{"id":313519,"date":"2017-04-24T11:45:24","date_gmt":"2017-04-24T11:45:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=313519"},"modified":"2017-04-24T11:45:24","modified_gmt":"2017-04-24T11:45:24","slug":"fears-over-fake-bieber-and-styles-accounts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/2017\/04\/fears-over-fake-bieber-and-styles-accounts\/","title":{"rendered":"Fears over fake Bieber and Styles accounts"},"content":{"rendered":"
Law enforcement officers have been warning BBC Trending radio about a growing number of social media accounts wrongly purporting to be teen idols like Harry Styles and Justin Bieber, speaking inappropriately to young children.<\/p>\n
The growing world of social media apps with big teenage audiences has made the situation even more difficult to police, they say.<\/p>\n
“Identity assumption by child sex offenders is increasing quite steadily,” Detective Inspector Jon Rouse, who runs task force Argos, a specialist branch responsible for tackling online child exploitation in Queensland, Australia, told us.<\/p>\n
Detective Inspector Rouse led a recent investigation that led to a 42-year-old man, who allegedly posed as Canadian singer Justin Bieber on a number of social media platforms in order to gain indecent images of children, being charged with more than 900 child sex offences.<\/p>\n
“The fact that so many children across the world could believe that they were talking to Justin Bieber, and that Justin Bieber would make them do the things that they did, is really quite concerning,” he says, “I think a re-evaluation of the way we educate children about safe online behaviour is really needed.”<\/p>\n
One mother of an 8-year-old girl, who has asked to remain anonymous, told BBC Trending that her daughter had downloaded a popular social media app for just two days before she was approached by an account impersonating a celebrity.<\/p>\n
“The first message was inviting you to enter a competition and to win it you get a five minute chat (with the celebrity),” she says.<\/p>\n
“And then the second message that came up was along the lines of ‘all you need to do is send me a photo of you naked or of your vagina.’ And then all these messages flew across the screen.<\/p>\n
“Then the third message said ‘don’t worry about it. All the girls are sending me these photos. Just do it. It’ll be our secret’. And then the last message was ‘do it now’.”<\/p>\n
The problem is found across the internet, from big platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to newer platforms which have large teenage audiences.<\/p>\n
Detective Inspector Rouse of task force Argos raised concerns about Musical.ly, a social platform which launched in 2014. “Lots of child sex offenders are utilising Musical.ly to groom children. That’s a very well-known international fact, believe it or not,” he says.<\/p>\n
The issue is not that safeguards on Musical.ly are particularly different when compared to other social platforms, but rather that there are a lot of young people using the app. It’s been downloaded by more than 50 million people under the age of 21, with a sizeable number of them being under the age of 16.<\/p>\n
Musical.ly told BBC Trending: “We take the safety of our users very seriously and we have zero tolerance for inappropriate, illegal, or predatory behaviour on our apps. We urge our users to report any inappropriate activity to us.”<\/p>\n
Chatter about this issue has been trending in the UK since February, when Gemma Styles, the sister of One Direction singer Harry Styles, alerted her followers to a fake Twitter account in her brother’s name. She said the account was “preying on vulnerable girls”.<\/p>\n