In a virtual appearance on The Talk Tuesday, Wayne Brady called out social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, for falling short when it comes to addressing the issue of grown men sending inappropriate DMs to underage girls.
Brady explained that he and his ex-wife Mandie continue to keep an eye on who is sending private messages to their 17-year-old daughter Maile over social media. The comedian said he grew especially concerned about this matter after hearing about what was being said when Mandie pretended to be Maile and interacted with an older man.
"Mandie got on the line with one of them and was, you know, texting back and forth and he was talking slick, until he realized that it was her," Brady said. "And then she's like 'What the hell are you doing?' And he's like, 'I just broke up with my girlfriend, and I just saw her.' That doesn't mean anything. You tell that to your cellmate when we put you in jail. You can talk all about your post-breakup relationship then."
Brady cannot understand why there's protections in place for catfishing and hate speech, but not for preventing men from using social media to prey upon underage girls. He has become so motivated that he hopes to begin working on an initiative that would help curb this type of online behavior.
"You can try to block a person’s account and report them for hate speech... you can report them for trying to be someone else, but in order to really get to them to say, hey, this person is saying something damning or showing images to a young woman or even to a woman who gets a salacious pic, all of the the tap dancing you need to do to get that person reported shouldn’t happen," Brady said, adding, "If this is what social media is, make the tools available to deal with these reprehensible people."
As the issue of police brutality in the United States came to the forefront, Brady opened up in a July interview with Access about the fear he had for his then 14-year-old daughter when he was notified that officers were headed to his Malibu home after she accidentally set off the alarm and couldn't turn it off. "I was so worried that my daughter could not explain in the heat of the moment," he recalled. "I told her, 'Get out of the house right now, run around the corner, and down the street about half a mile, and go to your mom's house."
