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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 have a child. I don’t care if someone uses photos for sexual purposes, the same person could masturbate to them from memory of seeing them in public. If you’re female, people will masturbate to you countless times without your knowledge and they have never needed AI to do it. People are weird, that’s life.
Still allows for the question of how 'normalized' you'd want it to become.
Presumably you wouldn't want a guy to just drop trou and start jackin' it right in sight of your kid.
And gazing at him/her creepily from the bushes while he does it is not a major improvement?
So I think parents end up conflating "jacking off at home to a sneakily taken photo" as sort of close to "hiding in the bushes and jacking off" even if there is far less danger implied by the latter.
So lets' just say that photos kept in the privacy of one's domicile are not harming anyone. How close in time and space should the masturbatory be able to get to the object of his desire before we get too uncomfortable and want to shut down the behavior?
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