• How often does tracking child abuse imagery lead to preventing actual child abuse? Out of all the children who are abused each year, what percentage of their abusers are tracked via online imagery? Aren’t a lot of these cases IRL/situationally based? That’s what I’m trying to determine here. Is this even a good use of public resources and/or focus?

    As for how you personally feel about the imagery, I believe that a lot of things humans do are gross, but I don’t believe we should be arbitrarily creating laws to restrict things that others do that I find appalling… unless there’s a very good reason to. It’s extremely dangerous to go flying too fast down that road, esp with anything related to “terror/security” or “for the children” we need to be especially careful. We don’t need another case of “Well in hindsight, that [war on whatever] was a terrible idea and hurt lots and lots of people”

    And let’s be absolutely clear here: I 100% believe that people abusing children is fucked up, and the fact that I even need to add this disclaimer here should be a red flag about the dangers of how this issue is structured.

      • I appreciate you posting the link to my question, but that’s an article written from the perspective of law enforcement. They’re an authority, so they’re incentivized to manipulate facts and deceive to gain more authority. Sorry if I don’t trust law enforcement but they’ve proven themselves untrustworthy at this point

      • @PelicanPersuader@beehaw.org
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        51 year ago

        It already is outlawed in the US. The US bans all depictions precisely because of this. The courts anticipated that there would come a time when people could create images which are indistinguishable from reality so allowing any content to be produced wasn’t permissible.

      • Okay… So correct me if I’m wrong, but being abused as a child is like… one of the biggest predictors of becoming a pedophile. So like… Should we preemptively go after these people? You know… To protect the kids?

        How about single parents that expose their kids to strangers when dating. That’s a massive vector for kids to be exposed to child abuse.