This blog frequently mocks news organizations that write about threats from technology without any actual victims - TIME famously writing about how social media would lead to burglary before any actually occurred.
Today, Nicole Perlroth of The New York Times wrote about how flirting application Skout actually did enable three adults to entrap and rape three teenage girls and we are highlighting the story as an example of responsible journalism about a sensational topic.
Note to reporters: if you can't write this paragraph - skip the story.
But in each rape case, the men are accused of posing as teenagers in a Skout forum for 13- to 17-year-olds. In one case, a 15-year-old Ohio girl said she had been raped by a 37-year-old man. In the second, a 24-year-old man has been accused of raping a 12-year-old girl in Escondido, Calif. In the third, a 21-year-old man from Waukesha, Wis., is facing charges that he sexually assaulted a 13-year-old boy.
From a public relations perspective, the story is also interesting from the way the company's executives responded to the horrible revelation about how their service is being abused. The forceful response and genuine anguish captured in the quotes are much more effective at making the sure the actual criminals remain the focus rather than the software engineers who enabled them.
Mr. Wiklund said he had learned of all three cases through local news outlets and contacted the law enforcement officials to aid in their investigations. He said the company suspended the app for teenagers on Tuesday and banned all their devices, which were registered with the app using unique device numbers. It said it was working with a task force of experts to scrutinize company practices and improve age verification.
“I thought we were doing a lot, but obviously we have to do better,” Mr. Weiss said by phone on Tuesday. “This is a five-alarm fire. The entire company is re-evaluating everything it’s doing.”
This story is a remarkably fair, measured look at a genuine problem.
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