[vova_hn2]

No, I think that it actually shows that the idea that information can cause "trauma" or another kind of "harm" unless some third party forcefully restricts your access to this information, is completely insane.

Of course, this "third party" knows better, right.

[noduerme]

I don't think that's quite true, either. Parent poster said it was amazing they were still sane. Other people might not be sane, depending on what they were exposed to at an early age. And watching something on video is different than seeing it happen in front of you, which is also different from having it happen to you ...and I understand the impulse to say that we're not a victim of anything just because we saw something horrible.

But lots of people seeing lots of horrible things, if it doesn't traumatize them, can desensitize them. There are plenty of freedoms that also cause harm. That doesn't mean the freedoms should be taken away, but it means that the "third party" is often correct. Society in a free country calls its own balls and strikes.

Some things should be hard to access. Accessing some things should also be taken as a red flag that you are not OK. The rest of the people around you have a right to their security as much as, or more than, you have a right to your freedom to view illicit information. And I say this as a person who would absolutely revolt against any system that based that decision on fiat, religion, or unfounded hysteria. We all personally have a right to do anything we want that doesn't hurt anyone else. But if the "third party" you're talking about are your neighbors, and if they have decided that you are a threat to them, then talk with them.

[like_any_other]

This kind of lukewarm attitude is why every Western country is speedrunning to become China. There are powerful interests turning your country into a panopticon cage, and the best you can do is "well as long as they give a good excuse, I guess it's okay"??

[noduerme]

I'm not sure I see the connection, but I'm open to debate it with you. I'm about as maximalist for individual freedom as you can get without being an anarchist. I don't want to live under majoritarian rule when it comes to my bodily choices or personal picadillos or my family's, or my right to bear arms. But I think it's ignorant to compare the United States in any way to China. I don't think that a freely elected, democratic society, choosing to enforce social norms at times through contested law and legal wrangling in courts is remotely the same thing as a totalitarian state issuing a dictat. And I also don't think that the primary way to distinguish our system of governance from a dictatorahip would be to legalize everything imaginable.

This is not a lukewarm approach to personal liberty, any more than sympathy should be mistaken for weakness. It's an understanding that we also need a somewhat functional and coherent society, even if it comes at some personal cost, and that without that we would end up in a power vacuum that led eventually to us being slaves in a dictatorship like China.

[like_any_other]

Your proposal was red-flag laws for visiting the wrong website, or just censoring them entirely [0]. That's not "as close to maximum freedom without being anarchy". That's the opposite.

[0] "Some things should be hard to access. Accessing some things should also be taken as a red flag that you are not OK. The rest of the people around you have a right to their security as much as, or more than, you have a right to your freedom to view illicit information."

[ruszki]

But it can cause trauma, and harm. What this shows is that it’s not inevitable. It maybe even shows that it causes trauma and harm rarely.

Who should be protected from it, and by who is a different thing. I strongly against blanket restrictions, but one for sure they are easier. And they definitely protect people who wouldn’t get this protection in other scenarios, because for example their parents are shit. Another viewpoint is that probably this is the least important thing for people who wouldn’t get this protection otherwise, so maybe it doesn’t matter at that point. One for sure, there should be a better argument to restrict access than the currently provided ones.

[gambiting]

I think it's just different scale, like anything else. When I was growing up we also knew about rotten.com(in rural Poland!) but the only way to see it was to pay for some access at an internet caffee, we(like a group of kids) would huddle around a pc, look around for 5 minutes and then the dude running the place would kick us out. If you had internet access at home it was very limited and loading any kind of images took forever - way too risky.

Compare to now where kids literally have all the world's internet in their pockets, they can watch as much of it as they like with very little risk. Like if you speak with primary school teachers they say kids share naked pictures of their classmates, because there's lots of online services that just generate nudes from a few pictures.

Like, yeah, information should be free for everyone. But I think our experience from the 90s isn't really relevant to the world in 2026.

[only-one1701]

One of the rare sane comments on this thread.

[pegasus]

It shows that exposure doesn't always cause trauma (which I don't think anyone claimed), not that it can't.

[virgildotcodes]

The uncomfortable truth is that monkey see monkey do is a real phenomenon. The majority of people who play violent video games and watch violent movies and watch real snuff vids online won't commit these acts.

That said, to say they do not influence you in any way is to deny all of advertising, if not the basic reality that the stimuli to which we are exposed in life are the primary thing that shape us beyond our genetics.

