Deception by Design: Digital Skin, Racial Matter, and the New Policing of Child Sexual Exploitation

Chapter author: Mitali Thakor

Page author: Nataly Dickson

Summary
Mitali Thakor begins her chapter by describing “Sweetie”, a digital animation of a young Filipino girl used by Lemz, a Dutch advertising agency, and by Terre des Hommes, a Netherlands nonprofit, for a project titled “Project Sweetie.” Project Sweetie is a campaign that addresses webcam sex tourism where men pay children to perform sexual acts on webcams (189-190). Run in 2013, Project Sweetie operated as a proactive policing campaign which used “Sweetie” to text and video chat with people on webcam chatrooms and “convinc[ed] them to share email addresses, names, and other identifying information, with the promise of sharing nude photos and videos” (190). Although Sweetie’s face was only used a few times at the end of the project, Thakor’s article highlights the fact that the avatar’s ethnicity, sexuality, artificiality, and the importance of these various factors are “critical to the design of this avatar as a carceral object” (191).

Thakor’s argument is based around the Project Sweetie campaign’s “conscious stylization of its entrapment work” (191). More specifically, she is interested in how Sweetie’s skin, which goes from brown to blue, is a “deceptive interface”, one that is not quite child nor quite artificial, but is also a contact surface where desire and punishment are negotiated (191). Sweetie’s “digital race materiality”, Thakor suggests, is “critical to the production of the carceral lure” (191).

“Sweetie” was designed by Brekel and Motek, graphic design agencies hired by Lemz, which used rotoscoping to model Sweetie’s body movements. A white Dutch woman was used to simulate the gestures and motions Sweetie was to perform. One of the design agencies, gathered various boy and girl faces from different ages, several skin tones, and patterns of musculoskeletal features as templates for Sweetie’s face (195). In the Project Sweetie video, the audience can see the “peeling back of the skin”, and Thakor finds that Project Sweetie’s success is based around the fact that the design team acknowledges Sweetie’s artificiality. This video allows the viewers to be a part of the secret operation which shows them how it is that they made Sweetie “desirable” (198). Thakor places specific focus on digital racial matter, or in this case, Sweetie’s Filipino “skin” and explains that she is reflective of the similar children who are real and potentially face actual online harassment and exploitation. By making Sweetie a carceral object and the project’s proactive policing, Thakor describes Project Sweetie’s outcomes as having “entrapping potential”  but not actually entrapping online child abuse offenders (205).

In a sense this project “magnifies the stranger danger panic” as well as the fact that Sweetie is used to lure people who might solicit a minor, more specifically, a minor with Sweetie’s desirability in skin, age, and access (191, 204) Sweetie as a carceral object relies on the potential that harassment and exploitation will occur. More broadly, Project Sweetie works under the assumption that in digital spaces there are people who will be constantly waiting to assault innocent children (204).

Connection to other readings
Deception by Design could pair well with the conversation that Safiya Noble has in her TedTalk titled "How biased are our algorithms?". Noble discusses about how searches about black, asian, latino girls or women are being associated with various sexualized descriptions/attributes. In Thakor's piece and in Project Sweetie's justification to have Sweetie be a young Filipino girl, is reflective of the fact that other young Filipino girls are targeted for specific child exploitation.

Connection to other chapters
Here are some links to other chapters that may be related (this section is meant to be done collectively by all class members)