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Google and Microsoft To Block Child-Abuse Search Terms
mrspoonsi writes "Leading search engine companies Google and Microsoft have agreed measures to make it harder to find child abuse images online. As many as 100,000 search terms will now return no results that find illegal material, and will trigger warnings that child abuse imagery is illegal. The Google chairman said he hired a 200-strong team to work out a solution over the last three months. Google's previous set of measures, which displayed a warning to people attempting to search for illegal material and caused a 20 percent drop in illicit activity."
Fair enough, child abuse is universally against the law (unless there are a few countries without such laws on their statue), but by the same token murder is illegal the whole world over, and I do not see Google bringing up an "Illegal search" page if you were to type "how to murder someone", perhaps it will do one day...
Yesterday I was not allowed to take a single photograph of my daughter who was in a dance competition, to quote "in case it ends up on the internet". This memory (dance competition) will be lost now, because it was not recorded. There was even an announcement, make sure all Phones and iPads are kept in your pocket / bag, something seems very wrong with this endless search for the boogeyman.
You understand the difference between "visualising" and "raping", yes? Watching porn did not making you a rapist?
The issue is massively complex.
We like the feel-good measures. We "rescued 380 children" last week by finding people associated with a nudist site that had pics of naked kids. The news articles collectively indicate that about 14 children in India were "identified" (not rescued), and that a bunch of teachers and such were removed from schools. In general, the conclusion by the online community is that 380 children were under the purview of teachers who might be into kiddy porn, and so "we rescued 380 children!" In other words: no actual children who were being abused have ceased being abused.
The actual act of censoring child pornography is highly disturbing in itself. If we're assuming that people who have an internal thought and interest in children sexually are a threat, and thus making child pornography illegal, then we have two problems. The first problem is we're trying to punish thought-crime: child pornography isn't illegal because it's harmful, but rather because we want to punish people for having these thoughts we find personally disturbing. The second problem is we're completely incapable of pursuing enforcement against persons who we've deemed dangerous (for their thoughts), until they take some kind of action.
That second problem is exacerbated by one questionable hypothesis: with the pornography outlet blocked by being as risky if not riskier than sex, will these people express by child abuse? If they're trying to find satiation and weighing risk, it's obvious that your Internet can be invisibly monitored (and thus is extremely risky) while you can at least manipulate and control children if you can get them to keep secrets (thus the spread of information is slow, if not controllable--and it's absolutely more controllable than the monitoring of your Internet activity). So it's much better to have actual sex with children than to search for child pornography at this point: it's safer.
The above hypothesis is questionable for two reasons. First: we know that exposure to pornography and other visual effects provides comfort. People start looking at perverse stuff online, then they start watching gay porn, they move to bath houses and start experimenting with homosexuality... it happens, it's a common pattern, and a lot of straight men (and women) have experimented with homosexuality or bondage or whatnot by the cycle of introduction (initial thought or suggestion), curiosity, exposure, and then action. Thus we have another questionable hypothesis: that watching child pornography may acclimate a person to action, leading to actual child sex interactions.
Another problem: action may come in different forms. Wired ran an article about online sex roleplay services, including everything from vanilla stuff to furry MUCKs (hilarity ensued: apparently a lot of not-furries got on furry sex mucks and were culture shocked). Common sexual exploration includes everything from furry fandom to group sex to, yes, underage roleplay. There are also real-world analogues of this: people actually roleplay scenarios, everything from teacher-student (college) to maids to rape play, up to and including finding young (18-20) and/or young-looking girls who can dress up as even younger girls. Schoolgirl roleplay is common; I've even known a number of girls who, in a nutshell, had the body of a thirteen year old when they were 25-ish--they could dress enough to look young-20s, but if you threw one in jeans and a t-shirt and tennis shoes you would swear she's got to be 12, *maybe* 13. That means there are many perfectly legal ways to act on these fantasies directly.
So we have a complicated net of censorship, inaction, thoughtcrime, opposing psychological theories on whether outlets help or lead to bigger crimes, and outlets that are physical but provide a harmless mechanism of action. We could also get into some social considerations like the abridged rights of minors and the philosophical concern of this whole age-of-majority thing: apparently minors don't
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