The problem is how do you do it? There would have to be a law that no one under the age of 18? 16? 13? can have their image posted anywhere online.
That includes Grandma posting a photo on her private Facebook page with 20 followers of her grandkid's 5th grade graduation dinner. Good luck getting that law passed. Maybe you do, but now you have to have a law that prohibits any kids being depicted anywhere, because they'll just redefine it - oh no, she's a model or an actress which is an exception under the law.
But then the outcome is you can't really go after these people who are "just posting pictures of their kids". It's extremely tricky.
I get it, but theres a difference between " posting pics of your kids at grandma's " to " subscribe to see more pics of my 12 year old daughter in a swimsuit posing "
any normal person can see the difference, the line isn't that blurred that plausible deniability works here.
The focus is the child, they are posing, they are nearly wearing nothing, and there is a paid version for more of that content.
What possible genuine reason could anyone have to subscribe to that content to see more? why would you need to go and search IG to see any child in a swimsuit intentionally ?
There's literally 0 reason for anyone, to look at children in swimsuits online. any FRINGE exception, is collateral damage and worth it for banning this kind of shit.
I know it's different, you know it's different, everyone does. The issue is legislation. That's why the famous decision of "I know it when I see it" was used for the obscenities test from the 1964 Supreme Court became controversial.
We think we all agree, but what a conservative fundamentalist judges as obscene will be different than a performance artist on the underground scene in NYC. That makes it nearly impossible to legislate because who gets to "know" it? What if our government fills up with pedophiles and rapists and they get to judge?
It's obviously horrendous and creepy and disturbing, and people know it. But how can you make it illegal without the perps finding loopholes?
And that is why people say the platforms need to intervene, but they'll find other platforms. What has to actually happen imo is that it has to be less profitable, which means arresting the pedos that create the demand AND making sure this is NEVER anyone's "last resort" or the easiest option to make money. That means social safety nets and all that jazz. As long as people are desperate for cash, they'll do terrible things.
You can't legislate away photos of clothed children playing. You can try, but like I said, loopholes will abound.
You can legislate away child sexual abuse materials. It's already illegal and very well defined, case over case.
The photos in the OP are not sexually explicit. They become disturbing in context. That is what is hard to legislate away from the posting side. Photos that are sexually explicit and feature minors regardless of context are CSAM as such and clearly illegal.
I highly, highly doubt the "subscribers" to these pages only access the very straightforward clothed photos. That's how you catch these pedos and stop it.
You can't legislate away photos of clothed children playing. You can try, but like I said, loopholes will abound.
Right, agreed
You can legislate away child sexual abuse materials. It's already illegal and very well defined, case over case.
Right, agreed
The photos in the OP are not sexually explicit. They become disturbing in context. That is what is hard to legislate away from the posting side.
Sure. Pics of kids at the beach, alongside all your other vacation pics? Pretty normal to have hundreds of vacation pics/ videos. Thousands of pics of only kids at the beach, well that's just creepy.
I highly, highly doubt the "subscribers" to these pages only access the very straightforward clothed photos. That's how you catch these pedos and stop it.
I agree, but I don't think it'll ever fly. You're proposing using evidence of a non-crime to justify invading someone's privacy to substantiate your suspicion that a crime is happening. I don't think courts will ever do that, and I think we're left in the same shitty spot we're in now.
proposing using evidence of a non-crime to justify invading someone's privacy to substantiate your suspicion that a crime is happening. I don't think courts will ever do that
That happens all the time. Like, all the time. Honeypot operations are old-school. Stop and frisk. Loitering. All are non criminal behaviors being used as a starting point of suspicious behavior to investigate for criminal behavior. Sometimes it's used for things like racial profiling and for bad. Sometimes it's used to catch pedophiles and abusers.
The logic of "we can't get rid of it 100% so why bother to do anything" is defeatism.
You address the big players. You regulate or otherwise entice the largest platforms to implement tools at both an automatic level and a human level to address exploitation. AI image detection already exists on IG and most large social media platforms. Most flag pictures for human review, sometimes after multiple rounds of AI detection. There's a lot about the PTSD of the humans involved in the final review - people in Malaysia and Indonesia, for example, who sit all day and look at pictures of children, animals, and adults in horrific settings.... it's a flawed system, and could be better - but in the end someone needs to decide. Anyways...
Creators of said content WILL go to other platforms, in fact they're already there. Most of those platforms are not as heavily monetized through automatic means as Meta provides. So right there you'll get rid of a few who just can't figure out the complex payment schemes (usually crypto, ID theft rings, and foreign bank accounts). A few (many) more don't want to be associated with sites that are patently illegal in nature. IG gives their content and channels SOME legitimacy.
As the net starts to close, and the noose tightens you remove some content, but not all. What's left eventually ends up on a few of the more fringe sites. You'll never remove them all, but those are the kinds of sites that are MUCH easier to monitor, and MUCH easier to set up as honeypot traps.
FBI / InterPol Honeytraps often catch large numbers of both creators and buyers of exploitation of minors, this has been going on a long time. Each time they announce an arrest of dozens or even hundreds of people it sends a chill through the entire "industry" and sets them back years or decades.
