EARN IT Act undermines the privacy, security, and safety of law-abiding users
techfreedom.org
techfreedom.org
It’s probably a better political environment to push for restrictions on access to porn than it’s been in decades. Most people still don’t approve of it. The free speech justification for it has been knee-capped on the left. And there has been a rightward turn in views towards sex among #metoo feminists.
There's nothing "liberal" about porn. Porn is neither conservative nor liberal, it is libertine.
If your partner prefers interacting with porn to doing so with you, the porn use is a symptom, not the source of the problem.
And most additictions really are just a symptom for other problems.
I guess this is also a good time for vulnerability since we're talking patriarchy. I've had periods of erectile dysfunction and they almost always overlapped with periods of intense stress or depression. Other times it had to do with my diet. That didn't stop some people at the time bringing up my porn use, which feels really nasty and humiliating when it happens to you.
That isn't to say there aren't men who desensitize themselves, but I suspect that's more prevalent in young men and more of a minority in general. It is a provocative thing to bring up in conversation.
By legalizing it, you effectively add cost, or tax, and the illegal component continues to remain (unlesss you simply make it stop being illegal, and unregulated, which most people agree is a bad idea) and the market segregates the workers into legal and illegal workers. The illegal workers lives get even worse, and the legal workers end up losing a lot of their money.
Look at legal marijuana, or hell, even legal prostitution in places that allow it and you'll see that's been the real effect.
but that's the point, legalizing or decriminalizing the actual act enables the people involved to seek protection from the illegal components.
Look at legal marijuana, or hell, even legal prostitution in places that allow it and you'll see that's been the real effect
at least in germany the opposite effect seems to be the case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_Act
"Sexual acts in the context of a prostitution contract are now valid to establish claims for compensation since the law came into force. This has not only significance for civil law, but also criminal law (property offences). In addition, prostitutes can now regularly insure in the statutory health, unemployment and pension insurance."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitutes_Protection_Act
"effective protection for prostitutes is only possible if this work is legalised"
in addition to that, the issue i see is, how much control is necessary to enforce a ban on prostitution. i would argue that it is not possible without a serious reduction of personal freedom. legalizing it enables to focus the control on those engaged in such activities whereas the rest of us won't be bothered.
> Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 70% cellphone respondents and 30% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/235280/americans-say-pornograph...
Dunno about you but I never answer unknown numbers, and neither does any of my friends, or anyone in my age bracket that I know, or anyone younger (gen z), so ... "Older Americans say they dislike pornography" is hardly surprising to me.
If you look at the demographic break downs its only getting more acceptable.
If you look at the demographic breakdowns, almost all the movement is among younger men. Among women 18-49, it’s only 41% approval.
E.g. I won't do drugs, I do not like people who do drugs, yet I'm all for regulation.
Did you state the end of it backwards?
I don't do drugs, I don't like drugs, but I think the drug war is worse than the drugs.
If you place restrictions on possession of material, it would have free speech implications that I don't think are trivial. Sure, we don't have absolute free speech but then there would be a debate about what porn is and the worst part of this is there is enough porn out there already that a lot of people would become felons once banned. It could even be weaponized to destroy websites where users can host content. Porn detectors would probably have to scan everything and there would be a non-zero false positive rate.
If you use the internet to restrict it, you're creating this powerful device the government has to censor the internet. I think this last one is something the government is very very interested in having. It's just hard to see how any of this would improve people's lives even if you are totally opposed to porn.
This is a fully general argument against banning anything at all. Nevertheless, we ban things, and moreover, we do not seem to act as if act of banning is meant to be pointless charade.
We ban smoking in many public places, we ban possession of weapons by felons, or carrying them without a license in many places. We ban selling alcohol to minors, and we ban kids from driving a car.
These measures are highly successful, they resulted in great reduction of the banned activity, and most people would oppose lifting this bans.
In other words, the answer to the question “how banning porn would work?” is “very effectively, like most other things that government bans and actively enforces”.
Likewise, on the internet, for a ban to be effective, heavy handed measures will have to be implemented. For example, a legal apparatus for effective policing and enforcement will grow in power against citizens, edge nodes of a country's internet border will be monitored, personal information and identity will be stored and tracked, etc. The internet has many uses so even if you do not like porn, I think a porn ban specifically will adversely effect people's free speech rights. That is not necessarily true for other types of bans.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/235280/americans-say-pornograph...
