[api]

They probably do for a small percentage of people, but we value free speech enough that we are willing to trade that.

There’s a huge difference though. If someone listens to 90s industrial music or watches Trainspotting and shoots smack, they are harming themselves. You can’t indulge pedophilia IRL without harming someone else.

Incitement to harming others is an area where we do sometimes draw a line with speech. So I think you could argue that child porn, even if fake, is direct incitement to violence. That would put it in the same category as calls to murder Muslims or Jews, etc.

The same argument could be made about rape porn though, even if it’s fake or simulated with actors. Personally I think that anything we do conclude about CSAM should in fact apply to rape porn, revenge porn, and other porn depicting nonconsensual abuse.

[jjgreen]

Drawings, novels and films about gunning people down may drive people to seek to gun people down (which is illegal), so ban, er, the whole of American culture.

[api]

Good point. I was just expanding the reasoning, but yes that is surely where it goes.

So maybe we do have to tolerate fake CSAM if we tolerate an endless parade of incredibly violent war propaganda films, not to mention hate speech that goes as far as to call for persecution and violence.

My late uncle was a psychologist and always argued that our glorification of violence was far worse than almost anything in porn.