5 ms·

Although I understand that the comments section under the videos can be problematic for various reasons, what is the intrinsic issue with people being turned on

by Udik 8y ago

Although I understand that the comments section under the videos can be problematic for various reasons, what is the intrinsic issue with people being turned on by kids videos? It's probably the worst sexual preference to have in terms of societal acceptance, but as long as it doesn't cause any harm to others- i.e., it's limited to watching innocent youtube videos- it seems perfectly fine.

LVDOVICVS 8y ago
Turn yourself in now.
sam0x17 8y ago
This -- people need to differentiate between "I think this is disgusting, but there is nothing illegal about this" and "this is illegal". You can't have your cake and eat it, in that you can't have a (relatively) free society with freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and not cater to pedofiles in some way. This is the (totally worth it) price we pay for not having systematic state censorship.
- krapp 8y ago
  >You can't have your cake and eat it, in that you can't have a (relatively) free society with freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and not cater to pedofiles in some way. Maybe, but you can still criticize a platform for a monetization algorithm that optimizes for pedophiles, collecting the cash and looking the other way. Although I think that, in doing so, we shouldn't absolve parents of their own responsibility, since often adults are pimping their children out for the views.
  - sam0x17 8y ago
    Youtube basically lost the monetization battle when it legitimized the view that advertisers should have any sort of say in what content gets shown next to their ads. 10-15 years ago, that concept didn't exist in the online advertising space, publishers were first class citizens, and advertisers didn't get any say in anything and would get banned more often than publishers for not meeting advertiser standards (which I don't even think are a thing anymore). Now it's completely switched. Catering to advertisers is rapidly killing youtube, and a large portion of the web as a viable platform for free expression. You are right, but by criticizing said platform, you are giving advertisers more leverage and basically helping to even further whitewash an already heavily censored internet. It's not just children. Look at the comments on any video and you'll see all kinds of abusive/sexual-harrassment comments. It has always been like this, and it will always be like this unless you want an algorithm to detect the "offensiveness" of your comments, which will result in certain topics being completely banned unintentionally (think China's handling of the term"tiananmen square massacre" if you want a working example of this). And the worst part is, it's essentially advertisers that get to decide what content is OK for you to view. I'd rather take the lack of censorship any day and pay a subscription, thank you.
- shkkmo 8y ago
  I think that our demonization of pedophilia will been seen by future generations as one of our cultural failings. It pushes people into secrecy and hiding. This isolation and alienation can keep borderline criminals from seeking and receiving the help they need before they abuse children. We should also be careful about removing free speech from minors to alleviate our own sense of disgust. However, YouTube has created, monetized and helped spread a network of people encouraging sexual exploitation and abuse of minors. That is incredibly messed up and people at YouTube should face criminal charges for this.
  - sam0x17 8y ago
    This a thousand times over. See my other posts in this thread for more on this perspective.
sam0x17 8y ago
It's true that a lot of people go literally insane when they think about pedofilia. Hate to break it to you guys but just like there exist plebty of straight males who aren't rapists, many of the people with attraction to minors never act on them. While many of these youtube comments are toxic and/or also constitute harrasment (which I don't condone and nor does the law), there are plenty of examples of legitimatly harmless expression (fanfiction, forum discussions and articles about attraction to minors and how to deal with it, etc), that are the subject of unimaginable amounts of hate and censorship online, where said hate and censorship is being conducted essentially on the basis of sexual orientation. Some companies (notably medium and reddit) are protective of this speech, while others (notably youtube/google) are not.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  > Hate to break it to you guys but just like there are straight males who aren't rapists, many of the people with these attractions never act on them. Not all straight males are turned on by rape. The appropriate comparison is rape fetishists or maybe even the more general umbrella of sexual sadism.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - sam0x17 8y ago
    See your reaction is exactly my point. In your mind the closest most analgous thing to a pedofile is a sadist. All a pedofile is definition-wise is a minor attracted individual (MAP). The rapey connotation is societally bound. Just like straight males as a group don't like to be thought of as rapists or rape fetishivists, MAPS don't like to be thought of as rapists or even as people who fantasize about rape. The confusion where you are technically right comes in because legally there is no such thing as a consenual sexual relationship with a minor, so someone who fantasizes about a sexual relationship with a minor is technically fantasizing about something that is legally rape, however what many of them fantasize about is absent of many of the trappings of what we would typically call rape. I've worked with some via some psych studies in college, and many fantasize about what they think of as a legitimate consensual relationship. That's a far cry from what society would have you believe, and that's what I'm trying to highlight.
PavlovsCat 8y ago
If it was just people being turned on by videos with benign, nobody would be aware of them even being turned on by anything. It's the creepy comments, and the channels catering to them, and the advertising money, and the fact that people sharing certain pathologies are networking and run their own little asylums, form bubbles in which that is not sick, but normalized. Nothing is fine about this. If someone wants to masturbate to little kids instead of getting therapy, they can draw them. Actually, no, not even that, they still should get therapy. I guess it can't just be "fixed", but it has to be managed, and not "self-medicated" with porn. There is a reason why this is not socially accepted, as you so mildly put it. And it's not just "weird" or "disturbing" other simplifications we put up like screens to not see what is just too inconvenient and depraved to even see, much less to actually address. There's people who use "think of the children" to control the internet or push whatever, true, but there's actual pedophiles getting bolder and bolder. Reject and resist both.
52-6F-62 8y ago
This begs the question— if it were your children, how would you feel about it?
- ASalazarMX 8y ago
  Not GP, but if they were my children, because they are small and innocent, I would pay attention to what they do online. They are your children, keeping them safe is primarily your responsibility, not Google's.
  - 52-6F-62 8y ago
    I agree with your first sentiment, absolutely. Your second, however, grossly oversimplifies the situation IMHO—and there we diverge greatly.
    - ASalazarMX 8y ago
      I'm not absolving Google or any company, they have a duty (and the commercial incentive) to solve this situation, but I think people here are magnifying the problem. YouTube makes similar recommendations to what you search or watch, and ads based on some black box analysis. Pedophiles just slipped through the cracks in the system. The cracks need to be sealed, problem solved... until these people find new cracks to exploit. We can't kill them or get rid of them, so this cycle is perpetual. Excessive moral outrage only contributes to sell clicks and justify ill-thought laws.
      - 52-6F-62 8y ago
        I still disagree. The potential for the harm to get worse is there. I don't think there's anything excessive about making a public display of the issue. A limited amount of regulation surrounding certain services could be a good thing, implementation-pending. In the same way that I'm glad engineers who design bridges have regulations to abide by in their projects. The reasons those regulations [choose your field of application] arose in the first place was because there was new knowledge informing an improvement in the [application] and yet there were those willing to close their eyes to the newly obvious design flaws because it was more profitable to do so, and the market simply wasn't correcting for it as some would believe it naturally will. I didn't know this was happening. Hell, I hadn't even considered it a possibility. I don't pay close enough attention to the social aspects of the site. I'm glad it was in the news.