And note the breakdown by religion--most of the opposition to pornography is religious-based.
What does that matter? The objection to pornography among religious people isn’t rooted in the supernatural or doctrinal aspects of religion. It’s not like mixing fabrics or eating shellfish. If you broke down the results by different religions, I suspect you’d find that Hindus and Muslims and Christians are all pretty opposed to pornography.
What you’re really talking about is moral philosophy. Do you believe that society should prioritize individual self expression and satisfaction, or collective duty and family formation? These are correlated with, but separable from, supernatural religious beliefs.
It matters because we have a secular government, so we don’t make laws based on people’s religious beliefs, no matter how popular those beliefs may be.
Religious people are welcome to live by whatever set of rules their books dictate, as long as doing so doesn’t infringe on other people’s rights. But they are not welcome to apply their religious restrictions to everyone else.
I also think that “nonreligious” people tend to retain much of the non-falsifiable moral philosophy they grew up with, and that for purposes of politics, it doesn’t make a difference whether you call that “religion” or not. As a foreigner, I find the phenomenon of white people who start fights with their family for saying racist things fascinating. In my culture you wouldn’t do that because preserving harmony within families is highly prized. It’s very Christian, though. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” Similarly, American political debate about LGBT “human rights” is deeply Christian. People can’t come out and say “God created everyone in his image.” But they would flip out if you proposed a utilitarian calculus that couples who can naturally create more taxpayers are more socially valuable than couples who cannot. These people think of themselves as atheists but coming from a non-Christian country it’s easy to see the through-line in their beliefs.
This is a roundabout way of saying that I agree people who don’t believe in God can be moral. But I think that anyone who is moral has a framework of non-falsifiable moral beliefs that, for purposes of politics, isn’t materially distinguishable from religion. Certainly, there is nothing about our Constitution that prioritizes moral systems that arise from university departments over those that arise from organized religion.
For political purposes, Christianity is just another “ism” that motivates people’s political choices. If the government has the power to restrict access to porn under the first amendment, then it doesn’t matter whether people support such restrictions because they are Christian and think that porn creates social harm or because they read Andrea Dworkin and think that porn creates social harm: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/opinion/sex-positivity-fe....
What is not ok is for a bill to be drafted that starts out with “Whereas the Christian Bible contains teachings implying pornography is against God, and Whereas we seek to glorify God…”. (This is just an example to illustrate the point. I’m not implying you or anyone who understands our constitution would think laws should be written this way, but this is what a non-secular law might look like.)
Bills must be based on evidence. “Whereas scientific studies by competent and qualified scientists and researchers have recently concluded that exposure to pornography is harmful to children,…”
Again, I think we were arguing related but distinctly different points about the original “most of the opposition to pornography is religious-based” and “What does that matter?” statements.
It’s impossible to avoid basing laws on moral beliefs, because fundamentally, moral beliefs are directed to notions of what will make a better society. Your version of “secularism” doesn’t take non-falsifiable moral judgments out of lawmaking. It just gives preference to one set of non-falsifiable beliefs over another. For example, acceptance of pornography or sex work is heavily based on the idea that people should be able to do what they want sexually so long as there is consent. What is the scientific evidence behind that belief? There isn’t. It’s based on a moral belief about sexual satisfaction being an important part of the human experience, it’s based on a moral belief about individual freedom and the limits on it, etc. Ultimately, it’s a moral belief about what kind of society is better.
Some Christians might have had that belief, but many racist (and, years earlier, slave-owning) Christians believed the opposite to be true, and used the Bible to justify slavery [1]. Jefferson Davis was quite explicit about it [2]:
> [Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God...it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation...it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts.
When I say "based on evidence" I mean that bills must have some basis that everyone can agree on. People may not agree with the conclusions, but there is a firm basis there nonetheless.
