Microsoft's Bing introduces child abuse search pop-ups

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Suicidemessageggb01252006....

...I suspect they want to avoid "copying google" yet again unless ordered to do so.

2015: Warning: _____ is illegal. Your IP address and search terms have been automatically sent to the Department of Homeland Security's _____ enforcement unit.

2020: Warning: _____ is illegal. You haven't searched for it yet, but your search history to date indicates that you might have _____ tendencies, and your friends include several people who have searched for _____. The Thought Police has been notified.

First of all, it is not at all clear that mere consumption of child pornography leads to the production of more child pornography. This gets asserted all the time, but I have never seen anyone produce a shred of evidence for it. Because people tend to see red at this point and stop reading closely, I want to be very, very clear that I am not advocating child abuse in any way. Rather, I think that focusing on consumers of child pornography is a waste of energy that would be better directed at the producers.

When I press people on this (which is not usually a popular move), the response I always get is along the lines of "they wouldn't make it if people weren't watching it", which is, in addition to begging the question, totally at odds with what we know about human sexuality in general. Look at non-pedophiles and you'll find no shortage of people documenting their sexual experiences in various ways that are never meant to be public. Hell, the whole "revenge porn" thing can only exist because people enjoy documenting their sexuality. Perhaps if you eliminated consumption of child pornography, so that the producers of it were truly shouting into the void, you would cut down on some of it. But that's not going to happen, and there's no middle ground. As long as they have some audience, those seeking an exhibitionist thrill will keep doing it.

And if CP stopped existing, would that really plausibly lead to less child abuse? I seriously doubt it. It seems overwhelmingly likely that people who abuse children on camera are doing so primarily because they like to abuse children. Yes, having images of their abuse float around the internet probably adds to the child's psychological pain. But that seems like kind of a drop in the bucket compared to the abuse itself, and the globs of shame and disempowerment that our society smears on victims.

And that's my point here. We waste a tremendous number of resources on trying to solve what is a fairly minor part of the problem. Why? Well, as far as law enforcement is concerned, I suspect that it's because it's easier to catch the consumers (there are more of them), and the rest of us cheer just as hard for either. As far as the rest of us are concerned, I reckon that part of it is that we need someone to pin our anger on for the injustice that's happening to these children. And, reaching into the darker parts of our psyches, we really love to see someone get stomped down, and not have to feel guilty about cheering for it, or worried that we might be next (for evidence of this, pick a random page from any history book and start reading).

Now sometimes, every once in a while, someone notices that consumers of CP are people, like you did. But seeing the cognitive failure is often not enough to recognize the damage that it has done. People's brains are consistency engines, and wrong ideas tend to pollute the ideas they're connected to, like a ripple of wrongness. It's natural, then, when you see a problem with the way people are thinking, to smooth over the inconsistency by saying "well, we should focus on curing them instead of punishing them", and to miss that we're actually focusing on entirely the wrong part of the problem.

And that brings me to one last point: pedophilia is very likely not something we're going to cure - at least, not until we're able to do extensive, direct brain modification. A lot of effort has been put into trying to cure paraphilias and sexual orientations, and it just doesn't seem to be something you can do.

But what we might be able to do is help people who are sexually attracted to children to find harmless outlets for their urges, and teach them to handle them without acting on them. It would also help if we could stop filling them with shame and guilt over something they can't control.

And it would help even more if we could stop filling the victims with shame and guilt over something they can't control. When someone says something like "child abuse is soul murder", we shouldn't let that slide, and we certainly shouldn't nod sadly in agreement to such a fucked up sentiment. We have to stop telling people that they're broken, that they're lost causes, no matter how much delicious anger at the perpetrators it stirs in us. It's selfish.

And it's also selfish to bask in our moral superiority as we obsess over the easiest and most futile part of the problem.

We do not, for instance, ban rape porn (yet) because there is no evidence it harms society. Cp is somewhat different because the children can not legally consent, whereas in produced rape porn the acts are consensual.

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22803502

Even on Tor... where do you find them there? It's not like suddenly when you load a site through Tor you see child porn on every site yo visit.

MS and Yahoo are implementing this in an effort to prevent MPs forcing regulation onto them. Any forced regulation will be stupid.

Google has said they're considering something similar.

I wish MPs would understand the vigorous efforts that search engines go to to find, remove, and report images of child sexual abuse.

We should all be conscious of the fact that any amount of "web usage" generates logs somewhere. How much of your details end up in these logs depend on what your system/browser leaks and how much detail your ISP has on you.

That sounds horrifying.

I agree that current situation doesn't seem to be working that well.