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Comment by tommieb | Hacker News Reader

Why is the media insisting on the vernacular "child porn" in usage and references to articles? It is child abuse, plain and simple. Something that is often ignored in favour of the former descriptive wording. Editors need to take note of it.

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I don't know any details about this, but is child porn or child abuse an actual problem on the platform or is the problem underage (i.e. 17 yr olds) posting their own nudes on the platform? Because, while not legal, I would not consider it quite the same as child porn or child abuse.

How would you distinguish between someone voluntarily posting/selling nudes and someone being coerced?

Child abuse is a much broader term than child porn, which is a subset of child abuse. Twitter had a more specific issue with child sexual exploitation as opposed to the many other forms of child abuse.

Child porn is much more specific and descriptive than child abuse. Yes, it's abuse, but when reporting on a story one usually tries to convey the most information possible, and using a broad, ill-defined term like child abuse would not cut it.

Also, historically in the US 'child abuse' has been the term used to describe beating a child.

I agree with your statement. To elaborate, the appropriate, though somewhat recently coined term, is CSAM - child sexual abuse material. Other coinage normalizes it or minimizes the damage from it.

> It is child abuse, plain and simple.

It’s “child porn” specifically because the vast majority of child abuse (including child sexual abuse) is not captured on video and distributed.

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