Another causation / anti-causation question is what effect porn (possibly specifically rape-fantasy porn) has on rape rates. There are two obvious arguments th

Another causation / anti-causation question is what effect porn (possibly specifically rape-fantasy porn) has on rape rates. There are two obvious arguments that point in opposite directions. The first is that rape-fantasy porn acclimates the user to the idea of sexual violence and makes the user more likely to commit it; the second is that rape-fantasy porn gives the user a safe outlet for their baser desires and makes them _less_ likely to commit actual rape. AFAIK we can say that access to porn, and all kinds of porn, has increased a great deal, while rape rates have gone pretty steadily down, during the last few decades; a graph on Wikipedia shows annual U.S. rape rates going from 2.5 per 1000 down to 0.5 per 1000. This doesn't prove the second theory—I think violent crime in general also went down—but it at least shows that, if the first theory is correct, the effect it describes is much smaller than everything else that affects rape rates. I can think of arguments for why white-nationalist forums would decrease the likelihood that the white nationalists who find them would go and kill non-whites. (a) Such a person might feel relieved to find that there are others who feel similarly, and therefore not feel like their cause has no one working for it and they need to do something spectacular and terrifying to attract attention. (b) They might have few friends in real life, and they can't fully show themselves to the ones they do have, so they have no truly close friends. But on the forum, they meet fellows who share their beliefs and feel they can trust, and then they make what feel like close friends. And now they'll know that, if they kill someone, that carries a high risk of getting thrown in jail and cut off from their friends; that extra disincentive might be enough to stop them. (c) On that note, the most visible and admired participants in the forum are not going to be those who go out and kill people, because (I assume) people can't continue posting when they're in jail. The general incentives of the forum probably point towards being a blowhard who doesn't do anything. This is why I will only accept the conclusion "Letting white nationalists gather on a particular forum will cause more white-nationalist-perpetrated killings" if I see a decent study showing it. (I think one of the official basic arguments for freedom of association and of the press is that, if you prevent people with grievances from associating and publishing their views, they will go underground and then get violent.) (Incidentally, I do like it when one of my possible conclusions is that, in order to reduce the likelihood of people doing terrible things, the solution is to work to raise everyone's standard of living, so they'll be too comfortable to want to risk losing what they have.)