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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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After recovering from yesterday's hangover I've got a bit more to say about this.

I suspect that one of the major drives behind this is the push to get more resources for addressing domestic/sexual violence treatment in society. The author of the paper has written other papers on domestic violence and seems to be undertaking a PhD on the subject. I've also tracked down her discussion of her findings at a criminology conference. She seems to wish to move towards de-anonymization (identity verification via 'government ids') and the ability to report perpetrators of DAFSV on the apps to the police which would clearly have a chilling effect on the use of the platform based on the nebulous definitions above.

When asked why LGBT+ people experienced higher rates of abuse under the definition she admits that 'they were perhaps using the apps differently' than heterosexuals and speculates that they were perhaps getting 'targeted because of their sexual identity by catfishing' (which I find incredibly doubtful).

Finally when asked whether the survey respondents might self select because of their attitudes towards sexual violence, she admits that that might be the case as they need to inform potential respondents what the survey is about. I find this last point very interesting because besides the 'thumb on the scale' with loose definitions of violence, it seems that the large numbers of positives could be due to a polluted sample. It just reinforces my belief that this is a motivated effort to get resources/attention for the domestic/sexual violence agenda.