That lines creates justification for anything and even everyone to be banned, sadly.
>Is "Don't like X? Don't buy it" as far as we should go with... AI-produced child porn?
My line is "is there a victim harmed with the action". Shooting a gun? Yes, someone is often harmed and killed. We should and do regulate gun usage.
simulated CSAM is repulsive but does not have a victim, in theory. The jury is out on how you train such content, so I won't saw "AI porn has no victim", but the animated stuff within Steam definitely has no victim (and Steam pretty much forbids live actors of any form for such content. They dealt with such a case in 2023)
Thing is though, if violent video games caused people to become violent, Columbine wouldn't have been a rare incident.
But it's a difficult one. People play video games but for most people it doesn't change their moral compass; it doesn't make them think ripping out people's spines is normal or acceptable. It desensitizes them to a point I suppose.
Does porn, porn games or simulated CSAM make people normalize objectification and violence towards people and children? I can't answer that, and I don't know if there's been any studies towards especially CSAM since it's such a taboo. N=1, but 20+ years of porn on occasion hasn't turned me into some rampant sex addict.
Either way, I don't see the harm of forbidding it. The web doesn't lack regular pornography alternatives, free or paid.
I mean, this seems to be a pattern people have seen in many cases?
I seem to recall something about people in the military developing scat fetishes after repeatedly masturbating in restrooms that smell of feces, due to a lack of other private places?
The phrase “fetish fuel” is a fairly standard phrase I think.
Generally, it’s pretty clear that some fetishes come from somewhere. Like, the “woman turns into a giant blueberry” one seems to pretty clearly trace back to someone’s experience with the scene in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”.
And, like, if someone starts out looking at/for breast expansion porn, they’re probably going to be exposed to a far bit of lactation porn as well, and I think there’s a fair chance that they’ll start seeking that out as well? For example.
Why would we expect this pattern to not apply in the case of CP/CSAM?
The first is that you're banning free expression, and banning free expression is inherently harmful.
There's also the displacement theory - with the legal content being much more accessible and regulated to ensure minors aren't involved in production, it displaces illegal content that does harm minors.
This seems to suggest that broad sexual preferences are remarkably stable.
When a river had carved a canyon, it is hard to redirect it. That doesn’t mean the canyon was always there.
As for violence, that's because such acts on film were illegal. Pornography was tightly regulated before this era of free speech. Even now the UK, is constantly trying to maintain BDSM porn as criminal [1] and Australia has similar tight restrictions [2]. This is to say nothing of the countries where pornography is completely banned: China, North Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iceland, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Malta, Myanmar, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Yemen.
So if the question is why do you see more of Y in XXX, it's because it is now allowed so content is created to satisfy needs that were already there.
[1] https://reason.com/2014/12/02/uk-bans-fetish-porn/ [2] https://www.kptlegal.com.au/resources/knowledge/pornography-...
In purely hypothetical terms, what would we if there was evidence for this? I can see some folks standing by their ideals and concluding that even if this was true, we shouldn't ban these games, while others would conclude that there is a moral obligation to future victims to ban them.
How would you behave if you shared the belief that incest and sexual exploitation games influence people's real life behavior?
