required by her job to take the new Covid vaccine. She wasn't comfortable doing so. 'I woke up on my 57th birthday, prayed about it, and said, 'I'm leaving my job.'' She bought land in rural Washington state and started establishing a homestead. Today, she has 66 acres of land, a chandelier hanging in one of her cabins — she has built several herself, in addition to a pantry and prep house — on her property. Her grandchildren are going to spend time on the land this summer, she said, to start to learn how to homestead themselves. In her online life today, Sunshine sees the kind of fear she sensed during the pandemic. 'With this new administration, people are even more scared and they actually ready to start getting prepared now, especially urban people, Black people, people of color — because traditionally, preppers have been White, you know, and other communities weren't even really thinking about it. But now everything has changed and people are really, really deciding to do something about it.' Sunshine said that on social media, she hears from a lot of people — namely Black women — who say how inspiring she is to them, women who reach out and share that because of her, they also bought land or developed a food storage system — and feel more secure and empowered for it. With her message that prepping is for everyone — that it can be accessible, doable, and not scary — she's built a loyal and diverse audience who eagerly look to her for advice and guidance. They tell her that compared to other prepping accounts they encounter, hers helps them feel more calm and secure instead of scared. It's a different perspective than that of White preppers, Ross said. 'We as people of color have went through the struggle, we knew, we saw it was coming, we believed every word that that person said about what he was going to do, but everybody else was too mixed up with the whole, 'I don't want a Black woman telling me what to do.'' Sunshine said that since Trump's reelection, she is encountering more racist comments on her social media channels, too. 'People feel more emboldened,' she said. The kind of racism and 'nasty comments' she encounters online are part of the very dynamic that she thinks is bringing even more Black women into prepping. 'It's just a different climate overall and people don't feel safe…The unknowns have increased. The potential for everything going off the rails has increased.' 'As a Black woman, I am vulnerable,' Ross said of the climate today, especially in the predominantly all White rural community in which she lives. 'If this continues, I feel like we're going to be hunted in the future — you know, back to slavery days.' It's part of why Sunshine said she wants more Black women to be knowledgeable about prepping — and realize it is for them, the same as she wants it to be for everyone, too. 'It provides a level of security. It decreases stress when you're worried about everything that's going on in the world, when you know that if everything were to go crazy outside your doors, that you can hunker down in your home for an extended period of time and have everything that you need,' Sunshine said. 'So it's not about being scared. There's this hashtag I use for my business #preparednotscared — it's all about decreasing the fear.' The post #PreparedNotScared: How Black women are changing the prepper narrative appeared first on The 19th. News that represents you, in your inbox every weekday. Subscribe to our free, daily newsletter.
