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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

I'm shocked by the implication that there's so much of it - that there's enough to damage somebody's mental health. I'm sure numbers are hard to come by, but I'd have guessed that there wouldn't be more than a couple of these cases per month - the problem can't be that widespread, or you'd assume it would spill over into other areas as well.

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It’s way, way more common than you’d ever want to believe.

Here’s a starting point, from one very repressed culture where the act of going to the police puts great shame on your family and turns you into an outcast:

> There seems to be no sign of decline in the number of sexual abuse cases against children. According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, child consultation centers nationwide responded to 2,077 cases of child sexual abuse in fiscal 2019, up 2.75 times from fiscal 2000, when the Act on the Prevention, etc. of Child Abuse went into force. In 1,056 of these cases, the perpetrators were biological fathers.

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210322/p2a/00m/0na/01...

Please, listen to children and believe their stories.

Low frequency outcomes over large number of events can produce surprising numbers. 0.01% of 2B people is still 200k people. If each of them posts a single image once a year you’re still going to get around 600 pictures of child abuse per day.

There doesn't have to be that much of it created, if it can be copied for free, and someone is willing to automate posting it. Cynical-me totally believes there are enough people doing that to traumatize a human content-sorter.

YouTubes contentID system is quite good at detecting just a couple seconds of sound to determine if something is copyrighted or not. It should be quite easy to match copies of content and just get rid of it straight away, meaning they don't have to see duplicates. I would assume they already do this. Which leads me to believe there's actually that much content being produced, I imagine most of it is not produced in the West though.

There is a national database of child porn content that most big companies that host video and photos use (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al). It allows them to filter the known content. I don’t know how fast that gets updated though. The larger issue is the new content. Facebook makes it very easy to take and share video, and makes producing and sharing this content easier.

It feels like you are suggesting that under a certain amount looking at images of children being sexually abused or tortured shouldn't have an impact on mental health? For me personally I think even a single image like that would haunt me.

Seeing one image once will have an impact but probably allow you to still lead a normal life after that. Spending all day looking at that sort of thing over an extended period of time is much more likely to have serious long-lasting effects.

I don’t think there’s a magical line where it suddenly has an impact on mental health, and the details will vary from person to person, but there is most certainly a point where you go from functioning adult to justifying a formal diagnosis of PTSD or something similar.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve accidentally came across a few pics on an old hard drive I was given second hand. I couldn’t even use my computer for a couple of weeks and I can still feel the revulsion decades later.

I'll burn some karma here: I know one is not supposed to question down votes, but here it goes. Why would someone down vote my comment? If someone doesn't think it adds to the narrative, skip the vote. If you feel it actively detracts or presents a false narrative, down vote.

> I'm shocked by the implication that there's so much of it - that there's enough to damage somebody's mental health

And I reply that just a few images had an outsized impact on me. And down voted. Normally, anecdotal evidence is replied to with the general response that "the plural of anecdote is not data."

Maybe the down note is that I'm not referencing mental health? Am I supposed to connect all the dots in my reply and go from "if a few images can have a visceral impact on me, that it is within reason that much more exposure especially over time could lead to mental health issues"?

It seems like some of your sibling comments have similarly been down-voted. God knows why. I’ve upvoted yours and theirs because I consider personal anecdotes to be useful contributions to discussion. If discussions were to be based solely on peer-reviewed meta-analyses of empirical data, they would be poorer for missing the colour and detail – and far, far drier.

Here's a currently open job role for a content assessor at the Internet Watch Foundation: https://www.iwf.org.uk/what-we-do/who-we-are/work-us

The stats there say they've dealt with 1.2m reports over 23 years, with 560,000 takedowns. That's certainly more than a couple a month.

Are you kidding me???

When I was at FB ~2012+ -- I commuted in with one of the content mods on the CP/abuse -- and shit I heard from him was HORRIFIC. and there is TONS of it.

And with all the pedo-network shit coming to light these days.. child abuse is WAY WAY WAY worse than anyone can imagine on this planet.

Ill take your downvotes without comment as a tacit acquiescence to child abuse.

That's surprising to me. I believe you, but I'm surprised. I would have assumed that this information would have been turned over to the police and the perpetrators whittled out of the general population in short order.

They do turn stuff over, I have no idea of what % is though...

They should be transparent about it, IMO - as we really need a growing outcry on child safety rights.

We constantly talk about the rights and protections for all these various groups, yet, in really really dire situations like this, sex trafficking etc, by comparison is way more important than kvetching over identity pronouns and such.

We need a global anti-pedo-abuse force.

I am really glad you posted this, as I’ve heard similar from people within the org. It becomes hard to justify working on such products when you know you’re perpetuating so much harm, with zero interest from leadership in resolving the issues.

You might be getting downvoted by your former colleagues. Would you be surprised?

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