It doesn't take a lot of imagination to consider the consequences of religiously based laws. Imagine you're a Christian in a small town, and for whatever reason, your town becomes a popular place for immigrants/refugees from the Middle East to settle, and all of a sudden your town has a slight Muslim majority. Would it be ok for them to vote to require all women in the town to wear hijabs in public because they believe God demands it? To such a proposal, you might say "that's absurd! God doesn't want us to wear hijabs!" There's no way to settle the argument, because there's no evidence for the claim one way or the other.
That's the problem with laws based on religion, and that's why our constitution protects against them.
[1] https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_slavery#Opp...
Imagine if Christians had a strong belief in tending the garden given to them by God, and it entailed a strong wish to fight climate change. It would be absurd to say that they cannot do anything in that direction, just because their reasons for this are religious in nature.
If you don’t like majority imposing restrictions on minorities based on their moral theories, your problem is not with religion, but rather with democracy.
If Christians want to fight climate change because they believe that's what God wants, great! They should seek policies to do just that. But what the lawmakers cannot do is write laws that say "the EPA must impose greenhouse gas limits because God commands it."
The lawmakers can have their reasons for the bills they write (they can believe it's what God wants, or they can know it's what their voters believe it's what God wants), but the laws themselves cannot be based on religion.
If you can't make secular decisions in your job representing all people in your constituency, if you can't separate your religious belief and personal morals from what is legislatively appropriate, then just maybe, you shouldn't be a politician. On the other hand, if you can act appropriately as a legislator, then I have no problem with a person who is personally deeply religious from holding elected office.
If you are a Senator or Representative in the US, you also represent the atheists in your constituency, as well of those of all other religious beliefs than your own. You don't just represent the ones who align with your religious belief.
So yeah, this is exactly what I was talking about: this is disenfranchising people based on their religion.
> If you can't make secular decisions in your job representing all people in your constituency, if you can't separate your religious belief and personal morals from what is legislatively appropriate, then just maybe, you shouldn't be a politician. (...) If you are a Senator or Representative in the US, you also represent the atheists in your constituency, as well of those of all other religious beliefs than your own. You don't just represent the ones who align with your religious belief.
This is just an isolated demand of rigor, it's a standard that you would not apply in other circumstance. Try making the same argument, but replacing religion with political party. "Sure, you are personally deeply aligned with Democratic policy, but you also represent Republicans in your constituency, so you should separate your personal beliefs and morals from your politics, and don't push for policy that your Republican constituents would not agree with". This is of course ridiculous.
You need to understand that what you proposing here is plainly disadvantaging (some) religious beliefs compared to other philosophies, and holding them to a different, higher standards. Why do majority of voters have to give "sufficient secular reason" for a given law? Constitution doesn't demand this sort of "parallel construction".
If you allow religious belief to be the sole factor behind legislative action, then you also open the door to a different religion coming in and democratically taking the reins of that action.
They also will heavily vocalize their opinion that no other religion should be able to come in and do exactly that. In the years after 9/11, they would harp about "Sharia law" and how it was allegedly "taking over parts of the US".
It is very clear in the Constitution that the government may not favor one religion over another. Ergo, to open legislative action to religious motivation allows any religion to do the same, no matter what. The US is pretty open about what it considers to be a "religion" as well, we're one of the few countries that allow Scientology to be considered a religion.
In the interest of identifying bias, I live in Tennessee, right in the middle of the bible belt. Thus, my opinion is indeed biased by experience in this area. I've seen how nasty and bigoted this neck of the woods can be, and these are the people that the region's politicians tend to pander to.
Nobody ever addresses the middle ground...the group of parents who have no objection to adults' use of it but believe it's not something that the developing minds of children should have unfettered access to.
I don’t think the commenter necessary would disagree that many parents _do_ want to protect children, but that so much of the electorate turns off their critical thinking skills when that sheepskin is used. They don’t seem to remain skeptical that the law could actually be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Or maybe I’m just projecting…
https://news.gallup.com/poll/235250/say-consuming-alcohol-ma...
Also, the proportion of people who find hate speech morally acceptable is likely much lower than 43%, yet that is still protected in the U.S. by the First Amendment.
An activity needs to be more than merely "morally unacceptable" to some people to justify banning it through legislation. You must also consider the infringement of personal liberties that a ban on that activity would cause, the resulting collateral damage, and whether the ban is practically enforceable. Prohibition was unsuccessful in the U.S. even at a time when the temperance movement triggered a wave of anti-alcohol sentiment because there were enough people who rejected the belief that others should be able to restrict their liberties based on different opinions on what is morally acceptable.
