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Notes -
I think the matter is more subtle than this.
I obviously think most people can, on the abstract level, distinguish between real and fake images. However I'm not willing to use this fact to jump to the conclusion that most people, including many people valuable enough to keep in one's life, wouldn't have strong emotional reactions to some types of even fake images depicting a person, especially images of a sexual nature. And again however much on conscious level they know the images are fake, I feel like the reactions many people have to these images could at least somewhat change their attitude towards the person ostensibly depicted in a real and meaningful way.
I think most people think differently about a person after fantasizing about having sex with them, than they did before such a fantasy crossed their minds. I certainly think that most people would think differently about them, and would almost certainly in some unconscious way treat them differently, after fantasizing about such a thing 100 times. And I think as much is even more true if they've had access to photorealistic depictions of this fantasy that are fake but produced by something other than their imagination, in other words, images that are much easier for their sexual-lizard-brain to believe are real even if they on a higher more abstract level know that the images are fake.
Other than that, you're right that legally these things shouldn't literally be banned. It was a mistake to include that set of questions in the body of my post. And you're right that I think most of the online discourse surrounding the subject misses the mark one way or another, which is nothing new when it comes to subtle moral/ethical issues.
Aside from all this, though, the disconnect I felt existed in my intuition was resolved by another commenter, who described the delineation as such: anything in my head or on my hard-drive, and exclusively in my head or on my hard-drive, is entirely my business. But as soon as I i.e. start to publish online what is on my hard drive, the probability that persons depicted in even fake pornography will find out that someone has done as much starts to approach 1. And, that's where I've started to cross a line. This is more or less what the quoted 'steelman' arguments you found on twitter are getting at, even if still for somewhat wrong reasons: publishing that material, making it highly likely if not certain that the depicted persons will be made to know of it, is what is wrong, at least morally/ethically. By doing so I've made it their business, where previously it was only my own. Regardless of the particular way in which they're affected, that you might personally think shouldn't matter to them, i.e. loss of followers, family/friends potentially seeing it and not knowing its fake, or at minimum, that they just don't like having to know about it -- ultimately it wasn't necessarily my right to make them deal with any of these things, even if I think they shouldn't care about them. The commenter who described the analogy I found so apt likened it to fantasizing about a person sexually, and then directly telling them that you have, in fact, have fantasized about them sexually. Maybe you think they still shouldn't care. But as far as I'm concerned, by doing this you've made something that was formerly solely your business, into their business, in a way I don't think you should.
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