i read this earlier and it's cope, you might accidentally see something gross but you're not gonna get brainwashed into cranking it to child pornography unless you have a desire to do so. there is a very large sector of people out there who manage to watch a lot of porn and yet never become pedophiles and this is another british trick to repress and control what they consider socially deviant
I think exposure over long enough periods of time can have a normalizing effect on a person. At first, it’s shocking, but as things progress you get desensitized to it, you see it all the time, hear people talking about it, see it commonly on your feed, and eventually you don’t see it as a big deal. This actually doesn’t mean simply happen in other spaces like in the Alt-Right pipeline (https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10108/7920). You start out watching cute little atheist videos, and 18 months later you’re onto Jered Taylor. The process is slow and as it progresses the person maintains little of the disgust that would have prevented them from saying that stuff to start with. In the beginning, the apolitical centrist would absolutely not be willing to watch a Jered Taylor video. By the end of the journey, Jered Taylor might well be tame. In the porn space, you don’t start out with the violent, the child porn, the beastiality, you start with playboy stuff. But you keep going down the line and eventually you’ll watch that because it keeps showing up, and people you know are talking about it, and so you start watching it and eventually watching an old guy have sex with a preteen is no big deal. The internet has enabled a lot of this simply because of how it works. It’s mostly private. You don’t know what I watch. Therefore the shame factor never comes up. And because it’s infinite, you can watch it for hours and never catch onto the process of normalization until you end up with some sort of shock to the system, which by definition never comes because no one catches it, and the algorithm doesn’t care. It just wants you to click the links.
imo it can be both. there’s fault in the persons and there’s fault in the algorithms. to me, this a companion piece to a different article i shared about YouTube from a while back.
The difference there is the kids were just watching stuff. They didn't understand or seek out transgression for the thrill of it. here's perhaps a better parallel: TL;DR on that is what can and can't be shown in Australia is anatomically tone-deaf so it's driving labiaplasty as women are getting the wrong impression of what's normal. I could see the argument that if what you get out of porn is "being naughty" and "being naughty" used to be going to see "Deep Throat" at your bachelor party but is now swapping Vannable material on Discord then yeah, the extremity of porn could arguably be driving the consumption of child pornography. I'm not entirely comfortable going "it's driving people to break the law" because fuckin'hell I broke into a cold sweat the one time I got hits on a Traci Lords search but then, I consider myself to be a reasonably moral person and "I've been hiding my porn addiction from my wife" speaks to certain failures of character.
now you’ve got me wondering: is it the algorithm driving people to those discords over time or is it the traceability of the internet making it easier to identify those who would have gone unnoticed 20-30 or more years ago i think either way: give me more regulation of the pornhub, YouTube, hell even Spotify. especially Facebook. all the algorithms.
I can't point to documentation on this one. It's been a day of construction so I'm kinda wobbly. But I feel like I've seen ample discussion of the fact that "engagement" is not naturally something you want. It's a metric that has been misapplied. You don't want the hamster pacing the cage biting at the bars and endlessly grooming, you want the little dude chillin' out and running on the wheel after dark. But what we measure is the bar biting. The Internet has been about "engagement" since the dawn of social media, and that's a real problem. We don't go to the pub to feel mad and anxious, we go to hang out. "engagement" has become this thing that drives the majority of our social interactions. Everything we do online is valued by how much it riles us up. I used to get so bored I'd browse /b/. Not for long. It was legitimately evil. Ogrish had shock value but, like, there wasn't this community that just marinated in it. And I do think that creating an environment where doing more and more extreme things for kicks is going to end up with extremity.