The Police Department in Youngsville, Louisiana (pop. 14,077) has posted some good advice to social media-obsessed parents on their own Facebook page recently. It starts out with some really good advice…

So far, they’re not wrong. Predators often use the most minute of details to find out about their victims. I remember a story from back in the MySpace days, where a predator used a soccer uniform that was on the background of a girl’s picture to determine where she went to school and tried to meet her there.

However, I think the rest of the post kind of goes off the rails a little bit.

Not only was that oddly specific, but it also escalated rather quickly. Considering Youngsville is roughly 90% white according to Wikipedia, I’m going to assume that the schools have some kind of protocol in place to prevent random strangers from entering the school to black bag your kid before throwing them into a shipping container let alone it only taking 10 seconds to do so.

In the past 14-years I’ve been writing about social media and human trafficking crimes, I’ve never heard of a kid being snatched from their school before being sold off to overseas traffickers. It’s not impossible for that to happen, I just don’t think it happens as often as this post is making it to happen.

The post does pull itself together in the end, sort of…

This part I agree with for the most part. While I don’t think your kids will be whisked away and shipped off to Thailand, that doesn’t mean that predators and traffickers won’t approach your kids on social media. And by posting every detail of their lives on Facebook, it gives the predators and traffickers more ammunition in their arsenal to groom your children.

What mostly concerns me about this post is the call to PLEASE SAVE OUR CHILDREN. While I have no proof, the SAVE OUR CHILDREN hashtag is often associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory. which makes me wonder if the person from the Youngsville police who posted this is a QAnon follower.

Besides, no one on Facebook really gives a rat’s ass about your kids.