A Target Sex-Trafficking Hoax Is Going Viral on TikTok

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Ej Dickson
@ejdickson
On TikTok, women are coming forward w/ stories claiming Target is a sex trafficking "hub." These videos are getting millions of views, but there's no evidence this is actually happening, and it may be doing actual trafficking survivors a huge disservice.
FILE - In this June 3, 2019, file photo a shopping cart sits in the parking lot of a Target store in Marlborough, Mass. Plenty of retailers like Target and Walmart allow shoppers to drop off online returns at their stores. But now, a growing number of retailers are accepting rivals’ returns. (AP Photo/Bill Sikes, File)
A Target Sex-Trafficking Hoax Is Going Viral on TikTok
TikTokers are claiming to have escaped being sex trafficked at Targets — but such urban legends obscure what real trafficking looks like.
rollingstone.com
1:05 PM · Apr 7, 2021

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/target-sex-trafficking-tiktok-hoax-1151665/

“OK, so I saw this TikTok that Target is the new sex trafficking hub, or very commonly known for sex trafficking, and I saw this girl posted her story so I wanted to say about mine,” Makenzie Jade says in her video. She then tells a story about being followed by a man while in the produce section of her local Target, then being circled by two additional men with nothing in their shopping carts. She called her mother and boyfriend, who contacted Target employees to ensure her safety and walk her to her car, where she says she saw one of the men she had seen in the store waiting for her.

The harrowing story, told in two parts, is hashtagged #sextraffickingawareness and #target, and has a combined 1.2 million views. In an Instagram direct message, Makenzie says she posted the video “to raise awareness to the situation.” “It is something you only see in movies,” she tells Rolling Stone. “I saw another girl post what happened to her, not thinking it would ever happen to me at my local Target.”

The “it” Makenzie is referring to is sex trafficking. Over the past week on TikTok, there have been dozens of videos, some with millions of views, in which young women from all over the country describe being followed by strange men or women in Target in what they describe as an attempted trafficking operation, though the videos don’t really clarify what that term means.

In one video, Allie Mellman, a 27-year-old woman from St. Paul, Minnesota, describes being approached by a woman in Target five years ago who asked her if she needed financial help and then gave her a man’s business card; when she looked up the name on the card, she couldn’t find a website or social media profile for the man. “At the time I thought it was really weird,” says Mellman, whose video got more than 587,000 views. But it wasn’t until she saw other videos on TikTok of women describing similar experiences that she thought it may have been linked to “trafficking.” “I was like, oh my God, that sounds exactly like what happened to me.”

*snip*

[Initech]

1. These people really need more to do!

[chia]

2. Another conspiracy genie out of the bottle, forever floating. I daydream about going full analog...

I miss those days.

[Iggo]

3. Well gosh, if it's on tik tok it must be true, right?

Fucking morons.

[underpants]

4. Abig problem here is that the Tik Tok age is the target audience

I didn’t mean any pun there. These young people are the ones targeted and should be the focus of outreach

[hlthe2b]

5. These idiots are going to get people killed--another mass shooting on the way or similar.

Not that these manipulated sociopaths even care...

[Johnny2X2X]

6. About 2 years ago I posted a couple threads here abut the Right's obsession with pedo conspiracies

They both got flagged and removed as far fetched and without proof because I predicted that the next step is for them to start accusing our candidate's or their families of having child porn on their laptops.

This is exactly what they accused Hunter Biden of. And people think of Pizzagate as something in the past, it's still an ongoing conspiracy with hundreds of thousands who believe it. The GOP is Q, they work together, this is their go to because it's so powerful. Accuse people of being part of a child sex trafficking ring and it excuses any possible actions against them. It excuses away 1/6, it excuses away death threats on elected Dems, and it will excuse away the worse actions that are surely coming.

“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire. This quote has never been more relevant than right now. They believe absurdities, they are being made to commit atrocities. Much worse is coming.

[Wingus Dingus]

7. If anyone WAS following women, it was probably loss prevention personnel.

Probably one paranoid woman had a legitimate experience of being watched at the store for shoplifiting, and now it's a mass delusion. The internet is making stupid people stupider.

[IthinkThereforeIAM]

8. I wonder if any of the, "perps", were undercover cops/store security...

... just doing their jobs? I mean, if the claims have any truth to them. And is Q branching out to TikTok now? I do not have the app nor do I plan on utilizing it, so I am making no claims. Just pointing something out.

[Tracer]

9. I was in that Marlborough store yesterday, and

oddly enough, I didn't see any strange men "circling" any women. I did see little kids hanging onto their mothers' legs. There were more store employees than shoppers.

And that empty cart? Looks like no-one bothered to put it back in the cart garage that can be seen just behind it.

[MineralMan]

10. There are empty shopping carts in most retail parking lots.

Thoughtless, selfish people load their purchases into their car, get in, and drive off without pushing the car to a collection point. ALL THE TIME! In fact, I just got back from the supermarket, where I picked up three months of medications. Someone had left a shopping cart right behind my car, so I pushed it to the cart collection area. I didn't suspect that a sex trafficker abducted someone. Just a lazy shopper who didn't give a damn. Probably a Trump voter...

That's not to say there aren't sex traffickers. There are. I doubt, though, that they are abducting people in Target or Walmart parking lots. Too many people around, really.

[nuxvomica]

11. I was very interested in urban legends years ago

I read The Vanishing Hitchhiker and it's sequels, and was intrigued because I had heard the one about the medical student upon which a practical joke was played with a cadaver's arm. The victim had gone quite mad and was found in his closet, his hair had turned completely white, and he was chewing on the arm. The whole story disturbed and depressed me so much that when I learned it was just and urban legend, the relief was like a gift.

Years later, a co-worker was upset to the point of tears over a story she had read in "Dear Abby". It seems a drunk driver had miraculously gotten home safely at 4 am after a night of heavy drinking. When he went out to his car in the morning to drive to work, his wife waved to him as the car pulled away but then she stopped and had a look of horror on her face as she saw the lifeless body of a 3-year-old girl impaled on the car's grill. Her husband had been so drunk, he had not seen the child walking along the side of the road or remembered hitting her. I explained to the co-worker how the story fit the elements of a classic urban legend and told her to question everything about the story that just didn't make sense, like why would a 3-year-old be walking alongside the road at 4 am. She was so relieved she didn't care that she was foolish to believe the story, she was just happy it wasn't true.

So I think when you hear people bothered by such things, explain to them how elements of the story are designed to cultivate basic anxieties, often about technology, corporations, foreign countries, even just strangers, and that they invariably have more than one logical error that makes the story suspect, and have a cloudy train of transmission, like "this actually happened to a second cousin of my friend's aunt's mailman", etc. It used to be that the antidote was to say "If this really happened, why was there no wide press coverage?" Sadly, there are so many people primed to distrust the mainstream media since "Liberal media" and "fake news" became slogans that it's getting tougher to straighten these things out. But you can still ask the questions about logical inconsistency, lack of evidence, attribution, and, most importantly, whether the story seems designed to evoke a reaction in them, like it's tailor made for their anxieties.