by Udik 8y ago

LVDOVICVS 8y ago

Turn yourself in now.

sam0x17 8y ago

This -- people need to differentiate between "I think this is disgusting, but there is nothing illegal about this" and "this is illegal". You can't have your cake and eat it, in that you can't have a (relatively) free society with freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and not cater to pedofiles in some way. This is the (totally worth it) price we pay for not having systematic state censorship.

krapp 8y ago
>You can't have your cake and eat it, in that you can't have a (relatively) free society with freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and not cater to pedofiles in some way. Maybe, but you can still criticize a platform for a monetization algorithm that optimizes for pedophiles, collecting the cash and looking the other way. Although I think that, in doing so, we shouldn't absolve parents of their own responsibility, since often adults are pimping their children out for the views.
- sam0x17 8y ago
  Youtube basically lost the monetization battle when it legitimized the view that advertisers should have any sort of say in what content gets shown next to their ads. 10-15 years ago, that concept didn't exist in the online advertising space, publishers were first class citizens, and advertisers didn't get any say in anything and would get banned more often than publishers for not meeting advertiser standards (which I don't even think are a thing anymore). Now it's completely switched. Catering to advertisers is rapidly killing youtube, and a large portion of the web as a viable platform for free expression. You are right, but by criticizing said platform, you are giving advertisers more leverage and basically helping to even further whitewash an already heavily censored internet. It's not just children. Look at the comments on any video and you'll see all kinds of abusive/sexual-harrassment comments. It has always been like this, and it will always be like this unless you want an algorithm to detect the "offensiveness" of your comments, which will result in certain topics being completely banned unintentionally (think China's handling of the term"tiananmen square massacre" if you want a working example of this). And the worst part is, it's essentially advertisers that get to decide what content is OK for you to view. I'd rather take the lack of censorship any day and pay a subscription, thank you.
shkkmo 8y ago
I think that our demonization of pedophilia will been seen by future generations as one of our cultural failings. It pushes people into secrecy and hiding. This isolation and alienation can keep borderline criminals from seeking and receiving the help they need before they abuse children. We should also be careful about removing free speech from minors to alleviate our own sense of disgust. However, YouTube has created, monetized and helped spread a network of people encouraging sexual exploitation and abuse of minors. That is incredibly messed up and people at YouTube should face criminal charges for this.
- sam0x17 8y ago
  This a thousand times over. See my other posts in this thread for more on this perspective.

