Social media has enabled people to connect and sometimes ultimately meet if it seems you share common interests. This could mean you can meet legit people who can become good friends in the long run and also it could mean it is possible to meet people who use anonymous accounts for a totally different agenda. This last case is a huge problem for social media sites and another sad case has happened in Uganda as Daily Monitor reports that seven girls were raped last month by men they met on Facebook.
Apparently according to Ms Florence Opodoi, a senior advocate of the Federation of Women Lawyers said that the latest victim, a 19 year old girl posted on Facebook where she was looking for someone to help her achieve her dream career in modelling. This post allegedly attracted interest from people and one man who was able to convince her to connect her to other models and also to fund her pursuit. He lured her to an apartment and told her he’ll come back with a laptop which apparently contained pictures of other aspiring models he had helped. This however led to the man later on giving the young girl soda which was spiked, only to wake up and realise she had been raped.
This case led the police spokesperson to make a statement about cybercrimes like this: “Social media culprits target teenagers because they are too adventurous and think they’re mature enough to make their own decisions” He was also reported to urge victims who use social media to alert the police. Also, the Uganda Communications Commission Director, Fred Otunu was quoted as saying “what we can say is that people should be very careful with whoever they interact on the cyberspace”
This incident points to two videos a YouTube vlogger by the name Coby Persin who performed 2 similar social experiments in conjunction with their parents where he lured both young girls and boysusing fake Facebook profiles. The outcome of the two videos showed that young people who use social media and especially Facebook trust who they meet online way too much and this sadly seems to make the work of these sociopaths quite easy.
