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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29424 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Can anyone explain to me why the standard arguments for criminalizing consumption of child pornography don't generalize also to the consumption of terrorist "beheading videos" that were very popular several years back?

  • The revictimization argument (that consuming child pornography revictimizes the victim) obviously applies also to beheading videos. (Some might argue that as the beheaded are deceased, they can't be victimized again, so such videos should be permitted— which would lead to the absurd conclusion that a CP video that also depicts murder of the victim should be permitted, since, by their own logic, dead children can't be revictimized!)

  • likewise for the argument "by consuming it you incentivizes the further production of such videos and hence further victimization".

  • as for the argument that "consuming such videos makes one more likely to commit the crime depicted in them", I can see some intuitive plausibility in the idea that consumption of CP is more likely to turn the consumer into a criminal than consumption of beheading videos. If I know nothing else about someone X except that X consumes CP, then other things being equal I find myself perceiving X to be more dangerous, and more disinclined to associate with X than if I know nothing about X except that X consumes beheading videos. However I do wonder how much of this asymmetry is due to the fact that consumption of CP is already a crime, so it's difficult to imagine someone who does it but who doesn't have dangerous criminal tendencies.

Isn't the primary difference that there is no commercial market for beheading videos? Beheading videos are mostly produced and circulated for free release by terrorist groups. Child pornography that circulates is often produced or circulated for the purpose of either selling access to it, or for the purpose of bartering access to it in exchange for other child pornography. There is no argument that beheading videos lead to more beheadings, there is a plausible argument that allowing child pornography leads to more child pornography.

Sometimes footage of people being killed finds its way into commercial releases:

Has it ever even been alleged that a murder was committed for the purpose of filming it?

Maybe some of the Livestream killers we've seen?

Terrorism would lose its purpose, if it didn't receive media coverage. Yet journalists reporting on crime committed by criminals seeking notoriety aren't prosecuted.

Consider also that the authorities with the power to do so are often uninterested in tamping down on ISIS snuff films.

I'm not sure if I understand the question. If you mean "has it ever been alleged that a murder was committed for the specific purpose of filming it for commercial release?", I believe the answer is no. My understanding is that every alleged "snuff film" turns out to fail one of the two criteria: either it isn't a real murder but just an unusually convincing special effects job; or it is a real murder, but it wasn't filmed specifically for commercial release (e.g. ISIS and cartel beheading videos are intended to be released but not sold; serial killers filming their kills but never intending to release them at all).

But if you're asking "has a murder ever been committed for the purpose of filming it?", I think essentially all ISIS or cartel beheading videos meet that description. Or at least filming the murder (in order to publicly release it and hopefully intimidate one's opponents) is a primary purpose, along with the immediate purpose of killing the person who currently finds himself on the business end of your machete. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if some of the people filmed being murdered by ISIS or a cartel did absolutely nothing to antagonise either group: the group just found themselves falling behind schedule in their content creation pipeline and the victim was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Now that I think about it, there are reasonable examples of murder committed for the purpose of filming it. And in those narrow cases, it would make sense to prosecute the channels distributing it. Publicizing ISIS beheading videos seems pretty bad to me! And certainly Livestream killers should be taken down.

But the contrast with CP still stands: while murder-for-content isn't impossible, it's less common than molestation for content, and certainly less common than filming molestation in order to sell or barter it. Prosecuting CP more plausibly reduces molestation, than prosecuting snuff films will reduce the murder rate.

I figure the two are not so obviously different in terms of raising appetite for the act depicted (though I don't have a strong opinion as to whether either of them does and to what extent), but a big difference is that in a modern context, violence is much more easily contained than sexuality. Slippery slopes from friendly interactions to flirtation to superficial physical acts to sexual intercourse abound, and while there are instances of the endpoint of the slippery slope that society wants to ban (age difference, intoxication, force), it is rarely practical to ban everything all the way up to the starting point or far enough that society would be around to intervene. We can't stop friendly interactions and can't even really police the flirtation step, but by the time that step is reached the interaction has usually been taken "offline". On the other hand, slippery slopes from unfriendly interactions to fighting words to violent altercation to murder are much more rare and rarely taken offline (who gets a room with someone they get along unusually badly with?). Murder has other differences that make it unlikely to burgeon due to a small difference in murderous ideation, such as invariably yielding hard-to-hide observable effects (a person is gone); circumstances where all the beheading videos you binged bubble up in your head and you think "we both want it and I can get away without consequences" seem unlikely.

If this is the actual argument, it is unlikely that people would say it out loud, since it implicitly centers an image of an act with at least superficial consent (Epstein, groupies and Discord casanovas rather than the dragged-into-white-van-at-playground scenario) which invites a whole tangle of thoughtcrime (ranging from revisiting '70s NAMBLA-style activist rhetoric to something like "I hear all the rich and powerful of the world get to engage in this. It must be really enjoyable if they jump through hoops to do it despite the risks. Why do they get to do that and I don't?"). So instead, they would resort to fielding the arguments that you list, which are socially unimpeachable but do not actually reflect the true target or expected mechanism of action of any anti-CP policy. As evidence, I don't recall "rape is actually about power" insight porn ever moving the needle on how much people want to ban CP.