sam0x17 8y ago

It's true that a lot of people go literally insane when they think about pedofilia. Hate to break it to you guys but just like there exist plebty of straight males who aren't rapists, many of the people with attraction to minors never act on them. While many of these youtube comments are toxic and/or also constitute harrasment (which I don't condone and nor does the law), there are plenty of examples of legitimatly harmless expression (fanfiction, forum discussions and articles about attraction to minors and how to deal with it, etc), that are the subject of unimaginable amounts of hate and censorship online, where said hate and censorship is being conducted essentially on the basis of sexual orientation. Some companies (notably medium and reddit) are protective of this speech, while others (notably youtube/google) are not.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
> Hate to break it to you guys but just like there are straight males who aren't rapists, many of the people with these attractions never act on them. Not all straight males are turned on by rape. The appropriate comparison is rape fetishists or maybe even the more general umbrella of sexual sadism.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sam0x17 8y ago
  See your reaction is exactly my point. In your mind the closest most analgous thing to a pedofile is a sadist. All a pedofile is definition-wise is a minor attracted individual (MAP). The rapey connotation is societally bound. Just like straight males as a group don't like to be thought of as rapists or rape fetishivists, MAPS don't like to be thought of as rapists or even as people who fantasize about rape. The confusion where you are technically right comes in because legally there is no such thing as a consenual sexual relationship with a minor, so someone who fantasizes about a sexual relationship with a minor is technically fantasizing about something that is legally rape, however what many of them fantasize about is absent of many of the trappings of what we would typically call rape. I've worked with some via some psych studies in college, and many fantasize about what they think of as a legitimate consensual relationship. That's a far cry from what society would have you believe, and that's what I'm trying to highlight.

PavlovsCat 8y ago

If it was just people being turned on by videos with benign, nobody would be aware of them even being turned on by anything. It's the creepy comments, and the channels catering to them, and the advertising money, and the fact that people sharing certain pathologies are networking and run their own little asylums, form bubbles in which that is not sick, but normalized. Nothing is fine about this. If someone wants to masturbate to little kids instead of getting therapy, they can draw them. Actually, no, not even that, they still should get therapy. I guess it can't just be "fixed", but it has to be managed, and not "self-medicated" with porn. There is a reason why this is not socially accepted, as you so mildly put it. And it's not just "weird" or "disturbing" other simplifications we put up like screens to not see what is just too inconvenient and depraved to even see, much less to actually address. There's people who use "think of the children" to control the internet or push whatever, true, but there's actual pedophiles getting bolder and bolder. Reject and resist both.

52-6F-62 8y ago

This begs the question— if it were your children, how would you feel about it?

ASalazarMX 8y ago
Not GP, but if they were my children, because they are small and innocent, I would pay attention to what they do online. They are your children, keeping them safe is primarily your responsibility, not Google's.
- 52-6F-62 8y ago
  I agree with your first sentiment, absolutely. Your second, however, grossly oversimplifies the situation IMHO—and there we diverge greatly.
  - ASalazarMX 8y ago
    I'm not absolving Google or any company, they have a duty (and the commercial incentive) to solve this situation, but I think people here are magnifying the problem. YouTube makes similar recommendations to what you search or watch, and ads based on some black box analysis. Pedophiles just slipped through the cracks in the system. The cracks need to be sealed, problem solved... until these people find new cracks to exploit. We can't kill them or get rid of them, so this cycle is perpetual. Excessive moral outrage only contributes to sell clicks and justify ill-thought laws.
    - 52-6F-62 8y ago
      I still disagree. The potential for the harm to get worse is there. I don't think there's anything excessive about making a public display of the issue. A limited amount of regulation surrounding certain services could be a good thing, implementation-pending. In the same way that I'm glad engineers who design bridges have regulations to abide by in their projects. The reasons those regulations [choose your field of application] arose in the first place was because there was new knowledge informing an improvement in the [application] and yet there were those willing to close their eyes to the newly obvious design flaws because it was more profitable to do so, and the market simply wasn't correcting for it as some would believe it naturally will. I didn't know this was happening. Hell, I hadn't even considered it a possibility. I don't pay close enough attention to the social aspects of the site. I'm glad it was in the news.