CSA doesn't neatly fit into a narrative. If there's a person committing abuse against a child, usually a family member in their own household, there's no story

CSA doesn't neatly fit into a narrative. If there's a person committing abuse against a child, usually a family member in their own household, there's no story there. They (hopefully) get arrested, get a minor mention in the media if that, and life moves on. If, on the other hand, they send CSAM using a platform, device or protocol, then clearly the makers of that technology failed to uphold their sacred duty to protect the child. If most CSAM cases happen using a few major technologies (and they will, because societies tend to standardize on what technologies they use for communication), the technologies get blamed for the problem they supposedly enable. If you dislike the technology for other reasons (the distrust of corporations from left-leaning politicians, censorship allegations on the right, a moral panic about the impact of smartphones on children's mental health), you can use people's misunderstanding of statistics to exaggerate the CSAM problem, blame the tech, and gain some notion of control over it in a way that is politically palatable to citizens. It's worth saying explicitly that centralization doesn't have much to do with this. We've seen similar stories play out with bicycles, Walkmans, pagers, AI, heavy metal and Uber rapes. They were different moral panics, but the mechanic was roughly the same. I think the situation wouldn't change much if we all used PGP-encrypted email over personal mail servers to communicate. An exception that proves the rule is the moral panic over CSA in primarily-catholic countries, notably relating to abuse committed by catholic priests, which are statistically no more likely to commit it than anybody else. As the influence of the Church on government policy is a hotly-debated topic in those countries, CSA is suddenly an issue that people can use to further their political causes.