One of the most effective arguments for criminalizing consumption of child pornography is that the consumption encourages production, including in places like the Third World where it is very hard for any law enforcement authorities to put a stop to the production.

When it comes to this argument, child pornography is not like beheading videos because when it comes to child pornography, consumption encourages production by funding it with money - however, people who make beheading videos generally make them not to sell them, but because of ideology and to try to intimidate others.

...to which the edgy response always has been that the government and MPAA should just set up a fully legal Megaupload for CP, thus destroying anyone's ability to get paid for producing it. Surely what's bad for the goose is bad for the gander.

In less edgy terms, making CP uncopyrightable and criminalizing buying or selling would have much of the same effect and presumably negate the advantages without needing any creature of the light to get their hands dirty. At that point you could at most argue that kudos/internet points for freely providing CP would also encourage production beyond what there would be otherwise, which seems like a bit of a stretch. Add a well-funded bounty programme to reward CP consumers if they help with tracking down producers and it's hard to imagine that the net effect would be more child exploitation. Some *chan NEETs could make an honest living beating their meat and using their autism powers to ID wallpaper patterns during the refractory period.

My sense from reading court documents (some interesting 4A law) is that just getting access to some CP is not all that hard. What is prized/valued in those communities is new CP, which does inherently involve new victimization. Warrant applications will say that they found such-and-such a server, and it had some 'examples' accessible on the surface, but you were required to upload new material that wasn't in their database already in order to get an account to access the rest of what they had. Moreover, you had to keep uploading new material every so often to maintain your account.

It seems that having this be inherently valued has a two-fold purpose for that community. First, it creates a direct incentive for people to become producers. Second, it serves as a 'law-enforcement filter', adding an additional layer of difficulty for law-enforcement to gain deeper access to the site. The unfortunate side-effect is that I don't get the sense that people are making large quantities of currency money by producing CP; they're instead gaining status and access in their tiny little community.

One of the main questions is to what extent this community value is dependent on the current size of the pool. They seem to like "new" and have these reasons other than the actual pool size to value it. I've seen some pretty large numbers in court documents about how big some of their pools are. Perhaps some of those numbers are somehow fudged (like how they talk about 'street value' of drugs seized), but it doesn't seem like the currently large pools that these folks are able to manage getting access to has yet become a serious impediment to them continuing to promote a local cultural value of "new".

I don't know for sure the mechanics behind how they manage to verify "new", but just from background knowledge of tech, I sort of have to imagine that AI gen is a much more serious threat to this local cultural value than just plopping up a Megaupload.

u/FPHthrowawayB argued at the old site that deep fakes are probably going to have pretty much this effect in the not so distant future anyway:

I do think in the very near future child porn will be naturally significantly reduced in scope if not largely eliminated by the general proliferation of deep fakes that are indistinguishable from actual CP and that society should not try to get in the way of this via regulating them (or requiring registration to view them, since that'll put them behind a gate that makes it clear they're fake, which eliminates their subversive effect of acting as counterfeit goods that drive the real goods out). Of course many if not most pedos will still prefer "the real thing", but if it's impossible to tell the real thing from the fake thing then what can you do? Are you gonna look through every clip of every single adult Chaturbate or MFC camgirl that's ever existed to find out if what you're looking at is an authentic webcam capture or a transformed version of an adult clip?

Basically, the "market" (which is actually, contrary to what most non-pedos believe, mostly a reputational and attentional market more than a financial one as most CP producers do it for kudos and prestige rather than to make cash) will be flooded by so many counterfeits that it will collapse. It will be so "bad" (or I guess good) that if most pedos knew it was coming I think many would try to stop it (as opposed to working toward it), treating it as an existential crisis for a significant sphere of pedo activity, but I don't think they can.

Here is interesting take from olden times by Rick Falkvinge why making CP consumption illegal has undesirable side effects - like eroding the digital privacy for everyone.

https://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/three-reasons-child-porn-must-be-re-legalized-in-the-coming-decade/

I like how both his and corey doctorow darkest visions of the erosion of the digital rights (privacy and general computing) may turn out to be optimistic.

Banning child porn is something different from banning a bunch of other things under the pretext of banning child porn.

If you're going to actively try to ruin the lives of 17-year-olds taking pictures of each other, or going after people witnessing a rape rather than the rapist, you are acting in bad faith, and the same holds if you're trying to set up a censorship regime under the pretext of tackling child porn. That doesn't mean you can't ban child porn without doing these things. Changing the law so that intent does matter is trivial and obvious. Yes, that means you might occasionally let someone off, but that tradeoff is worth it, exactly the same as for any other law. As far as this is not the case for child porn, that is the result of politicians acting in bad faith.

Censorship or encryption bans also don't follow from a child porn ban. We don't after all open letters to see if there's child porn in there. People may be getting away with mailing child porn, but the secrecy of letters is such an old established right that nobody would think of trying to violate it. That same attitude should've been carried over to modern forms of communication, but this never happened, and so now bad people can get away with doing bad things under the guise of "think of the children". That's the problem.

Beheading is political while CP is obscene. You might see a beheading on the news, albeit censored or with 'this content may distress some viewers'. You never see a rape on the news.

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