But don’t just take my word for it. Here are excerpts from three different media investigations into the child pornography scandal on Facebook alone.
Said the Sydney Morning Herald on December 14th 2010:
Paedophiles are brazenly sharing child pornography pictures and videos on Facebook, and internet safety experts believe the social networking site has failed to curtail the practice.
In an investigation, this website established that there are countless profiles and groups created by paedophiles – sometimes using their real names – who publish child pornography images and videos on the site.
And:
Facebook, which has to police more than 500 million users, cannot keep up with the child pornography trade on its site. Whenever its security team deletes a profile or removes images, they reappear almost instantly.
An October 2010 investigation into the subject by Fox News found that:
Facebook is failing to prevent child predators from posting suggestive and potentially illegal photographs of children on its website, a weeks-long investigation by FoxNews.com reveals, despite its claim that it's doing all it can to keep pedophile materials from being displayed.
Yet a five part report published in May 2012 by the WorldNetDaily (WND.com), an American news and opinion journal, showed that nothing had changed on the social network over 18 months later:
She’s a tiny brunette with brown eyes, barely 10, and she’s naked – posing for the man who raped her and traded her photo like currency with thousands of insatiable predators on Facebook.
The girl doesn’t smile, because she knows what comes next. Her abuser will share photos and earn bragging rights from thousands of others just like him who will exchange their own titillating snapshots – often images uploaded from cell phones – of boys and girls they molest.
And:
Another profile reveals a small boy, about 8, who looks much like a neighborhood Little League champion or Cub Scout. He’s been forced to undress on a bed and hold his ankles behind his head as his captor photographs his exposed genitals and anus.
One more boy, about 12, is lying face down on a bed as an adult male penetrates him. The photo is a mobile upload – likely taken by a third person in the room who observed the child’s rape and posted the image to Facebook with a cell phone.
On other pages, child-porn deviants share a photo of two naked girls who are kissing and fondling one another outdoors. Yet another boy, who appears to be about 4, is receiving oral sex from a child roughly two years his senior.
Other children just like them are shown sodomizing one another – or being raped by adult men or women – in photos and video links of the abuse posted on Facebook. Entire albums of exploited boys and girls are visible to the public and shared with the click of a mouse.
On the Facebook user page called ‘Kidsex Young,’ one man asks others, ‘Care to trade vids?’ Another posts a video of a naked man fondling a baby on a bed.
Does everyone who bought shares in this company know exactly what daily is taking place in its online realm? I doubt it as the screams of abused children are, it would seem, somewhat muffled under the weight of $100 billion worth of stock.
I can’t take that this is happening. It put me mad then knowing about it and it still puts me mad. I can’t accept that this is going on and that there is nothing which can be done about it. I am haunted still by those images that I saw, and I am haunted by the knowledge of what is taking place. You can’t gaze into that world and then just go away and forget about it.
After becoming aware then of the scale of the problem on Facebook I contacted first an American media personality, and, later then, ITN, the major British television news producers, to ask if they would expose this story through their media. While both were at the beginning extremely interested in doing so, unfortunately in the end neither story happened (for reasons unknown to myself), but they did put me in touch with two anti-paedophile police officers, one from the United States and the other from Britain, to whom I could make reports to about what I and the other members of the group were finding. And so I became as familiar with the paedophiles of Facebook and their world as I had been with that of the memorial page trolls. Like those trolls, paedophiles have developed their own gruesome little universe complete with special vocabulary. Probably the most commonly used term among them is ‘PTHC,’ an acronym for ‘Pre-teen hardcore;’ or to put it another way, pictures and videos of prepubescent children being sexually molested. Most of the paedophiles I observed on Facebook had listed PTHC as an interest of theirs on their profiles. This lets other paedophiles who view these profiles know that they are interested in swapping or buying such material. While the ‘PTHC’ material itself is usually posted in specially made groups with names like ‘girls and boys 5 to 9’ and into which the paedophiles will invite other sickos, sometimes they will just use Facebook to advertise themselves as someone who is willing to swap or buy child pornography. From January 2011 a posting from one ‘Kyle Childs’ on a group called ‘My Secret Photos’: ‘i want to trade pics to plz. girls.guys no limits. pthcluver***@******.com.’ As with the RIP trolls, getting banned by Facebook is a career hazard, but again as with the trolls once one group or profile is ‘nuked,’ it is reincarnated again in only a very short matter of time.
Another frequently used code word among them is ‘Lolita,’ which they will publicly list on their profiles as a favourite book, although as you might imagine it is not out of any love of literature but only to mark themselves out as having an interest in underage girls. Sometimes the word is shortened to ‘Loli’ (or, less frequently, ‘Lola’), with ‘Lolicon’ being the Westernised name of a form of Japanese ‘erotic’ anime art featuring little girls, something that is quite popular among the paedophiles of the Internet, along with its even more disturbing, and less subtly named, variant of ‘toddlercon.’ ‘Incest’ is another widely used term among them, that along with the rather more discreet sounding ‘Home schooling’ denotes an appetite for child pornography material involving abuse which has been carried out by a parent or sibling.
