00:09:37.400Okay, so back in 2009, when Ashton Kutcher was in a relationship with Demi Moore, they started the DNA Foundation, an anti-trafficking organization together.
00:09:48.720The name DNA Foundation is a mix of their name, Demi and Ashton Foundation.
00:09:53.740They got the idea to do this work after Demi Moore reportedly was watching a documentary about sex slavery in Cambodia on MSNBC and wanted to start an organization that combated that kind of stuff in the United States, too.
00:10:05.460Folks listening might recall Ashton's Real Men Don't Buy Girls campaign.
00:10:27.160Like, I did a deep, deep search to try to find an original video from the Real Men Don't Buy Girls campaign.
00:10:34.520This is a little bit of a conspiracy theory. I think they must have just removed it, had it scrubbed from the Internet, because I can't find anything. I can only find two videos that were clearly user-generated content that were not representative of what the original videos were.
00:10:53.980They were on YouTube. They were on TV. They were on Facebook.
00:10:56.640This also was the early 2000s when we just didn't have a lot of social media content.
00:11:03.160If a celebrity was doing something online, it was like automatically newsworthy.
00:11:07.920So I can't believe you don't remember them.
00:11:10.260Basically, the point of the campaign was that it was showing all of these like manly famous men like Bradley Cooper and Sean Penn doing all kinds of manly things.
00:11:22.460But then being like, oh, well, manly men make grilled cheese sandwiches using an iron because they're manly.0.61
00:11:31.920And the commercials were, I guess I will just say they were mostly panned for being cringy, which is probably why I cannot find any of them now.
00:11:41.900Like literally when I found a website that had like six squares from YouTube, like embedded YouTube videos, each of those squares was like video not found, video not found, video not found, video not found.
00:11:56.360So Ashton Kutcher apparently has the power to get these videos removed from the internet.
00:12:02.300But I remember them like they were yesterday.
00:12:04.980You can still find, if you Google real men don't buy girls, you can still find the images of like Ashton Kutcher.
00:12:12.640He's wearing like a knit beanie, like a slouchy knit beanie.
00:12:16.720And he's holding the sign that says real men don't buy girls.0.62
00:14:29.360So back then, DNA was really kind of centered around celebrities raising awareness about trafficking, which on his face is not like the worst thing in the world.
00:14:40.460If anything, these ads were a little bit cringy, but they weren't like the worst thing ever.
00:14:46.060But DNA was a little bit tricky with their numbers when the organization was first getting started.
00:14:51.640They misreported and inflated stats and numbers around trafficking, which is going to be a theme in this episode.
00:14:57.520This will not be the first time that you're hearing that this anti-sex trafficking organization is misreporting and inflating numbers around sex trafficking.
00:15:05.980So this part of the conversation really ties into this one stat.
00:15:09.920Ashton repeats this one claim over and over,
00:15:12.280that there are between 100,000 and 300,000 child sex slaves in the United States today.
00:15:19.880He said it unchecked on CNN's Piers Morgan.
00:15:23.180He testified before Congress and gave that same stat.
00:15:26.700This stat is repeated over and over and over again.
00:15:29.420If you Google it, you get lots and lots of hits.
00:15:31.700But surprise, this is not an accurate stat, not even close.
00:15:35.800The Washington Post dug into this specific statistic
00:15:38.180and found that it comes from a 2001 report from Richard J. Estes and Neil Wiener of the University of Pennsylvania.
00:15:45.100So this study was published in 2001, so it relied on data from the 1990s.
00:15:49.560But people have been parroting it well under the 2010s and even sometimes today.
00:15:54.460So obviously it's already like a little bit suspect.
00:15:57.660The report never said that 100,000 to 300,000 children are being trafficked in the United States.
00:16:03.400What they did say was that 100,000 to 300,000 children are, quote, at risk for commercial sexual exploitation.
00:16:11.980So that's a different thing than how Ashton Kutcher reported it, that there are 100,000 to 300,000 kids being trafficked in the United States then.
00:20:08.620And then it's repeated over and over and over again.
00:20:11.280And I kind of do need to give a little bit of a caveat here that Ashton was far from the only person who repeated this bad statistic.
00:20:19.340In fact, this number has been used by elected officials on both sides of the aisle.
00:20:23.480After the Washington Post fact check on it, Senator Rob Portman from Ohio pledged to stop citing that number.
00:20:29.820I'm inclined to think, like, maybe Ashton and Demi didn't know that this number was, like, not really a number that they should be repeating.
