Children exploitation via YouTube
thespinoff.co.nz
thespinoff.co.nz
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.
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?
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.
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.
This is getting into a very thoughtcrime-y area.
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.
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.
Every small, in itself harmless, subculture apparently draws in some outright creepy to exploitive people after a given time.
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...
and I agree with you. WTF.
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".
Anyway, sorry for the meta-meta discussion.
But educated adults try to move on past that, rather than just calling people evil and add to the discussion.
More so, this is another Satanists/Rock and Roll converting our kids issue, that big media will now pick up on, le sigh.
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)