I guess when your fetish is so weird it's not even really sexual, you can trick kids into doing something that is pornographic only to a very small number of people. Like, it is really disturbing that some creep is able to ask a kid about if she's ever stepped on any bugs and that he's getting off on that. On the other hand, I'm not really that concerned about it. I do agree that you absolutely should not be contacting a minor for sexual gratification, even if they and 99% of the population don't understand how it can be for sexual gratification. But so long as they're not stalking the kid, sending messages back and forth asking for details where they live, or really doing much of anything, there are probably far more dangerous sexual predators on the internet to be worrying about.
You can worry about these people and worry about the more dangerous sexual predators, too--doesn't have to be one or the other.
One good reason to worry about these ones: they're already comfortable publicly using children for sexual gratification, who knows what else they're asking the children to do in private. The article notes that some of the comments left on the videos solicit one-to-one contact information, for example.
>You can worry about these people and worry about the more dangerous sexual predators, too--doesn't have to be one or the other.
Everything is "one or the other" -- opportunity cost.
Besides, even if you could worry about these people too, you probably shouldn't. That's kind of the message from the parent comment, and I agree. Where does it stop?
Hmm, yes, at some point, opportunity cost is a thing. I think there's a risk that that line of thinking can be very reductio ad absurdum where only the most gruesome of offences deserve investigative resources and all others are dismissed out of hand.
OK, I'll take a new tack and try to quantify it better. People who are grooming hundreds of children for sexual exploitation (in the open, no less) merit real concern. That the children don't know it's happening now is not, in my opinion, the standard we should use to decide how bad it is.
Rather, we can ask: what will happen if no intervention is done? The evidence suggests that they are being exploited; the network of children being exploited is growing; their exploitation leaves breadcrumbs for others to follow and potentially expand upon; and in the future, it is likely that some of the hundreds of children involved in this will realize that they were used as a sexual plaything.
Where does it stop? I dunno--I'll agree that this it's hard to find the right balance. As long as the bad guys are self-curating playlists with hundreds of victim videos whose comments include easily searched terms, I think the effort/reward here is likely pretty good.
I disagree - once you have used a minor for your own gratification you have passed a point that society really does care about - frotting for example is illegal, because of the state of mind of the perpetrator not the victim.
This seems like a really hard problem to tackle. The article kind of nails the problem in that none of what the children are doing on the videos actually violates any rules nor would it be classified as sexual in any way. There's no nudity, they aren't doing anything sexual, they aren't even truly saying anything sexual.
In a way this is the flip side of the "it isn't porn, it's art" argument. Not all nudity is porn, and not all porn involves nudity or sex. Trying to figure out where to draw the line is very much non-trivial, and is made even more so by the fact that exactly where that line falls varies quite wildly from person to person. As someone with no attraction to either of the fetishes (or is it three fetishes, are we counting pedophilia as one of them in this case?) mentioned in the article or as the focus of the videos I'd be hard pressed to classify any of the videos they're talking about as pornographic or erotic, but apparently there's a subset of the population that that isn't true of. Aside from banning any interaction between adults and someone under age I'm not sure it's going to be possible to prevent something like this from happening.
There's also the question of if we should be trying to prevent something like this. I know everyone's gut reaction is "BUT THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!" and "OMG! PEDOPHILES!!!", but honestly if the children aren't being creeped out or feeling intimidated and threatened, aren't being stalked, and aren't doing anything sexual, how much effort should we be wasting worrying about some weirdo getting turned on by someone talking about stepping on bugs or whatever?
Edit: I'd also like to point out the best way to help prevent something like this is for the parents to be monitoring what their children are doing online. It wouldn't stop all of it, after all as pointed out the contents of most if not all these videos seems rather harmless (which is kind of the point I guess) so many parents might not have issue with it, but they should still be aware of what's going on in case it doesn't stop with something relatively harmless like this. E.G. the guy mentioned in the article asking the kids to Skype with him.
The issue that the article seems to take with this phenomenon isn't that there's any harm being done (although some of the stuff with lego seems questionable), but rather that someone somewhere is having 'bad thoughts' about the minors involved.
But if the children were 'innocently' being actively solicited to make identical videos by other children, it wouldn't be an issue. It would just be children interacting socially.