The social and political impact of mass surveillance and secret targeted profiling of human behaviors is unlikely to dramatically change the trajectories of the lives of people who are today adults, even if it may impact the way our state functions. But for children, having a massive corpus of data on their ever preference, with which to manipulative them as consumers and voters, forever? This is an existential threat to their ability to mature into free-thinking adults.
I don't mind 'think of the children' arguments; but they need to actually rationally consider the impact on children in the first place.
[1] - https://archive.is/20230504130057/https://techfreedom.org/ea...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20230504121420if_/https://techfr...
I happen to speculate this because I may have used tor for web crawling, which may have caused a specific site to crash before I cut back the crawl rate. Punishing tor for such incident is mostly FUD.
Statistically, it destroys lives and makes people miserable.
After it ends in divorce (which statistically is most of the time), there's all sorts of follow-up issues with splitting goods and the insanity that is alimony.
Non-fact-based opinion: Stable relationships create stable children, and stable children are less prone to predators.
Too many abusers have stable marriages. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turpin_case
I think it would be much better, and more of a longer term solution, to spend money on resources to tackle root cause abuse issues than poorly thought out privacy invading legislation that affects literally everyone.
My divorce example was to point out the potential for equally silly, poorly thought out legislation because divorce has a negative effect on children.
I think more money spent on boots-on-the-ground child protection services and education campaigns for children themselves, to provide them the knowledge and awareness to protect themselves from online predators, would be a longer term, better targeted legislation.
But of course the above is only a better option if you're actually wanting to give children a better chance at avoiding abuse.
Edited to add: I just had the thought that approaching any problem from a law enforcement angle is treating the symptoms and not the cause. It almost ensures an on-going stream of work because it just doesn't address the fundamental problem.
A law enforcement approach doesn't protect children, it punishes offenders. It doesn't make vulnerable children any less vulnerable.
A law enforcement approach is harvesting pus instead of attempting to treat the infection.
Er, what statistics are you basing that on? That sounds like an old stereotype, because every study I've seen on it says that marriage is great for mental and physical health.
> it ends in divorce (which statistically is most of the time),
More defensible, but depends how you read the data; if you ignore serial divorcees the rate drops a lot (i.e. if I'm reading this right, half of people who get married never divorce, but the other half get divorced and then keep remarrying and divorcing, which rather skews the numbers if you just count by marriage).
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
For instance, if the law was "No driving over 70mph on I-75", shortening the law to "No driving" isn't an improvement. And even if we maintain the detail and shorten to "No 70+mph driving @ I-75" it doesn't improve things.
Concise is good. shortness for shortness sake is not. We don't need to be playing code golf with laws.
Budget bills in particular can get really tedious. And any bill that, say, strikes or adds a word to already extant law, would require reading the entirety of the law so changed.
Forcing them the discomfort of having to read it out loud all by themselves should help greatly with that.
I’m looking at you former speaker of the house that said we have to pass the bill to know what’s in it.
Same with voter ID. It’s touted as “racist” although other poorer countries easily handle the issue of voter ID.
It’s almost as if one political party amasses power by continually brow beating their constituents into a victim mentality.
It's sometimes helpful to look at the name of the bill & assume that the bill will achieve the exact opposite.
> Can we make congressmen actually read the bills they vote on?
Most Congress members vote based on spheres of influence, not spheres of interest. The lobbyists that fund the politician's campaign tells the politician how to vote & the consequences of voting against the lobbyist's wishes.
Cattle, not pets.
Earn it has bipartisan support. Its passing is inevitable sadly.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/353...
That's a defeatist view.
It is quite certainly not inevitable. It can be stopped through public outrage.
Let's think of the children for a moment! The children in the EU, GB and the USA will grow up under constant surveillance. So much growing up today happens in connection with digital communication. To invade children's privacy like this is just sick.
The bill only creates a voluntary set of guidelines for companies, not a mandatory set of guidelines.
