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This thought occurred after Christmas this year during a few activities where family members wanted to play a game, so they pulled up a YouTube video to demonstrate how a thing is done, and it was incredibly gross.
99% of modern kids will never have the ability to be forgotten- parents post their pictures online when they're not able to give consent, including embarrassing and compromised photos. This includes YouTube videos of moms putting their daughters in compromised positions and posting them on the video site.
Such videos are easy to find- the mom often speaks, and their prepubescent girls do a seemingly-innocuous activity. Those girls will always have those videos on a stranger's hard drive at best, or at worst, end up as data used for ai generation.
I'll note that I don't have a proposed solution to this. The laws on child-porn already exist, but this content skirts the edge of acceptability. The girls are usually 10-13, and doing an innocuous activity- like playing pattycake or ring around the rosie, usually in mostly-acceptable clothing.
When you stumble on one such video, you can tell what I'm talking about. It's the camera angles.
For this reason, I come to TheMotte- have you seen the videos I'm talking about? What do you think about them, and how would you evaluate whether or not such content is okay to post online?
If you have kids, do you worry that there's some random perusing Instagram or willing to train ai on them?
After seeing these things, I can't get it out of my head, nor can I come up with a reasonable solution.
I haven't seen these videos myself, but I've heard people complaining about them, not unlike yourself. And like you said, nothing about the videos are explicitly sexual. It doesn't go full pedobait like Cuties. But it's still uncomfortably sexualizing. From some other complaints I've seen the dead giveaway are the comments, usually full of gross comments by pedophiles ranging from plausibly deniable to 4-chan party van. Also foot fetishist? So many foot fetishist. I guess they can't all work at Nickelodeon.
The other tell is the recommendations on those videos. There is a tread worn in the algorithm a mile deep that assumes if you like that video, you must love other gross shit that sexualizes minors.
Personally, we keep all photos of our daughter off the internet. No social media, no approval for school or businesses to post them, just absolute zero tolerance. Partially because we both have family that is unwell, unsafe, obsessive and might not leave us or our daughter alone. Also for all the usual tech-paranoid reasons about AI and corporations creating and owning a simulacrum of your soul.
I’m kinda with you, although not a blanket ban from me. The issue beyond sexuality is that the internet is forever and kids cannot actually consent to having their image and activities uploaded. What’s cute at ten might be a problem at twenty or thirty when they’re trying to build their lives. Businesses can and do look at your Facebook. A lot of women will look at social media before going on a date. And whatever images and posts they find will form an impression. Every kid including me has an edge lord phase, where they think they’re super smart and cool because they dress weird and hold a lot of weird opinions (often quite loudly). For anyone born after 1990, that phase is online ready to bite them should the wrong person find it.
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