[mindslight]

In general, you're using loaded terms that continue the conflation - eg "predator" and "pedophile". Someone looking at child pornography is not a "predator". And someone who is generally attracted to women but tries to chat sexually with 11 year olds because they make for easy targets isn't necessarily a "pedophile".

The point isn't pedantry or to defend any of these people, but rather to avoid succumbing to too-easy explanations. For instance, your mentioning of "image hashes" in response to the topic of "protecting children". Instagram certainly loves that narrative, but it doesn't actually address the topic at hand.

> Why should the only acceptable solution be society retreating behind walled gardens

For the same reason that dropping your kids off in the middle of a city doesn't make for daycare. Greater society inherently involves being robust to normalized ever-present abuse (eg advertising, for one), which requires adult maturity.

All the dialogs in the article are creepy as fuck, but half of them were ultimately just conversation and will likely ignored by law enforcement as inactionable. If you want to prevent those conversations, the only way is to drastically reduce the scope, eg a heavily-curated playground.

[sjy]

The dialogues in the article included people sending dick pics to a person they thought was an 11-year-old child. I’m sure that the lack of a ‘real’ victim is a problem in some countries, but this kind of offending is regularly prosecuted in Australia.

[mindslight]

I wasn't putting that behavior in the category of "inactionable"! I had also thought there were more discrete conversations, but rereading it's really excerpts all from (presumably) the worst one. But, the article does provide its own accounting:

> text-chatted with 17 men ... and seen the genitalia of 11 of those

So even though two thirds are doing something that could be straightforwardly prosecuted, it seems like one third are still abusive in some way that isn't necessarily easy to write into law, especially one that won't be worked around.

FWIW "regularly prosecuted" doesn't necessarily mean that the chance of an individual prosecution is high!

[sjy]

Absolutely. The people who get caught doing this stuff generally haven’t done much to conceal their identity and get caught with evidence of other unreported offences on their computers. It’s horrifying to think about what the sophisticated ones might be getting away with.

I overlooked the word ‘half’ in your original comment and brought up the dick pics because they make the crime so easy to prove. I’d say all of the conversations were illegal grooming, but it’s harder to prove that the person had the necessary intent when the conversation isn’t explicitly sexual.