If you ever wonder how your friends have such crazy ideas about life, chances are you have the Internet to thank. Well, I guess you could thank people like Randall here as well.
You see, this isn’t the biggest story. It’s not even the littlest story. It’s all a figment of someone’s imagination. Unfortunately, Randall here knows that 525,800 people “LOVE” his post. So chances are, Randall is liable to post more totally fabricated fiction in the future if it boosts his followers.
What makes it worse, 159,000 people thought it was worth retweeting, and did so. I don’t have the time to chase down all those retweets, but I’ll bet a majority of them didn’t bother to fact check it either.
HuffPost did however. Their article here is certainly worth a read.
Boiling it down, some missing children were found, but not all together and not all at once. It was over a period of weeks and the circumstances of each varied greatly.
One thing did stand out in the article for me, and I questioned it in their comment section. They asserted that only 115 children are kidnapped by strangers on a yearly basis. That doesn’t seem possible to me – only barely more than two per state per year. I have a hard time believing that…and said so in the comments section.
Child or human trafficking is too important a story to mislead people about. Lives depend on everyone recognizing it is an important issue and it’s not being solved any time soon. I prefer to believe the statistics at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
We’ll see if I get a response and I’ll update this post if I do.
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Feature image by ijmaki from Pixabay
