It's kind of a miracle that most of us people who got exposed to all that stuff are still sane.
Of course, this "third party" knows better, right.
How do we know this? All I've seen so far is anecdata. As my own anecdata, an ex of mine felt she had been traumatized by watching horror movies at a very young age. Many years later she still had flashbacks.
I don't recall there ever being a trending issue among psychologists - child or otherwise - dealing with clients who have been traumatized about the minimally restricted Internet of the 90's and 00's.
But if you don't trust this heuristic, then tell me - what distinguishes the belief that seeing horrible content on the Internet in the 90's and 00's led to a large number of traumatized individuals vs the belief that the ready availability of horrible content hurt a statistically negligible number of people and that it was a significant net benefit?
Actions and policies should be based on something more than intuition and belief alone.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-mod...
I'm an extremely liberal-libertarian free speech and free information advocate. I grew up in a world where as a 12 year old, on IRC, in 1992, I had people sending me fetish porn and child porn, and I developed the belief at that age that that was fine, if you were 12, you had the right to see anything you could, including other 12 year olds naked. But this was not something most 12 year olds were exposed to, and by the time I was 14 I was pretty clear on why they shouldn't be.
We live in a world where there is no such thing as a "ban". Oh, I know, I hated bans and railed against bans, and I don't think the government has any right to ban anything. But a ban is just an obstacle to people who want to violate the norm. A ban is only a way for societies to set up barriers between people and bad shit which is bad for society, and sometimes it's okay for there to be barriers. In 1992, the reason most kids were basically incredibly innocent and had never seen any porn at all at 12 years old, was that the barriers to it were reasonably high. If you were some kind of command line warrior child who could figure out IRC over dialup, then yeah, people would literally mail you brown paper boxes with porn tapes on VHS.
There are, actually, boundaries on what is too traumatic to show someone. Personally, I'd like to obliterate the behavior that fuels those things, rather than need to address the downstream issues of people seeing them. But there are things that are poisonous to society because they poison individuals, and there's a role for society and government to play in prohibiting those things, or at least preventing their spread as much as possible.
There is evil in the world, and it is sometimes necessary to stop it. Free information is not an unalloyed good.
That said, to say they do not influence you in any way is to deny all of advertising, if not the basic reality that the stimuli to which we are exposed in life are the primary thing that shape us beyond our genetics.
Do they make you more likely to feel detachment at the thought of horrors being inflicted upon others, does that influence your career path or political leanings?
The number of times I've seen a commercial for pizza or taco bell or seen a food mentioned on a tv show or movie and thought "hmm that sounds good right now, i'm gonna order that" is way more than 0.
To be clear, I'm against any censorship of violent video games, movies, art, etc.
You can of course argue that school shooters and Stephen Miller would do what they do without all the media (social or not) they've consumed.
That said, what are we, after all, other than some sort of combination of our genetics and environment?
It's hard to argue that there isn't some sort of link between the mention of taco bell and me immediately doordashing it, which makes it hard to reconcile the two positions.
Are you asking for evidence that humans tend to emulate what they see other humans do?
Are you asking the more direct classic question of if there's evidence that violent media correlates with violent acts?
You want evidence that rises to the level of establishing "causality" in consideration of a natural experiment that is being run across all of humanity simultaneously?
What populations are protected from violent media?
How would you even disentangle all the countless confounding factors?
The arguments here are well-worn by the industries that peddle in these types of media, with obvious incentives, and obvious incentives on our side as consumers to not be restricted from consuming whatever we enjoy.
This is why I spent so much time referencing all the other ways in which humanity tends to emulate the behavior of other humans or be influenced by advertising/media, as it seems unlikely that these tendencies would suddenly cease around the sole category of "violent media".
Your argument has no strong data to back it up.
Goatse has been online for thirty years and I’ve never seen anybody say “I would definitely have never tried that if nobody showed me that website”
It’s not really something anybody could just replicate on a whim. It is not like ordering taco bell
I don’t think that is true. Advertising relies on manufactured needs, portraying the hawked goods and services as things one needs to live a comfortable, easy, pleasurable or socially worthy life.
None of that resonates with shock content.
As an extreme example, you supposedly can’t sell guns by showing pictures of gun suicide victims. This is also why some governments require tobacco products to feature gruesome images of smoker lungs, cancer, etc. Ironically, kids in those countries have started collecting and trading those images cut out from tobacco packages.
Curiosity lands squarely opposite of control.
From another angle, OP's article mentioned something akin to sexual awakenings related to the content they trafficked in.
You can see how popular suicide drone footage out of Ukraine is, there is a large contingent of people eating that stuff up, cheering it on, despite watching a man desperately beg for his life as a drone circles him, toying with him, before going for his head and the feed blacking out being about as grim as it gets.
People are creating games now to replicate the experience. People want to drive drones into other people's heads, all along a spectrum from watching it on youtube, playing a video game, to joining the ukrainian effort and actually performing the act in real life.