Don't get me wrong, it's creepy as heck and I can totally understand the visceral discomfort, but the issue people are having with it is the prurient interest of the viewers, not the effect on the children.
This might sound weird, but I think the primary "victim" here might be parents, not the children.
Here's an (admittedly imperfect) analogy: There are a lot of reasons to oppose constant government surveillance, even if you're not a criminal. But one of those reasons is just the simple fact that, as human beings, we are psychologically stressed out by the fact that someone might be watching us at any moment. Even if I'll probably live my entire life without feeling any tangible effects of the surveillance, believing that it's out would be a legitimate harm to my quality of life.
Parents are entitled to be legitimately troubled by the fact that pedophiles are thinking of their children in their sexual fantasies. That's not "imagined" harm; it's real. After all, psychology is what it is, and it's not changing any time soon.
Of course, enforcing any rules/laws against such behavior will be tricky, but probably not impossible.
As it's true for all media in general,
never leave your kids alone with youtube, especially if only clicking on recommendations, even with toy videos. Things get really weird, really fast after some iterations.
Every small, in itself harmless, subculture apparently draws in some outright creepy to exploitive people after a given time.
There's also the fact that youtube comments are an absolute cesspool. I don't even bother reading them anymore because it's almost exclusively trolls and the scum of the internet that dominate there for some reason. Whatever the most deplorable, offensive, ignorant, or disgusting thing you can think of, someone has probably said it in the comments to a youtube video, most likely to a video of someones grandmother knitting a sweater or something equally inoffensive.
One could even extrapolate from this, that for emotional health it's good thing to postpone teaching that skills to as late as possible, or until Adobe VoCo ruins it for all.
When it can, detecting thoughtcrime might not be far off ...
AI could soon filter some of this stuff or screen it to alert humans, which will obviously be a good thing.
But I think it's up to us to adapt to new technological environments. Parents shouldn't be allowing their young children to post videos of themselves on youtube for a variety of reasons. And kids should be warned not to do things strangers on the internet ask them to do, just as we warn them about strangers on the street.
I dunno, when faced with a somewhat troubling and frankly just bizarre concept like described in the OP's article, I think a recaction of "WTF" isn't exactly off-base...
More than likely because your comment, while a reasonable reaction, isn't really a comment that facilitates discussion, which is not preferred and seen as white noise. Most people are fine with profanity in reasonable amounts but it should have more content. Reactions alone tend to not give a lot of room for discussion on the topic so much as the reaction itself, inquiring and understanding the commenter's position instead of the article.
Sure, I was even a little worried that it would be perceived that way immediately after I posted it. (Although my concerns weren't articulated to myself as well as your point.)
But at the time that I left my comment, this thread had very few votes and only 2 comments. It looked like it was just about to fall off the bottom of the front page.
I figured a simple "dude, wtf" comment for the (very) few of us who were participating in this thread at the time would be interpreted as: "If you don't know what to make of this, but you know you don't like it, I'm with you."
As it turns out, at least some of downvoting was due to some people's serious misunderstanding of the original article. See for example, aaron695's misguided comment below about "gay sex".
>More so, this is another Satanists/Rock and Roll converting our kids issue
No offense, but your post makes it sound like might have missed the point of the article. This isn't about "converting" kids to anything. (In fact, thankfully, the kids in this case seem totally oblivious to the role they're playing here.)
The issue is that a few jerkwads are sneakily tricking kids into saying -- or sometimes acting out -- things that titillate the jerkwads' sexual fantasies. It's troubling because someone is using kids as unwitting pawns in a sex game.
If we agree on the point of the article, then comparing it to "gay sex" -- which exploits no one, let alone children -- is, frankly, offensive.
You called it a "frankly just bizarre concept" which is about the sexual fantasy itself.
Using children is not bizarre, but a well known issue.
Once again, this is a 'please' think of the children' where people are attacking a sexual minority, over a issue that doesn't exist because they don't like it (if the minority exists, it sounds more like a flat earther thing to me, most people in it for fun / trolling)
Your Grandparent post is above water, and your complaining about it is downboted I guess because you were complaining about it not because of disagreement over content of the first post.
