It will be interesting to see how far this goes, it's likely we'll look back on this as reddit's turning point - there is some really awful content on that site.
However it's ironic that people rush to defend linking to cam-of-new-hollywood-blockbuster.torrent as "just a link", declaring it can't be illegal because it's just pointing to a file, it's not hosting it and only a fool lawyer or judge nestled warmly in the pocket of the RIAA/MPAA could misunderstand this.
But when that link goes to 13yearoldinabikini.jpg, a collection of 1s and 0s on someone else's server, suddenly this Link is a tool of evil and not only must it be removed, but the community celebrates the censorship and nominates more items for censorship.
Child pornography is dissimilar to copyright piracy. Child pornography is in a legal category unto itself, at least according to United States case law.
"13yearoldinabikini.jpg" probably cannot be classified as a pornography. Most of the things they banned were probably legal (I can't imagine there really was a true child pornography subreddit). But I understand having these subreddits around was a slippery slope and some content might have been over the edge. And as was already mentioned, it's hard work to control it post by post. Especially when some askreddit post accumulated the infamous reddit-hivemind and they went on reporting every single post in "targeted" subreddit (whatever the content).
Banning child porn is hardly the beginning of a slippery slope to the iron fist of reddit censorship.
Child porn is probably the one subject that is so indefensible that no one in their right mind would consider it a great loss that a major distribution channel for it was turned off.
Not that I believe for a second that the degenerates won't figure out some way to either skirt the rules or find another friendly site to aid and abet them.
It's a good first step, even if it was made under extreme duress.
There are people on Reddit trying to make the case that (based on a study from the University of Hawaii), access to child porn (or, more reasonably, artificial child porn like lolicon) can significantly reduce the rates of child sexual abuse:
By the way, I'm not in any way supporting that opinion, just presenting the case that some people are making. I personally think there are probably better ways to combat child abuse than giving people lolicon.
Sure, I would bet that there are better ways to prevent child abuse than making sure that pedophiles have access to no-children-involved virtual child porn. But would it be an improvement over the current situation? I think it might; there are definitely a lot of anonymous posts on Reddit from pedophiles who use erotic fiction and lolicon hentai to suppress desires for anything involving actual children.
The broader question is: how can we improve the pedophile situation? Banning "questionable content" is politically easy, but doesn't seem to do much to protect anyone; as long as the stuff is being produced, there will be way to obtain it. It would be nice if pedophiles could get effective counseling to minimize their chances of molesting children, but currently it's very hard for pedophiles to get any sort of counseling without being reported to the police. That hardly seems ideal.
For starters, remove the mandatory reporting rules for psychiatrists. Currently, if a patient tells a psychiatrist that he has pedophile tendencies, the doctor is bound by law to report him to the authorities. This causes all of the pedophiles who don't want to be pedophiles to not seek treatment, increasing their risk of actually offending.
I don't think the mandatory reporting rules (generally) require reporting for tendencies. I think the common rule is a report has to be made if there has been contact with a child. Of course, pedophiles are so vilified that I can't imagine too many are knocking on therapists' doors asking for help. And those that do certainly aren't advertising it.
It does, but most states/countries have some exception. For example, here in Australia a psychiatrist has to report someone they think is going to cause harm to themselves or others.
I understand that you are not supporting that opinion, but I would like to rebut anyway.
Whether it significantly reduces the rates of child sexual abuse is besides the point. If someone thinks it's okay for one child to be abused so another may or may not be abused later, they need to check into the nearest psychiatric ward immediately.
We are human beings, for fucks sake. We should be holding ourselves to a higher standard than that.
Someone should make a site to permanently enshrine all the bugfuck insanity these people are trying to use to defend the indefensible.
Not to mention the sinister side-effect of allowing CP to reduce abuse- last I heard, much of it is produced via children from second-world countries. So in the end, we internalize all the benefit within the USA, and externalize all the suffering to downtrodden nations and their children.
I recently made the same distinction on HN, but there's not much point to it because the Moral Majority has made real discussion of CP so toxic that pretty much everyone avoids it. The situation is so bad that your very question might get you branded as a "pedophile". I believe that what Reddit is doing represents a slippery slope, one made out of legal convenience, and that the above distinction, rather than issues of copyright, represents the real battlefield for online freedom of speech.
Looks like the journalist didn't bother reading the study. The author fails to mention that where cp was de-banned resulting in a reduction in (reported) child abuse cases, that the reduction was temporary and was back up, and increasing, within a few years. Also plenty of correlation = causation going on in that article.