My experience is you can find a customer for just about any content, including shock content. Some messages have broader appeal for sure, but even the worst thing you can imagine will have someone with whom it resonates.
It's clear that people are influenced by their environment, and things that were once considered grotesque and unacceptable can be watered down over time with exposure to where, for example, rapists and pedophiles can openly win presidential elections and be placed on the Supreme Court. To where large portions of nations rationalize and support genocide, or any horrible thing you can imagine, even when presented with images of the suffering inflicted.
Humans are malleable and you don't have to have a perfectly crafted advertising campaign to have some people decide they like what they're seeing and want to replicate it, no matter what it is.
My point was that it doesn’t resonate with the principles of advertising. Certainly shock content can resonate with an audience, as well as create demand and desire to emulate: just look at the success of the Jackass franchise.
The kids aren’t buying tobacco because of the images, though — very few if any adults are either. I would assume they’re cutting out their collections from discarded packaging, and that they would not want to emulate lung cancer even if they saw pictures of it.
Purely guessing here, but it doesn’t seem likely that content on rotten.com would have led anyone, let alone masses of people, to become human butchers: in the OP article, the desire to emulate was limited to building narratives around the content.
Crime scene investigator or trauma surgeon, maybe those are more likely outcomes.
But lots of people seeing lots of horrible things, if it doesn't traumatize them, can desensitize them. There are plenty of freedoms that also cause harm. That doesn't mean the freedoms should be taken away, but it means that the "third party" is often correct. Society in a free country calls its own balls and strikes.
Some things should be hard to access. Accessing some things should also be taken as a red flag that you are not OK. The rest of the people around you have a right to their security as much as, or more than, you have a right to your freedom to view illicit information. And I say this as a person who would absolutely revolt against any system that based that decision on fiat, religion, or unfounded hysteria. We all personally have a right to do anything we want that doesn't hurt anyone else. But if the "third party" you're talking about are your neighbors, and if they have decided that you are a threat to them, then talk with them.
This is not a lukewarm approach to personal liberty, any more than sympathy should be mistaken for weakness. It's an understanding that we also need a somewhat functional and coherent society, even if it comes at some personal cost, and that without that we would end up in a power vacuum that led eventually to us being slaves in a dictatorship like China.
[0] "Some things should be hard to access. Accessing some things should also be taken as a red flag that you are not OK. The rest of the people around you have a right to their security as much as, or more than, you have a right to your freedom to view illicit information."
Who should be protected from it, and by who is a different thing. I strongly against blanket restrictions, but one for sure they are easier. And they definitely protect people who wouldn’t get this protection in other scenarios, because for example their parents are shit. Another viewpoint is that probably this is the least important thing for people who wouldn’t get this protection otherwise, so maybe it doesn’t matter at that point. One for sure, there should be a better argument to restrict access than the currently provided ones.
I have no real interest in any shock video or shock image; but I reject any form of censorship even more so, such as is currently tried via age sniffing on everyone and killing off VPNs. The world wide web is currently privatized.
Compare to now where kids literally have all the world's internet in their pockets, they can watch as much of it as they like with very little risk. Like if you speak with primary school teachers they say kids share naked pictures of their classmates, because there's lots of online services that just generate nudes from a few pictures.
Like, yeah, information should be free for everyone. But I think our experience from the 90s isn't really relevant to the world in 2026.
BTW seeing death, disease, and misery was completely normal through entire human history. We live in abnormally safe times. Maybe there is some mechanism akin to allergies, where immune system cannot believe that everything is chill so it overreacts to tiniest threats.
My kids do not need to see beheadings and exploding people. I could have done without that exposure. It was certainly traumatic.
It is actually a well researched topic in psychology. See “vicarious trauma”, “secondary trauma”, etc. - also, see PTSD from content moderation. Similar for war journalists. They can do it for a decade or two, until one story gets under their skin, and then they’re confronted with decades of material, which at the time of watching didn’t phase them at all.
The argument “but then we should see more cases” is misleading, because similarly to “a little spanking didn’t hurt me” the psyche is good at avoidance - with the negative side effects of that avoidance equally well researched and documented. For example, perception of others might be influenced without grounds in reality, and this wrong perception is subsequently passed on to children.
It may even have some positive effects, like preparing for real life events in a safe environment. Not all about rotten.com is about violence, it shows diseases, injuries, surgeries, etc... things that getting desensitized about may be good. I don't know the opinion of psychologists is on the subject, but positive or negative, I believe the effects of internet "shock" content are mild at best and interest in it not unhealthy, though maybe revealing of an underlying condition if done in excess.
I remember the camaraderie of discovering disturbing internet content with friends, but it was a specific bonding group activity, limited to a pc in someone’s room not a mindless solitary scroll
Some people just arent squeamish I suppose.
Can't speak to the others.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10009492/ - slaughterhouse workers
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12174799/ - healthcare workers