00:20:36.880I do think if I were creating an organization entirely dedicated to trafficking, I might not have gone on TV multiple times and repeated a number that respected names who were already in this space had loudly debunked and all caps asked people to stop using.
00:20:54.920But the question really is, did Ashton and Demi know that they were repeating incorrect statistics to champion their anti-trafficking work?
00:21:03.020And to be honest, it kind of sounds like maybe they did.
00:21:05.980The Village Voice did a whole investigation where they actually contracted a methodologist at Arizona State University to dig into the Demi and Ashton Foundation.
00:21:15.160For the record, this is probably because the Village Voice was known for their prolific adult classified section where people engaged in sex for money.
00:21:25.240So it's probably one of the reasons why the Village Voice would be very, very invested in debunking the claims made by Demi and Ashton's foundation.
00:21:32.540So in the Village Voice piece, they talk about Maggie and Trevor Nielsen, who run the California-based Global Philanthropy Group and worked as consultants to celebrities who want to start charities.
00:21:42.900When confronted with the inaccuracy of their numbers, Maggie Nielsen did not seem super-based.
00:22:49.300You know, if you're able to use a big number, that means that you're better able to fundraise.
00:22:54.980According to Professor Steve Doig, Knight Chair of Journalism at Arizona State University, who specializes in the analysis of quantitative methodology,
00:23:03.040this is the person that the Village Voice contracted out to do their investigation into Demi and Ashton's foundation,
00:23:08.620Doig says, let's face it, a study or a story saying several thousand young teens are being exploited in the sex trade has a lot less impact than one suggesting that several hundred thousand are at risk.
00:23:19.520researchers, journalists, law enforcement, and politicians alike have incentives to focus on
00:23:24.380the much bigger number. And I kind of can't help but think that that's part of what's going on
00:23:29.620here. I do, to be super clear, I do think that one of the issues is that trafficking is the kind
00:23:37.780of crime where it is legitimately hard to find hard, accurate numbers around. And I also think
00:23:43.780that when you're putting together a charity where you're fundraising, I can imagine not
00:24:52.760Like it feels like an issue that deserves a little more respect.
00:24:55.700But even still, it seems like they're trying to position it as like a population health organization where they're talking about like this many American children are subject to this harm.
00:25:09.500And so there's an obligation to get the numbers right, to have real numbers. If your numbers aren't made up, there should be somebody at the organization who has looked at the primary source, that original article, and reviewed the methodology and is willing to put their name on the line and saying, oh yeah, this number that we're using is a good one. And it sounds like they just didn't have that at all. It's just pure marketing.
00:25:35.640And I guess I just feel like this is me on my soapbox, but people deserve the truth.
00:25:41.000If you are raising awareness, but you're not able to tell the truth, what are you raising awareness for?
00:25:46.060If you knowingly are like, I know these numbers are cobbled together, but it's an important issue.
00:25:54.900I don't think that raising awareness, but that doesn't give people the awareness they need.
00:26:00.140If people are going to be aware of an issue, they need to be aware of it accurately.
00:26:02.860And if you're raising awareness for an issue and you're doing it in a way that is not accurate, what are you actually doing other than raising money?
00:26:10.660If you don't have any rigorous numbers that you can point to as evidence that it's happening, maybe your first step should be to, like, get some decent numbers and some decent data to guide your efforts.
00:26:23.880Otherwise, you're just operating based on intuition and preferences.
00:28:40.380Okay, so in 2012, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher have a very messy, very public split following rumors of Ashton being unfaithful and Demi's addiction issues.
00:28:51.600And amid that split, the organization is rebranded from Demi and Ashton to Thorne, colon, Digital Defenders of Children.
00:28:59.940And this is where they adopt a much bigger technology and data focus rather than just sort of general celebrity awareness campaigns about trafficking.
00:29:09.260And this is what leads to Thorne becoming a major player in law enforcement and Internet regulation that they are today.
00:29:16.280So Ashton and Demi explain, saying, quote,
00:29:19.180For the past three years, we have focused our work broadly on combating child sex trafficking.
00:29:24.080It has become crystal clear in our effort that technology plays an increasingly large
00:29:27.760role in this crime and in sexual exploitation of children overall.
00:29:31.580We believe that the technology-driven aspect of these crimes demands its own attention
00:29:42.220And I think it is really important to dig into what that has actually looked like.
00:29:46.380So, major, major shout-outs to Violet Blue, who wrote a great piece at Engadget called Sex Lies and Surveillance, Something's Wrong with the War on Sex Trafficking.
00:29:56.100So, earlier, I talked about how oftentimes anti-sex trafficking work conflates a bunch of issues.