The author fails to mention that where cp was de-banned resulting in a reduction in (reported) child abuse cases, that the reduction was temporary and was back up, and increasing, within a few years.
How so?
The striking rise in reported child sex abuse depicted for the last half decade of the 1990s, according to notations and records in the Year Book of Ministry of Internal Affairs, do not apparently relate to the same types of child sex abuse recorded previously or afterward. They are believed to more closely reflect a concerted effort by the government to deal with a rise in child prostitution and the influx of foreign pimps, their prostitutes, and clients following the introduction of capitalism. This phenomenon seemed to be caused by the new economic situation and the society’s attempt to cope. Once the child prostitution surge was dealt with, the downward trend in overall reports of child sex abuse continued.
The author of the article fails to mention it. The author of the paper does, but fails to consider that maybe the decrease in reported cases in 1989 is just as spurious as the increases in the late 90s. The decrease in reported child sex abuse started in the 70's, according to the study.
Fig 1 of the report shows a continual decline, then shortly after the liberalisation there is a 60-70% increase in child sexual abuse and massive rise in rape ...
I don't find that report's hypotheses well supported by the Czech Republic study. Will be interesting now they've de-liberalised to see how things pan out.
They began on the slippery slope - they didn't shut down some kiddy porn ring today, they shut down something that might be illegal. You can see kids in bikinis in movies, magazines including by their parent company [1], at the beach, etc.
Reddit's got a lot of content that might be illegal, that few people would be sad to see gone, and that the community as a whole would be a better class of people without.
"I would think banning something that may be illegal plants you pretty firmly on that slippery slope … "
Not sure I agree there. A forum (non-tech, it's actually a model-specific motorcycle forum) that I'm involved in has explicit rules against discussion of "politics, firearms, and police", not because it's illegal, but because there's such a strong track record of well intentioned discussions of those topics degenerating into arguments and fights that are _clearly_ not worth whatever "benefit" the free and open discussion of those topics on a motorcycle forum might have.
Whether or not you agree that grey-area images of children are technically legal, the owners/admins of Reddit clearly have the right to say "legal or not, we choose not to host those images/discussions here." You wouldn't expect a church or McDonalds to feel happy with you arranging a group of friends to meet there and swap bikini model photos - even if they're completely legal images, they're inappropriate for someone else's venue and they've got every right to say "not here, please". (and have you moved along if you persist).
I think fears of "slippery slopes" here are unfounded.
I think it's different when the rules are explicit from the start like in most forums, versus Reddit's case of actively upholding free speech and the right to like and link to (sometimes really) gross stuff.
So you believe teen girls in swimsuits is child porn? I'm sure you can find these same pictures all over facebook, should facebook remove those "child porn" images too?
There is a difference between making something illegal and moderating a private site. Eg. I'm for freedom of speech but I'm not allowing anyone with swastika tattoos in to my house.
It's surprisingly hard to come up with a balanced version of such rules.
Using your example: What about a follower of the religion that symbol was stolen from? Or a hard core gamer with image of a dieing SS member from Wallenstein.
As to Reddit, stock footage of Wimbledon can be less the wholesome content for people with a certain mindset. Let alone Posters from any number of bands etc. Personally, I would suggest playing it extremely safe, but at some point you need to find an arbitrary line based not one what's bad but something that says 'this' is OK. Or there is a steady march to ban an ever wider swath of content. How could she be so shameful as to show her wrists in public.
> Or there is a steady march to ban an ever [wider?] swath of content.
That would actually be alarming if it were a government we were talking about here. Who cares if some privately owned web site starts "censoring" (a ridiculous bastardization of what that word is actually intended to convey, btw) its users? Surf somewhere else.
Sure, as a user it's not really an issue. But, someone set's a policy to be administered by unpaid community members and for them it's a tricky subject.
PS: There are literally people that will be offended from pictures of female wrists, others get offended if your not willing to show such things. So at some point you need to say _ people will be offended and that's OK.
>It's surprisingly hard to come up with a balanced version of such rules.
It doesn't have to be balanced or even consistent, if people think reddit is getting to oppressive they can start using (or create) a different site. I don't see them loosing many users over this, at least not the kind of users you want to have.
"It's surprisingly hard to come up with a balanced version of such rules."
