Smart Safety: Project Stonefish

Over the past ten months, the Special Projects Team at Bark, the tech company known for creating the social media monitoring tool that helps protect more than five million kids across the U.S., has been working on Project Stonefish, a nine-minute mini documentary on childhood predation. The attached link is part of a larger feature-length film on the numerous dangers kids face in a digital world, to be released nationwide in the summer of 2020. In Stonefish – fittingly named after one of the most venomous fish in the world capable of camouflaging itself before attacking its victims – the Bark Special Projects Team turned 37-year-old Roo Powell (aka Sloane Ryan), into several personas, the two most popular being 11-year-old Bailey, and 15-year-old Riley. Using age reducing techniques both on and offline, the film shows how quickly Bailey and Riley’s innocent posts attracted hundreds of messages from predators in a matter of minutes, leading to the most malignant situations of all: a predator and child meeting in person for the first time.