00:30:03.140The trafficking of adults for labor, the trafficking of adults for sex, the trafficking of children for sex, and adults engaging in consensual sex work.
00:30:11.260And that is essentially what is going on with Thorne.
00:30:13.700Violet Blue reports that of Thorn's 31 nonprofit partners, 27 of those groups target adults and vow to abolish consensual sex work under the banner of saving children from sex trafficking.
00:30:26.900Perhaps unsurprisingly, Thorn was a champion of SESTA-FOSTA, legislation that openly conflated adult consensual sex work and the trafficking of children.
00:30:35.900If folks don't know, a quick and dirty way to understand SESTA-FOSTA is that under SESTA-FOSTA, every website or online platform can be held liable for hosting what the law describes as sex work.
00:30:48.240But sex work is undefined and there is no distinction between human trafficking and consensual sex work.
00:30:54.840Even the Department of Justice asked the House Judiciary Committee to change FOSTA's focus to traffickers and not cases where there is minimal federal interest like consensual sex work.
00:34:55.960So if you're Googling this to find more information, they're spelling it like edgy.
00:34:59.640It's not recognition with a C, it's with a K.
00:35:01.360Was it created by, like, 1990s socialists?
00:35:06.900It's like the same branding as, like, really edgy energy drinks or something.
00:35:14.440I was surprised they didn't throw an X in there.
00:35:16.800You know, like, we got to get that, like, edgy X branding.
00:35:19.580So Recognition, Amazon's facial recognition technology that is used by Ashton Kutcher's anti-trafficking tool, Spotlight, detects faces in images and video.
00:35:28.340There was a very, very long, messy battle to pressure Amazon to stop selling this technology that is used by Thorne to law enforcement.
00:35:38.460I'll give you like a little like quick and dirty history of what happened there.0.98
00:35:42.720So that is because Amazon's recognition is janky as fuck, especially when it comes to marginalized people.0.95
00:35:51.060Two researchers, Drs. Joy Bolamwini and Deborah Raji, published a paper demonstrating that recognition was classifying the gender of dark-skinned women 31.4 percentage points less accurately than that of light-skinned men.0.98
00:36:05.020Amazon responded not by acknowledging these results, but by attacking the credibility of these Black women researchers.
00:36:11.960Amazon published two blog posts claiming that Raji and Bolamwini's work was misleading.
00:36:16.680In response, nearly 80 AI researchers defended their work and yet again called for Amazon to stop selling face recognition technology to the police.
00:36:26.820In 2020, after the death of George Floyd, House and Senate Democrats introduced a police reform bill that included a proposal to limit facial recognition in law enforcement, marking the largest federal effort ever to regulate this technology.
00:36:40.800So in July, after IBM was like, we're not using this tech anymore, the ACLU of Northern California conducted its own study and found that the system falsely matched photos of 28 members of the U.S. Congress with mugshots, which really got Congress's attention.
00:36:57.880The false matches were disproportionately people of color.
00:37:00.880So after all of this outcry, Amazon did announce a one-year moratorium on partnering with law enforcement to use recognition, with one exception for when police are using Thorne's Spotlight.
00:37:13.700So they know that the facial recognition technology used in Spotlight is not great. It's racially biased. It has gender bias. They know all of this. So they're going to stop using that technology unless it is being used for police to combat trafficking via Spotlight.
00:37:32.640So this technology, if it is being used purportedly to identify people who are potentially involved in exchanging sex for money, but it's also really janky and misidentifies black and brown faces, women's faces, you can see why that would be a problem, right?
00:37:49.940Yeah, for sure. Like, how do you justify discontinuing the technology because it doesn't work well, but we're going to keep using it for this one purpose? Like, it just doesn't even begin to make sense.
00:38:05.680I completely agree. And remember, despite Thorne's stated mission of helping kids who are being trafficked, they have conflated children who are trafficked with adults who engage in consensual sex work.
00:38:18.840Now, Thorne, I need to be clear, does specifically say that their focus of the organization is helping kids who are being trafficked, not adults who engage in sex work. And that might be true at an organizational level, but that is not what's going on in practice.
00:38:35.060Thorne's CEO, Julia Cordua, told Forbes that Spotlight was limited to officers who investigate child sex trafficking, saying law enforcement has reported that with Spotlight, they have seen over 60 percent time saving in their investigative process and over 21,000 children have been identified using this tool.
00:38:54.000Court filings and interviews with current and former police show that Spotlight is frequently used to identify adults, a point on which Cordua declined to comment.