Companies would be motivated to adopt the voluntary guidelines in order to avoid a heap of legal liability, but this would only be a heap of liability by tech company standards and not by the standards of any other industry not protected by Section 230.
In other words, the fourth amendment argument doesn't really hold water. The data collection practices would still only be private actions, not state actions.
I'm not advocating for EARN IT. I still think the bill is terrible because it disincentivizes end-to-end encryption (or more specifically, it incentivizes bypassing it with client-side scanning). But the specific argument that it would make prosecuting child abuse more difficult doesn't hold water.
I think this really is the crux of the issue.
Whatever our various opinions, we can all seemingly agree that Section 230 gives internet publishers far too much cake that they also eat. And because the cake keeps being given out and eaten with no damns given to more finer attempts at reconciliation, we're moving on to responding with sledgehammers like this one.
This bill isn’t coming out of nowhere. Allegedly, CSAM is up 89% from pre-pandemic levels, which if true is fairly shocking and does deserve a response, perhaps in tech, of some kind. CSAM isn’t going away and every sane person hates it - so is the best strategy we can come up with, be to put our heads in the sand and say “but muh encryption!” whenever asked?
I would argue, no. We need to seriously consider if it is possible to come with our own bill, addressing the CSAM issue, so that we get to set the policy and not a fed-up ignorant Congress. Trying to keep things the way they are, forever, I don’t think is going to be a winning strategy. Both parties are in favor - so either we can write it, or they can write it.
Who is the in that 'our'? That's exactly what this bill is for specific values of our.
> "FBI opens settlement talks with gymnasts who survived abuse by Larry Nassar Updated July 28, 20224:27 PM ET (NPR)"
I don't know why it needs to be said again and again that the existence of criminal behavior isn't an excuse for warrantless domestic mass surveillance, but apparently it does.
/s
Allegedly. That said, the alarming statistic is used by people who have a specific agenda related to CSAM. It is not dissimilar how pro/anti-gun sides ( and many others, it is just an example ) cherry pick their favorite data/ranges and so on.
<< addressing the CSAM issue << if it is possible to come with our own bill
Not if it breaks some basic internet foundations.
There is a simple reason for it. There is a way to stop all fraud at bank. Stop all transactions. I think you will agree that while stopping fraud is a valuable proposition, the solution is close to unworkable. It is the same here.
In other words, in order to entertain some level of freedom, one must be willing to accept that some bad people will do some bad things with that freedom. That is the trade-off.
Now, that is not letting 'bad guy' off the hook. Police still has a job to do. What we do not want to do is create an easier world for police, but a more livable place for all the republic's denizens.
We do lots, including tracking large transactions. Most people agree this is a reasonable thing to do. Most people are, I suspect, more upset by CSAM than by bank fraud.
Just to add to this, you are conflating tracking BSA, CTR and couple other things and trying to fit it into CSAM.
<< should we do nothing to try and stop bank fraud?
To rephrase your argument, are we doing nothing? By your admission we are already doing a lot under BSA ( I would argue we do too much, but that is a separate conversation ).
The proposal for CSAM is nowhere near the level of intrusiveness that BSA operates at and BSA is quite intrusive.
> Of the 153,369 webpages actioned during 2020, almost half (68,000 or 44%) were assessed as containing self-generated imagery.[1]
I suggest starting there rather than my encrypted communications with friends and family.
[1]: https://annualreport2020.iwf.org.uk/trends/international/sel...
Calling fully intentional, consensual nude selfies or even sex videos created by teenagers of themselves "child sexual abuse material" is so very clearly a misapplication of the term.
That said, if those selfies do, by whatever means, get distributed beyond where the subject originally intended them to go, they need to be treated as...well, at the very least as revenge porn, which is now (fortunately) banned in a number of jurisdictions. So I'm definitely not saying this is a black and white issue; quite the contrary, in fact.
I do agree that "children" is too broad a term and that we should segment that population into different groups and focus on the younger groups much more than the older ones.
I can see a reasonable argument for "11-year-old girls shouldn't be sexting their boyfriends", but the way to address that problem isn't to treat them as sex offenders. It's to get the parents to be more healthily engaged in their children's lives so that they can productively teach them why that's not a good idea in a way that is likely to stick.
