Reddit: No More Suggestive Content Featuring Minors
First time accepted submitter say_hwat writes "Today Reddit announced that it has banned subreddits dedicated to posting sexualized imagery of people under the age of 18. Last year, the site came under fire for r/jailbait, a subreddit dedicated to posting images of people under 18. The subreddit was shut down, but many others, such as r/gaolbait and r/bustybait, continued existing or sprung up afterwards. The policy change today came hours after a thread on Something Awful called for a public campaign against Reddit's lax attitude towards the sexualization of children. The Something Awful thread creator claims that Reddit's administrators know about child pornography being traded, but refuse to act. Among others, the thread creator cites r/preteen_girls as being particularly egregious."
Probably a lot of normal people's reaction to Reddit's policy change is "You mean sexual imagery of children wasn't already against the rules? How is that not firmly established from day one?" Unfortumately, the Reddit admins' bizarre six-year acceptance of child porn on its site is reflective of an overall lax attitude in online geek communities. Rather than seeing themselves as what they actually are--just nerds running computers--they like to perceive themselves as freedom fighters battling all forms of censorship in the world. This lack of practically toward obviously illegal stuff leads to a lot of eye-opening attitudes toward issues of sex and gender. For crying out loud, Reddit's statement actually refers to this new rule as a "slippery slope," as if it's somehow more difficult for them not to censor legitimate information if they can't have a subreddit named /r/preeteen_girls devoted to underage photos submitted by creepy Facebook stalkers.
The lax attitude toward this sort of thing even comes from community leaders like Richard Stallman, who wrote on his blog that "[P]rostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia ... should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness." And he told an interviewer that people who redistribute child pornography are "not participating in the crime" and so shouldn't be censored. Hell, even bringing this up on Slashdot risks copious downmods from Stallman fans (it's happened in the past).
There has to be a line drawn between OMG-FREEDOM-AT-ALL-COSTS and posting sexual pictures of children. Living in a civil society requires some level of protection of the innocent. Reddit should shut the hell up about slippery slopes and do what it should have done six freaking years ago.
Now, if we could get the folks who market jeans and other clothing to teens to stop using sexually suggestive images of people under 18 . . .
http://www.busyweather.com/
How dare these creeps sexualize teenage girls with big firm full breasts? That sort of sexual attraction is completely unnatural and twisted. I'm glad reddit has taken the step of eliminating these pictures of fully clothed busty girls.
Next challenge: prevent men from looking at busty teenage jailbait out in public. These perverts must be stopped.
Being between jobs, I've spent a crap load of time on Reddit lately, so I'll try to give you some better context than you're getting from the other posts, which are almost all random speculation.
This isn't just about seeing sexuality in children or people fapping over misappropriated but otherwise innocuous pictures of other people's children.
The largest of the sub-reddits at issue, preteen_girls, featured a posting from a man attracted to his daughter (I would provide a link to this thread, but reading it once was enough; I ain't going back there). He received advice about how to get her drunk, how to gradually introduce her to some physical intimacy via backrubs and neck massage, and gradually escalate to fully sexual encounters. This is exactly how things unfolded when my wife was raped as a 12 year old. They're not just trading pictures, they're trading time-tested advice on seduction and child rape.
Oh, and the advice I described came from the moderator of the page.
That's the kind of stuff that's going on here. I don't give a flying fuck how you feel about free speech, or even child porn: giving advice on intoxicating, seducing, and fucking people is wrong. Setting aside the serious question of whether children can give consent in the first place, these people think it's fine to seduce and drug kids until consent is no longer an issue. This kind of stuff is wrong whether your target is 12 or 42. Knowing that people meet and give one another advice about such things in public on these sub-reddits, to say nothing of what goes in private between people who connect via these sub-reddits (because most people are still smart enough not to collude in raping a child or sharing true snuff on a public forum), gives Reddit both the moral authority and the legal imperative to shut those forums down.
Seriously, raping 12 year olds. Intoxicating and fucking your own daughter or niece. As I've already had to say once this month on slashdot, sometimes 'think of the children' is a valid concern.
If you'd RTFA, the most active subreddit now banned by Reddit was called /r/preteen_girls. But hey, enjoy your +5.
What's up with the moderation to this article? Everyone opposed to trading child porn pictures on Reddit is getting modded down, and everyone defending possession of those pictures is getting modded up. Please tell me Slashdot's moral compass isn't that horribly screwed up.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Agreed. I guess that's just the types we get around here.
'scuse moi, but just WHAT types are you referring to?
Tell me, is a picture of a little girl biting a banana considered as "Child Porn" ?
That picture may be just an innocent picture of a little girl enjoying a sweet banana, but to the minds of some, that innocent picture is "sexually suggestive" and therefore, HAS TO BE ABSOLUTELY BANNED !!!
Who is sick, may I ask?
The child, who enjoy the banana?
The guy (or gal) who took the pic?
Or the person who saw porn when there was none?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !