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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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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.