21-year-old YouTuber Coby Persin has gone viral this week thanks to a new video that shows three teen girls getting tricked on social media into meeting a stranger.
But the video, called "The Dangers of Social Media," might be hyping up a threat that isn't actually that widespread. The video also leaves out a couple of key details — that the girls' parents were paid to participate and that Persin skipped over girls who didn't seem like they would fall for it. Also it gets a fact about the number of child predators in America totally wrong.
And yet the internet loves it, with the video getting more than 25 million views in four days.
Inspired by a recent news story of a father whose 12-year-old daughter was abducted by a 27-year-old man she met online, Persin created his own experiment where he set out to convince teenage girls to meet up with a total stranger they only knew through Facebook.
Over the course of three to four days, Persin would friend each girl on Facebook and message her on the website as well as through text messages. He had created a different identity for the purpose of the experiment, pretending to be 15-year-old boy who had just moved to their town and was trying to make new friends.
All three girls in the video responded positively. He began to ask them to meet in person, and though the girls said they had to wait until their parents were out or asleep, they eventually agreed — but when they arrived at the agreed upon location, Persin was accompanied by their parents and a crew of cameras.
None of the parents actually thought their child would go through with the experiment, so when they saw their daughters approach Persin, their reactions were emotional.
“You could’ve been raped and murdered,” one father yelled as he grabbed his 12-year-old daughter. “I’ve already lost your mother, what would I do if I lost you?”
“You understand now, you should never ever, ever do that again, this should teach you a lesson forever, for your whole life,” Persin told the last 14-year-old girl. All three girls were too upset to respond to their parents or Persin with anything other than “I’m sorry” or silence.
Many of the commenters on YouTube think Persin was doing a public service by alerting parents to these types of online dangers.
“That's pretty scary,” said one commenter. “Parents need to stop treating a child's cell phone and social media like it should be the child's own private space. Hopefully both kids and parents learned a valuable lesson here.”
But is this threat as widespread as the video suggests?
The only statistic in the video, that "there are over 750,000 registered child predators in the United States," is highly inaccurate. In fact, there are that many registered sex offenders, not child predators, and many of them are people convicted of nonviolent crimes like public urination, solicitation, and streaking.
Beyond that the video is based on only three examples and we don't know how much they were staged.
“What is the message?” Lenore Skenazy, author of “Free Range Kids,” wrote on her website. “That young people shouldn’t trust anyone online? That’s like telling them not to trust anyone they meet in the off line world, too. […] What is so hard to understand is that, first of all, our kids today are NOT in constant danger. Also: The vast majority of crimes against children are committed NOT by sneaky strangers, but by people they truly know."
As for Persin, he seems mostly interested in making viral hits. His channel is known for videos like "Girl Walks Around NYC With No Pants!" and "Making Homeless Guys Arm Wrestle For Money!" And he's already planning a follow-up to the catfishing video — but this time with teen boys.
“It’s going to be scarier, let’s just say,” Persin told The Daily Dot's Votta. “It’s going to be crazy.”