Edited to add: it also says in the report that the images are predominantly 11 to 13 year old girls. these are not horny 16-17 year olds sexting their partners.
It's especially absurd in some jurisdictions where it is explicitly legal for two teenagers to engage in intercourse, but if they share a photo of tits with each other other they've committed a federal crime. The fact we consider a photo criminal, when both parties are above the age of consent for one another, is a new level of absurdity, and things like the EARN IT act just make this situation worse.
I have a teenage daughter. I don't particularly relish the idea of her taking and sharing nude photos because I know that the Internet is forever and it will eventually get out and cause her harm. Nonetheless, there is very little I can do to stop it short of blocking her from using technology altogether. What I would like even less is if the company I buy her phone from decides to be a busybody and reports her to the feds for taking a nude photo of herself and then she ends up with a felony record and registered as a sex offender for the rest of her life for getting a bit too spicy in text messages with her boyfriend.
I don't understand how anyone could classify this as CSAM.
I would strongly suspect 11 year olds behaving in a sexual manner likely did not receive good parental instruction. On the other hand, we have an epidemic of broken homes in this country, so it's unsurprising that this is also the case. I do not think that it necessarily indicates a situation anymore dangerous than the norm, which is that many kids are neglected because they don't have active engaged parents, and they may be exposed to things which are inappropriate for their age due to the circumstances of poverty.
I didn't grow up well-to-do, and I got to be exposed to some pretty gnarly things at 10-11 that thankfully my daughter has never been exposed to, because I was able to provide a better life for her. Unfortunately there are many 11 year olds that will be exposed to horrible things, and that will have an impact on their life. I don't want these things to happen, and I have taken every step I can to make sure my own daughter is not exposed to the same things I was exposed to seeing, much of which was a simple consequence of growing up in poverty in a bad part of town (such as seeing someone OD and die at a bus stop on my way home from school).
That's all we really can do in this situation, is be better parents, there's no meaningful way that society can step in for children with disengaged parents unless we want to criminalize it and institutionalize the children. As someone who also got to experience "the system" for children in this country, it's actually far worse than having an overworked single parent who lets you use the internet unsupervised and wander around on your own while they're at work.
What we're dancing around though, is that there are actual pedophiles on the Internet that would like nothing more than to have the 11-year send them underwear, or even fully-nude pics. That's what the 11-13 year old needs protection from.
And keep in mind, pediatricians now recommend starting to talk to your kids about sex and consent starting at age five.
https://mcpress.mayoclinic.org/parenting/when-to-start-talki...
Punishing that 11-year old, charging them as a sex-offender, when they were the one that took the picture, makes zero sense though.
> A child should be aware of their consent to being touched or handled — or their space being invaded — from age 5.
> sexual health education has traditionally been timed to coincide with puberty
It seems like an attempt to inject a pediatrician with a book on sex ed in aspect of kids health, where common sense would suffice.
At face value, the idea that this specific age group is sending more such photos than the older cohort is surprising enough I would reject it as bad data without further research into why it is happening. Selection bias seems a much more likely explanation.
I do happen to think this kind of privacy is important, but I also recognize that non-actionable alternatives won't get much traction.
[0]- OK, there are some the parents can take, but asking hundreds of millions or billions of people to act individually is not an effective way to solve a systemic issue.
[1] Jurisdictions vary wildly in how they prosecute this but many seem to have funny age combinations where e.g. a 13yo sending an explicit image to a 14yo means the 13yo can't be charged for producing CSAM but the 14yo committed a felony by possessing it. Some jurisdictions have charged people for sex trafficking themselves in these situations. It's all pretty insane if you ask me.
Edit: Worth pointing out that the organizations that push hardest for legislation like this (mostly christian fundamentalists) also care the least about these side-effects, because sex before marriage is a sin and ought to be illegal anyway. A conspiracy theorist would hypothesize that these side-effects are actually the intended main effect for those groups.
Worth noting that the rates of pedophilia among public schoolteachers is actually higher. Actually, many, many times more likely.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/has-media-ignored-sex-abuse-in-...
This isn’t even getting into social media, and also spread of attention problems and screens. But in a way, I sense most parents were not yet adjusted to the new reality of the internet in the last 2 decades, and we’re all playing catch up for regulation.