The code word ‘R@y Gold’ is used a lot by the Internet’s paedophiles to point themselves out to others of their species as being into child pornography in general. This apparently was the online name used by probably the biggest idol to be found in the Internet’s paedophilia subculture, 66-year-old Richard Goldberg, currently serving a 20-year term at the Federal Correctional Institution, Petersburg, Virginia. He had been added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List in the June of 2002 after absconding the previous year while out on bail on charges of child molestation and the making and distribution of child pornography. Captured then in Canada in 2007, his notoriety has made him a folk hero among the members of the paedophile underworld, many of whom seemingly even knew of him from his online child porn swapping days and before his appearance on the Ten Most Wanted list. As well as using it as a code word so that other paedophiles can search them out, some of the Web’s paedos will use R@y Gold as their online handles, something that I suspect may be to distinguish them as being involved in the actual making of child sex abuse images. Goldberg is known to his fans as ‘The King of Child Porn.’ This is how far it has been allowed to get: them having their own idols and ‘kings.’ My thoughts are that it would have been good that if instead of 20 years Virginia had been able to strap this king to an electric throne and so given the paedophiles of the world a dead martyr to mourn instead of them having a living sovereign to celebrate.
‘Taking the knot’ is a euphemism for the unthinkable act of a human person being in full sexual intercourse with an animal. This takes on even more horrific connotations when used in relation to paedophilia, and I have indeed observed on some of their profiles this phrase in relation to children. One anti-paedophile activist told me of one female paedophile (oh yes, like Vanessa George they do exist) who had been promising a select number of the other paedos on her Facebook friend list that she was going to
let them watch her via cam sexually abuse her children with dogs. ‘Hussyfan’ is another code word, the meaning of which is child pornography specifically involving girls. ‘Jimmy Hussyfan’ was the handle of one particularly vile Facebook paedophile active around the beginning of the time I was reporting them to the cops. This one claimed to be abusing his very young children. ‘LS Magazine’ is often listed as an interest, and that refers to a major so-called ‘softcore’ child pornography business which operated in the Ukraine from 2001 until it was smashed by the Ukrainian police in 2004. This magazine and the colossal amount of child pornography it regularly and quite professionally produced of young girls in various naked and semi-naked poses is legend among paedophiles. Other ‘likes’ and interests that they will display on their profiles are more self-explanatory, such as ‘8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13’ or variations on such to denote what age range raises their interest; and terms which take on extremely sinister overtones when put in the context of paedophilia like ‘Playing with daddy,’ ‘Daddy’s little girl,’ ‘Spanking children,’ ‘Little girl lover,’ and ‘Little boy lover.’ Some will just dispense with the pleasantries altogether and list things like ‘Sadistic torture of children’ as an interest, something that I once seen displayed as one of their likes.
Facebook claims, and has claimed so for a long time, that many of these terms are banned on the site and that groups, pages, and profiles cannot be made using them, and that users cannot find each other by searching for them. Certainly during my time reporting on the paedos on the site the terms were to be found everywhere, even when Facebook was claiming that its filters were blocking them out. They were also still to be easily found in May 2012 when WND.com done their investigation. I don’t care to look to see if they still can be found but even if the filters have now become successful in blocking the terms from being used, things like that can always easily be gotten around anyway by substituting numbers for letters, along with other such similarly imaginative endeavours.
Talking of terms … I know that some anti-paedophile activists dislike very much the use of the term ‘child porn’ as they feel that it somewhat normalises what is a horrible crime against children by possibly putting it into the same category as forms of consenting porn. I disagree. The word ‘pornography’ in this context simply refers to material - specifically photographic or video material - that is designed to stimulate the sexual desires of its users. The word has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the people involved are consenting or not. No dictionary definition of the word will be found to say that the people depicted in pornography must be consenting, and pornography can be used to describe anything so depicted with the aim of stimulating the sexual desires. Even material things like cars can be photographed in such a way as to appear pornographic to those with a sexual interest in cars (and such people do exist). Consent has absolutely nothing to do with it. And while those who wish to refer to such material only as ‘child sex abuse images’ are totally correct in describing them as such, the term ‘child pornography’ is its own horror and perfectly describes what it refers to: that is innocent children being forced into recorded sexual acts or poses. So it is a term that I will use without apology.
