Operation Smile: Making children cry, and possible photoshop? (pizzagate)

submitted ago by bumbleberries

So I was looking at Operation Smile, the organisation which child-trafficker Laura Silsby previously ran a fundraiser for. One of the directors is Cindy McCain, who is also a director of ICMEC launched by Hillary Clinton. ICMEC is also connected to Laura Silsby through AlertSense.

Operation Smile provides cleft lip surgeries to children for free worldwide. According to Wikipedia, it occurs in 1 to 2 per 1000 births in the developed world. I don't know how common it is in third world countries, but watching a video of Operation Smile seemed really unnatural to me. Here are some of the strange points:

So it was clear to me that somebody with a sick sense of humor made the video. Clearly not a legitimate company. They're asking for $250 donations to make a child smile, while making children cry in their own promotional videos.

Then I was looking at an article on its website to find a photo of a family with 3 kids with cleft lip. Three with cleft lip? Strange. Apparently cleft lip is an epidemic in third world countries. Then I spotted what looks like an incomplete photoshop job:

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ConcernedParent2 ago

I do think there may be something shady going on with these operations, especially if it links to Silsby.

That being said, when it comes to spreading awareness campaigns and trying to get donations, you have to appeal to people by playing with their emotions. If they just showed a happy child with a cleft lip, people aren't going to see it as a urgent matter. If you show a sad child and show the difficulties they go through due to their cleft lip, people will be much more likely to donate because they see it as an actual hindrance for those poor children.

This practice is not unique to this organization, all charities and organizations do this. Think about those sappy animal shelter commercials; they could have found some happy animals or found a shelter that takes better care of their animals, but they didn't. Why? Because all those pitiful looking animals compels you to donate.

bumbleberries ago

I just added an extra image under "white blobs".

I'm not really inclined to believe that all charities do this. The crying girl looks like she's legitimately ashamed of herself, and the milk thing is just bad taste. It looks like child abuse to me, as though a psychopath made the video to appeal to our emotions through tears.

ConcernedParent2 ago

Those blobs look like bits of tissue or cotton to me.

I deal with charities a lot, especially since my children's schools love to send them home with piles of magazines and pamphlets begging for money. They always go out of their way to make things sappy and sad as possible, sometimes to the point of being cringy.

This isn't a new concept, and the studies behind it are well documented. Just one study:

Experiment 1 and 2 examined images used in charity advertising in terms of the emotions they generated in respondents. Images of children were found to be particularly powerful in generating emotional reactions. Experiments 3 and 4 manipulated emotional intensity generated by images within donation requests, and found that images showing negative emotions generated significantly larger monetary donations, and significantly larger donations of items and time.

bumbleberries ago

Hmm, I'll look into it a bit more another day I guess. Deleting it for now as I don't want to push an unsubstantiated claim. Looked like an incomplete set of teeth to protrude out of the upper lip to me.

ConcernedParent2 ago

It's a little hard to tell what that is since the video isn't exactly the best quality.

I would still keep looking into the organization. Like I said, if Silsby is involved, then there is a good reason to be suspicious.