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Comment by Amezarak | Hacker News Reader

I find this whole thing extremely tendentious. CSAM is illegal and people are banned from X for producing or posting it. Indecent faked pictures of public figures may be gross and indecent but it isn't clear they're always illegal and outrage is highly selective - there used to be one going around of Trump with a tiny penis. Anyway people get banned for that too.

People are mad at X for political reasons, and they think this is their lever to get rid of X. Obviously all social media platforms have people posting this garbage, and while they enforce the rules as much as they can, stuff slips through. X is not uniquely awful. It's just in the hands of the wrong guy. Elon may be a polarizing and offensive grifter, but I have zero interest in continuing to go down this road.

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I think you are wrong to see this as purely political. Women being portrayed as nude, battered, covered in semen, and so on are genuinely horrified. Such images would not be tolerated if they were sourced from a political ally.

Furthermore, I don't think that fake nudes of the US President are morally equivalent to fake nudes of minor public figures who are 99% women, even if the law treats them the same. We need to take into account the completely different lives that men and women online experience, where women are constantly subjected to sexualization and abuse.

This is one of those topics that discussion on HN is hopeless because women are so underrepresented.

They aren’t tolerated on X, people get banned for this. That’s why the whole thing is so duplicitous. x is not different from other platforms in this regard. Grok on X was also limited to paying users because of this.

Illegality is a floor, not a ceiling. It is justified to adhere to and promote a morality that sets higher standards than the law, including taking the view that creating and distributing indecent images of people should be prohibited.

Who decides on the morality?

Do you agree that unflattering fake nudes of Trump should also result in platforms being banned from the appstore?

> I find this whole thing extremely tendentious. CSAM is illegal and people are banned from X for producing or posting it.

Remember that time Elon Musk apologized for banning someone that posted CSAM and then unbanned them? I sure do, considering that was the reason why I left Twitter three years ago.

> People are mad at X for political reasons, and they think this is their lever to get rid of X.

I don't give a shit about X. Truly, I wake up and exist for weeks at a time without realizing the website exists or that anything happened on it whatsoever.

What I'm laughing at is Apple, who has had decades to forfeit their App Store monopoly. They didn't, largely because of pants-on-head stupid ideologues like Gruber defending their backwards logic. And then again with the client side scanning controversy, and now again when Gruber is mad that the shoe is on the other foot.

Apple is fascist. That's all there is to it. It's just a long, painful let-down for certain cheerleaders who really, really want to see the App Store used as a cudgel for good, vindicating the bootlicking apologists who put us in this miserable position.

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