Symbols are also employed by paedophiles who want to subtly distinguish themselves to others in the know. These can be worn on things like rings and necklaces, or displayed on Web profiles. A dark blue triangle drawn in a spiral shape stands for ‘Boy lover’ and is the symbol used by some predators whose interests lie mainly in boys around the age of 12 or slightly older. Its brother symbol is a more roundish spiral triangle, drawn in light blue and stands for ‘Little boy lover.’ A light pink spiral heart means ‘Girl lover,’ while a butterfly light pink on one wing and light blue on the other symbolises a sexual interest in children of both sexes. All of these symbols together can be seen in the second photographic section of this book.
‘Pedobear,’ a 4Chan meme of a teddy bear mascot who has a sexual interest in children and that apparently began its life as an attempt to mock paedophiles is something which gets put about the Internet a lot by 4Chan fans as an in-joke, but it is also something which I have witnessed real paedophiles using to mark themselves out with. Indeed, Scotland’s Daily Record once carried a photograph of convicted paedophile David Logan wearing a Pedobear t-shirt while standing beside a ‘Beware children’ sign. Any non-paedos still wanting to flash this mascot around do so at their own peril.
One Facebook paedophile in particular became in my mind Satan itself. This is Paolo Ghelardini, in his late 60s and an Italian resident in Romania. If somehow one devil could stand out among all the rest of the devils of hell as the very meaning of evil it is this one, this nightmare in a physical human form. More than all of the rest he was the one who could really chill my bones such was the utter evil manifest in him. My hair stood on end reading some of the sinister things that he wrote. This devil claimed to have been producing child pornography in Holland from as long ago as the 1970s and alleged a close friendship with Joop Wilhelmus, a notorious and thankfully now long-deceased Dutch child pornographer. According to Ghelardini his ‘regretted big friend’ was slain by a ‘bastard Catholic.’ ‘I was one of his photographers and scientist for Super8 movies!’ claimed Ghelardini. ‘My glory, my dream! This is freedom, this is civilisation!’
While on Facebook, he would call himself either ‘Paolo Constantino’ or else ‘Paolo Constantinescu,’ but he was easily linked by members of our group to his real identity as always he would use real photographs of himself as his profile pictures and would speak freely about his work as an illustrator for Italian comics (he had also worked on a children’s book about Jesus Christ).
‘She is one of my best lilmodels! Now she is 10 yo, but she began to do sex since 2 ys! She likes so much analsex and piss!’
‘[name removed] my model! She began sex at only 4 years! Now she is 17, a real slut nymphomaniac!’
Those are some of the other things he talked freely of.
Paolo Ghelardini also liked to philosophise about paedophilia:
Real life, real sex is Paganism like the ancient Greece and Rome! We are lost the original eden! I am old, you young and braveheart…go on for me too in the battle for sex freedom, in the name of God! In the name of Awakening of Love!
Another paedophile in the ring posted onto Facebook:
Ambra Angioline call my master Paolo Constantino. He likes to show you when he rapes young girls (and very little too) on the mirror…
This post was liked by one ‘Paolo Constantino.’
One of his most chilling moments was when he posted a photograph he had taken of a little girl of about nine in an orange swimsuit peddling past the front window of his house in the city of Constanta, Romania. Underneath the picture he had written: ‘Outside my window! …. ! Lonely wolf is ready to catch her … !’
Lonely wolf was himself captured by the Romanian police in the spring of 2011 and eventually that October was sentenced to 12 years of prison on child pornography charges, and was ordered to be deported back to Italy once released. True to his boasts on Facebook to own thousands of photographs and videos of children being sexually molested, the police found in his possession approximately 9,500 photos along with 1000 videos that by his own admission contained images of bestiality, sado-masochism, and necrophilia all involving children. One Romanian newspaper report says that he admitted that his favourites were videos involving babies under the age of one. It was also said by the police that during the period April to June 2010 he had himself taken pornographic images of minors which he had then distributed onto the Web. Before his arrest he had been talking on Facebook of his plans to adopt a five-year-old orphan girl. He could be getting close to 80 years of age when released from his sentence in a Romanian jail, assuming that he serves all of it. It would be nice to think though that he’d die just before completing that sentence before going on to the eternal prison.
To me and the others in the group, seeing Ghelardini arrest
ed was a top priority. Indeed I and one or two others almost begged various police agencies to get something done about him. It seems in the end, though – although this is not absolutely clear - that it was a report which Facebook itself made to the authorities which led to his eventual arrest. This may seem at first glance to be something that shows the social network in a positive light but let us look at it a little closer. The reports in the Romanian press state that Ghelardini went through 19 different Facebook accounts beginning from January 2010 until May 2011. This means that Facebook had known about his activities long, long before they ever decided to file a report to the police about him (if indeed they ever did). They had been banning his profiles, so clearly they had seen what was contained on them. (The fact that he was eventually known by the police to have went through 19 accounts on Facebook is because once they opened an investigation into him they would have been able to get Facebook to retrieve that data from its servers, not because the company itself was reporting to them every profile he ever had as soon as they discovered them).
Hackers on Steroids Page 17