Seeing that Ashton Kutcher is a co-founder brought to mind his feud with the Village Voice a few years ago over the VV's escort ads, which Kutcher alleged were facilitating child prostitution and sex slavery. The VV then published a long investigative piece arguing that Kutcher's statistical claims -- e.g. that 100,000 to 300,000 U.S. children are sold into sex slavery each year -- was off by several orders of magnitude:
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/real-men-get-their-facts-st...And of course it should be said, VV, which was and is undergoing huge financial stress, has every incentive to believe its hands are clean, as it was desperate for the revenue from escort ads.
Hard to tell if Kutcher has revised his numbers. The Thorn site is vague about its numbers. It talks about hundreds of thousands of kids at risk, and on the about page, fuzzes the claim with "100,000 escort ad posted in the United States every day, and within these, there are ads that represent children."...the unsaid implication being that the number of escort ads per day may not have any real bearing on the actual number of children at risk.
It might seem pedantic to care about stats when children are at risk, but the purported goal of this Thorn initiative is to "use tech to fight child sexual exploitation", and its pages make as much mention about data science as the average tech startup press release. But worthwhile data science requires good data, not platitudes. It's not as if the fight against child abuse is as simple as throwing tech and computational resources at it, nor is that even necessarily the most efficient way to fight the problem.
And of course it should be said, VV, which was and is undergoing huge financial stress, has every incentive to believe its hands are clean, as it was desperate for the revenue from escort ads.
Hard to tell if Kutcher has revised his numbers. The Thorn site is vague about its numbers. It talks about hundreds of thousands of kids at risk, and on the about page, fuzzes the claim with "100,000 escort ad posted in the United States every day, and within these, there are ads that represent children."...the unsaid implication being that the number of escort ads per day may not have any real bearing on the actual number of children at risk.
It might seem pedantic to care about stats when children are at risk, but the purported goal of this Thorn initiative is to "use tech to fight child sexual exploitation", and its pages make as much mention about data science as the average tech startup press release. But worthwhile data science requires good data, not platitudes. It's not as if the fight against child abuse is as simple as throwing tech and computational resources at it, nor is that even necessarily the most efficient way to fight the problem.