Unless you're satisfied that the occasional "false positive" is an acceptable side effect. Sure, a "no swastika tattoos in my house" rule _might_ mean I (or the OP) end up not becoming friends with an edge-case - and that might be sad, but if the flipside is having to go to a lot of extra effort to find some more specific way of screening the neo-nazis who outnumber the edge-cases 1000:1, maybe that's a choice I'd reluctantly make.
Sorry strange-religion-guy and artisticly-dubious-gamer-dude - you might just end up "collateral damage" in my fight to simplify my life.
OK, so Hindu isn't that "strange", but I tend to doubt very many Hindus have swastika tattoos without also falling into the "strange-religion-guy" circle on the Venn diagram...
(But I also fail because of the "not every neo-nazi has a swastika tattoo either" thing...)
Actually, the swastika is used to bless things in Hinduism. When my parents bought a car, they put a swastika on it while the priest prayed over it. I had to point out that they might want to move that indoors somewhere before they got reported to the police by someone who didn't know what they were looking at (when the Nazi's stole the symbol, they mirrored it).
Generally speaking, though, dealing with things on a case-by-case basis is the appropriate and intelligent process. You're perfectly capable of analyzing a visitor's swastika tattoo within its own context, and determine whether that particular individual is, in fact, someone you're willing to allow into your house, without having to apply a hard-and-fast a priori rule.
Unfortunately, as the Reddit post describes, dealing with case-by-case analysis of pornographic material posted to reddit was simply consuming too much time and attention from the admins. They could either scale up their staff for dealing with grey-area cases, at the expense of other activities they might undertake to improve the site, or they could simply no longer permit grey-area material outside a certain boundary to be posted on the site. They chose to do the latter.
A part of the trouble is that most reddits automatically show thumbnails of linked images and videos. Now it's more than "just a link."
Also keep in mind that there are no safe harbor provisions for CP as there are with copyright infringement. It makes no sense to flirt with illegality regarding CP, since one photo judged to be illegal kills Reddit.
Oh, I love censorship by private organizations†. Censorship is what makes my favorite news website great. Can you imagine what a mess it would be if every damn journalist could write what they wanted? Censors (commonly also called editors) are what make a lot of stuff great.
Also: Are you really outraged by that? What is wrong with you?
—
† I make exceptions for critical communication infrastructure that is owned by a single or a small number of private organizations. Reddit is not that. Not by a long shot.
Oh, I love censorship by private organizations†. Censorship is what makes my favorite news website great. Can you imagine what a mess it would be if every damn journalist could write what they wanted? Censors (commonly also called editors) are what make a lot of stuff great.
Not all elimination of speech is censorship, only if they target content that is consider "objectionable" or "inconvenient". Other reasons for eliminating speech (like not reporting the news that they were supposed to report) are not censorship.
If an editor eliminates content from an opinion piece simply because they consider it "objectionable", then it's censorship.
Are you really outraged by that?
Outraged? No. Who says I am? I do find it sad that Reddit isn't a place of free speech (as in, everything-except-illegality), but considering the subjectiveness of the Dost test, I can't say I blame them.
How many CP was really there is debatable. But I tell you this: if Reddit had CP, then Facebook is a major CP distributor, probably the largest in the world.
They applaud the censorship because the content is predatory. Even though images like "13yearoldinabikini.jpg" are legal, they are almost certainly scraped from some unsuspecting teenager's Facebook album. Also, remember to consider this within the scope of reddit. If reddit announced they were banning all subreddits dedicated to warez, most people would say "well duh".
Prey:
2
a : an animal taken by a predator as food
b : one that is helpless or unable to resist attack : victim <was prey to his own appetites>
In this case, the prey are unsuspecting teenage girls who are powerless to prevent horny men from prowling their Facebook profiles for photos to circulate into underage spank banks (or for personal use).
Most rules and mores are arbitrary in nature and only gain meaning in our capacity to uphold them. They're handicaps we place on ourselves. If that doesn't make sense, read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle
However it's ironic that people rush to defend linking to cam-of-new-hollywood-blockbuster.torrent as "just a link", declaring it can't be illegal because it's just pointing to a file, it's not hosting it and only a fool lawyer or judge nestled warmly in the pocket of the RIAA/MPAA could misunderstand this.
But when that link goes to 13yearoldinabikini.jpg, a collection of 1s and 0s on someone else's server, suddenly this Link is a tool of evil and not only must it be removed, but the community celebrates the censorship and nominates more items for censorship.