00:39:02.940And this is what I think is really going on at Thorne. They can say all day long that they do not exist to target adult consensual sex workers, but their technology just is being used to target those adult consensual sex workers who they say they don't want to target.
00:39:19.980And this is not just messed up because it's wrong to surveil and criminalize adults who consensually engage in sex work, which it is, but also adult sex workers have networks of support and advocacy where they can help detect and prevent children from being trafficked for sex.
00:39:36.300But sex workers cannot be a resource to help combat trafficking if sex work is further surveilled and criminalized.
00:39:44.100Like, time and time again, we see that sex workers are on the front line of seeing when something non-consensual or something is going on with a minor.
00:39:53.760And they are the ones who frequently work with law enforcement to help curb that.
00:39:58.440But they're not going to be able to do that if they are continually being surveilled and criminalized.
00:40:04.140Not only that, laws that surveil and criminalize sex workers also make it harder for them to do their work safely.
00:40:09.700It shuts down the resources and services used to research and vet clients.
00:40:14.260And so if your whole thing is we want to prevent people from being trafficked for sex, don't then make it harder to engage in sex work because actually you are going to make it easier for people to be harmed and trafficked and caught up in non-consensual situations.
00:40:33.580Kate D'Amato, a sex worker advocate at Reframe Health and Justice,
00:40:37.020a queer and trans people of color collective focused on harm reduction and legal reform,
00:40:41.160said that by monitoring sex workers rather than working with them,
00:40:44.640police are making it incredibly hard to do sex work in any way that is remotely safe.
00:40:49.480And even if Thorne says that they do not want to target adults who are consensually engaging in sex work,
00:40:56.240it kind of sounds like they are including those same adults in the numbers of trafficking victims
00:41:01.520that they report that they have saved, in scare quotes, from trafficking.
00:41:06.300Because just like the previous iteration of THORN DNA,
00:41:11.460they still are kind of misrepresenting their numbers.
00:41:14.860Ashton Kutcher gave testimony before Senator John McCain
00:41:17.960and other U.S. lawmakers where he said that Spotlight
00:41:20.640had helped save more than 6,000 U.S. sex trafficking victims,
00:41:24.720including 2,000 minors in the last 12 months.
00:41:27.800But according to a report from Reason,
00:41:29.400these numbers wildly outpace the average number of new criminal investigations into sex trafficking
00:41:35.060open in the U.S. each year or average number of victims identified by U.S. law enforcement.
00:41:40.760For instance, between late 2009 and late 2015, FBI agents working with state and local police
00:41:46.620across America identified an average of just 175 minor victims per year, according to the
00:41:52.800Attorney General's 2015 annual report to Congress and assessment of the U.S. government's activities
00:42:23.680In addition to that, uniform crime reporting data from the United States indicate that
00:42:27.580744 investigations into state-level sex trafficking offenses were opened in 2015.
00:42:33.340So there is probably overlap between state and FBI investigations.
00:42:38.240But the report says even if we count all of those cases separately,
00:42:42.580we're looking at a total of 2,580 investigations into sex or labor trafficking,
00:42:48.4005,725 less cases than Thorne allegedly helped identify in a one-year period.
00:42:55.440Yeah, I mean, based on those disparities you just cited and their history of playing fast and loose with numbers, one kind of has to suspect that maybe they're playing fast and loose with their numbers here. Do you suppose it helps with their fundraising?
00:43:11.600Oh, I can imagine that it might. Basically, according to this report, it looks like Thorne is inflating the numbers of trafficking arrests that their technology has led to. And the most likely explanation for how they're kind of being funny with the numbers is that they are counting adults arrested for posting ads on places like Craigslist or Backpage or other escort sites looking to engage in the exchange of sex for money in the number of people that their technology has saved from trafficking.
00:43:39.720whether they were actually being trafficked or not.
00:43:42.640So back to that Reason report, Reason writes,
00:43:45.360the majority of adult ads on Backpage are posted by sex workers themselves,
00:43:49.420and people arrested and cops' human trafficking stings based on these ads
00:43:53.680are predominantly sex workers and or people looking to pay other adults for sex.
00:43:58.040Police might be looking for trafficking victims when they contact ads
00:44:01.500featuring young-looking women or certain supposed code words,
00:44:04.880but when their hunches don't pan out, and this is most of the time,
00:44:09.720Considering the data we do have on state and federal human trafficking cases, the only way the numbers from Ashton Kutcher's group could make sense is if, A, they're counting every red flag ad Spotlight identifies, regardless of whether these tips are ultimately deemed worthwhile enough to prompt a criminal investigation, or, B, they're counting cases of consensual sex work between adults and lumping all adult sex workers identified into adult trafficking victim numbers.
