You've misunderstood me severely. I'll try to reframe my point; it has absolutely nothing to do with "gateway drug" arguments. Suppose your country makes it i

You've misunderstood me severely. I'll try to reframe my point; it has absolutely nothing to do with "gateway drug" arguments. Suppose your country makes it illegal to distribute videos of people dying, and suppose you operate a video sharing website. A user uploads a video to your website that shows a bad traffic accident. You're not sure who the people involved in the accident are. The accident looks severe, people got hurt badly, but you aren't sure whether anybody died. If you cannot confirm whether the traffic accident victims survived or died, do you delete the video or not? Do you ban traffic accident videos categorically so that your moderators are no longer forced to deal with this ambiguity? Do you ban the general genre of "people getting hurt" videos because your moderators struggle to differentiate people getting hurt from people dying? That's analogous to what tumblr did. It's certainly not a question of whether or not videos of lethal traffic accidents will turn people into bad drivers. And neither is it a question of whether lethal traffic accident videos should be legal or illegal. It's a question of how moderation policies deal with legally ambiguous content. Forget sex and violence; consider how youtube handles copyright infringement. People get 'copystriked' all the time in situations youtube's ContentID situation considers ambiguous, in situations that should be covered by fair use or in situations where no copyrighted material was used at all. Youtube has overzealous copyright moderation because they've decided that's the 'safest' way to stay out of courtrooms even though it pisses off and rips off their content creators.