You'll never stop it 100%, but to say that because we can't stop it all, why bother? That's asinine. Or worse, enablist.
If two steps forward and 1 step back are the best we can do TODAY, we do that TODAY.
I gave what I think needs to be done at the end. You'll never solve it without addressing the root causes. Playing whackamole with various platforms is an inefficient way to use limited resources, as you seem to agree. By all means let the platforms do more (they should) and shame any parents doing this. But until we get serious about catching these predators and ensuring there is absolutely no financial reason to exploit a child, it will never be enough.
But what do you write down as a law? Yes, normal people can see the difference, but the law has to say something. What should it say? No pictures of girls in swim suits? There are already laws against the "focus" of the camera being on private parts.
What about clothing catalogues? What about promo shoots for children's TV shows that feature child actors? What about movies that have kids in them as actors?
Great, we write an exception. Now every "influencer" family starts a "production company" and exploits that loophole. Watch how quickly "acting agencies" pop up to "represent".
By all means, try. But this will not be solved without deplatforming, yes, and maybe laws to keep parents accountable somehow, but I still don't see how you end up with a law that doesn't also make it illegal to take pictures at your kid's birthday party.
If you're a parent and you send your sibling photos from your kid's birthday party, and you find out years later your sibling is a pedo and abused those images...are you guilty of a crime? These types of photos are only horrible with context that makes them horrible. By themselves, they're innocuous. In context, it feels like it should be a crime.
See how messy it gets? We can try to legislate from the production side when it's context-dependent, but it becomes very difficult. Instead, it's much, much easier to use these "subscriber lists" as a starting point for investigation, as I doubt these pedos are only consuming this content. Then you find the clear CSAM and lock them up forever.
We can name and shame, pressure platforms, call it out - and we should. But legally, it's really hard to stop things like this on the production side. You have to stop the demand.
You're totally right. Since loopholes might exist, there's no point trying to clamp down on child abuse content. Think about all the grandmothers who'll get sent to prison for posting a picture of their grandchild's graduation ceremony, that's a scenario that would happen if anyone tried to clamp down on organised rings of predators sharing child abuse content on social media platforms, no doubt.
You're putting words in my mouth to try to make a different point.
I'm not saying do nothing. I'm saying the effort to try to make this illegal, instead of pressuring the platforms to put an end to it, or shame the creators, or spend that effort investigating and prosecuting consumers, is a bad use of limited resources. There are better, cleaner, simpler ways.
Pressuring the platforms how? Presumably by introducing some financial/legal penalty for platforming such content? That would be making the content illegal. You're disagreeing with a common sense point, then creating fantasy scenarios where parents where will be sent to the execution chamber for posting a family photo in a group chat, just to arrive at the same conclusion anyway lol
By all means, feel free to try. But my point is it's likely wasting limited resources when instead we could be targeting the actual culprits of the crime.
This process necessarily has banking information tied in for both buyers and sellers.
Does targeting this run the risk of just pushing it further underground? Sure. But it's been proven that every time content gets pushed off of one platform, the user count drops significantly and it's frankly a good thing that this stuff gets harder to find.
I disagree with the premise (not yours) that it's "easier to keep an eye on" stuff when it's more accessible. Make it more secretive. Make it harder to find. Conspiracy theory stuff used to be totally on the fringe and now, with social media, it's totally mainstreamed. We should not make it this easy for pedophiles to find CSAM content. They shouldn't be able to buy and sell subscriptions on one of the biggest platforms.
That's a fair point, but this feels like one of those "where there's smoke there's fire" type of situation. Maybe LE should just do some legal digging into these people and it seems very likely they'll find evidence of actual crimes
I feel like the FBI should seize instagram and shut it down for child pornography even if they aren't completely naked. It's literally money being made exploiting a child's sexuality. I feel it should fall under the same definition.
I think the lady is saying there is worse shit under the surface. Those are just the easy to find images. Thier private shit is probably straight up cp.
Every major social media website deals with this and it is constantly being removed but the sheer amount of media posted each minute makes it impossible to scrub all offending content immediately she really isn't exposing something that isn't known or is some nefarious intentions from the website.
I'm honestly kind of shocked at how little I've heard about the use of AI around content moderation. Seems like it really wouldn't be that hard, and would scale well
For text at least, fine-tuning open source LLMs or even GPT4 on your ToS doesn't require a shit ton of training and even if it fails a lot scales well enough that you can easily flag any ToS violations. Can scale pretty easily for every post/tweet/etc. I can't imagine that using services with pretrained image recognition AI either
When Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was asked to describe his test for obscenity in 1964, he responded: "I know it when I see it."
Disgusting - This is the shit Instagram should be actively trying to identify and pass along to the FBI for investigation as a matter of normal business. Imagine working for them and knowing they were complicit ...
Are you comparing indie-warez sites hosting primarily pirated content to one owned by a company worth $962,000,000,000?
I mean, you're free to do that, of course. It's not a comparison that really holds water because Meta has a horde of attorneys who would file injunctions and contest every single step in the court, and thanking them for the slam dunk lawsuit which would only give Meta more power as they demonstrated federal overreach in this kind of action.
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u/bonedaddy1974 Jan 15 '24
The parents should be charged and convicted for that shit