00:44:37.880And in some way, they are doing something with their numbers, either A, anytime law enforcement looks into one of these ads, they're counting that as somebody who has been saved from trafficking, or they're just lumping in consensual adult sex workers as adult trafficking victims.
00:47:20.660a very narrow kind of reasonable sounding kind of harm, particularly a harm against kids. But then
00:47:26.480that definition is expanded such that more and more things are included. The same way that when
00:47:32.000we talk about legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act, where the legislation says that it's
00:47:36.220about protecting kids from harmful online content, but then the definition of that harmful online
00:47:40.360content is just expanded to include all different kinds of content, both for minors and adults.
00:47:47.440And so I say all of this to say that when you hear that somebody is trying to combat harm of kids on the Internet, it should not just be a sign of like, oh, that's a good person.
00:48:00.620Like, we don't need to look at what that actually involves.
00:48:26.260Inflating the danger around sex trafficking not only lends credibility to specific harmful legislation,
00:48:33.140legislation like SESTA-FOSTA that can actually make trafficking worse,
00:48:36.380But it also makes it seem like sex trafficking is more likely to be a situation where a white child is, like, snatched off the street by a stranger and forced into the sex trade.
00:48:49.380Now, this is obviously a very sympathetic narrative and one that is very easy to throw money and legislation at.0.62
00:48:55.880But if trafficking and sex crimes begin and end with strangers snatching kids off the street and forcing them into the sex trade, you are going to be trained that that is the real threat.
00:49:08.980It is much more likely that the threat is someone the victim knows or that they are groomed or coerced into being trafficked.
00:49:16.420But if trafficking is your end-all be-all for sex crimes, you are going to be a lot less likely to see your buddy who has always been really nice to you, who seems like a really good guy and always shakes hands with firefighters after 9-11 as a threat.
00:49:32.620Because in your mind, the real threat is strangers.
00:49:36.320So when we inflate the numbers around trafficking and use that to justify all kinds of harmful practices and laws, we are not actually keeping ourselves safe.
00:49:46.420And so, yeah, I think as people are talking about Ashton Kutcher and why he would risk his reputation and his work in the space to defend Danny Masterson from his two forcible rape convictions, I hope this is a helpful explanation as to why he might do that.
00:50:05.640And also, I hope this is a good invitation for folks to listen to marginalized people when they speak up about what they're experiencing online, because pretty much everything that I just said, I got from sex workers. Sex workers have not been quiet about this. They have been speaking up about harmful legislation on the Internet for a very long time. And I think we really got to listen to them. And that's it. That's all I got.
00:50:28.560I learned a lot here. I had no idea Ashton Kutcher was doing any of this. What a weird story.
00:50:34.040Yeah. I mean, let me just like before I let you go, I just want to look up all the different tech companies that he is invested in because he was an investor at Uber. He was tweeting about how like it's good for tech companies like Uber, presumably tech companies that he invests in. It's good when they when they track down dirt on journalists who are reporting on on those companies.
00:50:59.660And then later he was like, oh, no, no, no, no. I was just speaking as myself. I wasn't speaking as like an Uber investor. I was just, that's just my opinion.
00:51:09.600There's like a real paternalistic through thread of, I'm going to start this charity named after myself to protect girls from trafficking. And also, I'm going to make a lot of money through investing in surveillance software. It's probably not a coincidence that both of those things are happening here.
00:51:36.720oh yeah um i and that's sort of like one of the reasons that it was important to me to talk about
00:51:42.880this is that ashton kutcher is propping up profiting from and funding a vast surveillance
00:51:50.600network and then like going on podcasts and like going on hot ones and like making it seem like
00:51:57.320it's cool and funny and i just i hate the idea that he has so effectively been able to brand
00:52:03.120himself as like a smart tech guy who will go on TV and sell our own harm back to us in a way that
00:52:11.560looks cool. Like, oh my God, he really like, you know, he's really like doing something interesting.
00:52:18.000People thought he was a dumb stoner, but actually he's making millions off of me. I mean, just a0.95
00:52:23.180few months ago, Ashton Kutcher launched a $240 million AI investment fund. And so somebody who
00:52:30.700goes on Hot Ones and giggles and kikis about this, like, pretty creepy, scary surveillance.
00:52:38.960I don't know that this is somebody that I would trust with architecting something like AI. Like,
00:52:44.420it just is, it's concerning to me. Ashton Kutcher, what are you doing?