Jonathan Mendelsohn
The horrifying details of the kidnapping of an unidentified 13-year-old boy have come to light. As it turns out, the Utah boy was groomed on Twitter before the kidnapping ultimately occurred, and the ever-popular social media platform is being partially blamed for not intervening.
Videos by Rare
Reportedly, the young teen frequently communicated with an adult who identified online as a “map,” which is an abbreviation for “minor-attracted person.” Both the boy and the accused individual, whose online username was @HunterFloofyFox, posted about the online furry community, which is a group of individuals who role-play as animals. Police, who were aware of the alleged grooming, sent out a search warrant to Twitter but there was no follow-up because of a misspelled username. Weeks later, the police corrected the error, but Twitter did not respond right away, and the boy was kidnapped five days later.
Horrific Kidnapping Could Have Been Prevented by Twitter
Heather McConney, the victim’s mother, spoke out about her outrage over Twitter not doing more to intervene. She said, “He had photos, images of my son, on Twitter. Everybody could see it. How do you not see this is a child? If you would have taken 10 seconds to go and look you would have seen it. And if you would have just released the information, we would have been able to find this person.”
The victim’s father, Ken McConney, reported to police that he found his son’s room empty one night with the window wide open. The boy was reported missing, and a day later, he was rescued from the assailant’s premises in Nebraska, where he had been apparently driven to. Police submitted emergency requests to Twitter to obtain the identity of the Twitter user known as @HunterFloofyFox, and after two hours, the social media giant provided officials with the suspect’s name. The predator was born Aaron Michael Zeman but legally changed his name to Tadashi Kojima in 2018. The suspect is being charged with sexual assault, federal kidnapping, coercion, and child pornography.
In an email, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety Ella Irwin stated, “We are very open to collaborating further with law enforcement on how we can speed up and better assist them with these types of investigations involving missing children and the data requests they may have in these cases.” Hopefully, in the future, Twitter will be more competent when it comes to serious matters such as this.