Do they make you more likely to feel detachment at the thought of horrors being inflicted upon others, does that influence your career path or political leanings?

The number of times I've seen a commercial for pizza or taco bell or seen a food mentioned on a tv show or movie and thought "hmm that sounds good right now, i'm gonna order that" is way more than 0.

To be clear, I'm against any censorship of violent video games, movies, art, etc.

You can of course argue that school shooters and Stephen Miller would do what they do without all the media (social or not) they've consumed.

That said, what are we, after all, other than some sort of combination of our genetics and environment?

It's hard to argue that there isn't some sort of link between the mention of taco bell and me immediately doordashing it, which makes it hard to reconcile the two positions.

[cluckindan]

> to deny all of advertising

I don’t think that is true. Advertising relies on manufactured needs, portraying the hawked goods and services as things one needs to live a comfortable, easy, pleasurable or socially worthy life.

None of that resonates with shock content.

As an extreme example, you supposedly can’t sell guns by showing pictures of gun suicide victims. This is also why some governments require tobacco products to feature gruesome images of smoker lungs, cancer, etc. Ironically, kids in those countries have started collecting and trading those images cut out from tobacco packages.

Curiosity lands squarely opposite of control.

[virgildotcodes]

I think there's a lot at work psychologically in advertising, but "kids in those countries have started collecting and trading those images" kind of undercuts your point that shock content doesn't resonate with an audience, create demand or a potential desire to emulate what's depicted.

From another angle, OP's article mentioned something akin to sexual awakenings related to the content they trafficked in.

You can see how popular suicide drone footage out of Ukraine is, there is a large contingent of people eating that stuff up, cheering it on, despite watching a man desperately beg for his life as a drone circles him, toying with him, before going for his head and the feed blacking out being about as grim as it gets.

People are creating games now to replicate the experience. People want to drive drones into other people's heads, all along a spectrum from watching it on youtube, playing a video game, to joining the ukrainian effort and actually performing the act in real life.

My experience is you can find a customer for just about any content, including shock content. Some messages have broader appeal for sure, but even the worst thing you can imagine will have someone with whom it resonates.

It's clear that people are influenced by their environment, and things that were once considered grotesque and unacceptable can be watered down over time with exposure to where, for example, rapists and pedophiles can openly win presidential elections and be placed on the Supreme Court. To where large portions of nations rationalize and support genocide, or any horrible thing you can imagine, even when presented with images of the suffering inflicted.

Humans are malleable and you don't have to have a perfectly crafted advertising campaign to have some people decide they like what they're seeing and want to replicate it, no matter what it is.

[cluckindan]

> your point that shock content doesn't resonate with an audience, create demand or a potential desire to emulate what's depicted.

My point was that it doesn’t resonate with the principles of advertising. Certainly shock content can resonate with an audience, as well as create demand and desire to emulate: just look at the success of the Jackass franchise.

The kids aren’t buying tobacco because of the images, though — very few if any adults are either. I would assume they’re cutting out their collections from discarded packaging, and that they would not want to emulate lung cancer even if they saw pictures of it.

Purely guessing here, but it doesn’t seem likely that content on rotten.com would have led anyone, let alone masses of people, to become human butchers: in the OP article, the desire to emulate was limited to building narratives around the content.

Crime scene investigator or trauma surgeon, maybe those are more likely outcomes.

[jrflowers]

>The number of times I've seen a commercial for pizza or taco bell or seen a food mentioned on a tv show or movie and thought "hmm that sounds good right now, i'm gonna order that" is way more than 0.

Goatse has been online for thirty years and I’ve never seen anybody say “I would definitely have never tried that if nobody showed me that website”

[virgildotcodes]

Do you think the number of people who have tried to reproduce the photo, specifically because they saw this photo, is 0?

[solumunus]

Feels like it would be 0 or extremely close to 0.

[virgildotcodes]

I'm in a cafe but I'm putting it in my notes to search for a goatse.cx replication album when I get somewhere more private. I will send you my therapist's bill.

[lostmsu]

Evidence?

[virgildotcodes]

Evidence of the fact that I ordered doordash? Evidence of the fact that people are a product of their genetics and their environment?

Are you asking for evidence that humans tend to emulate what they see other humans do?

Are you asking the more direct classic question of if there's evidence that violent media correlates with violent acts?

[lostmsu]

The latter. And not just "correlates".

[virgildotcodes]

lol

You want evidence that rises to the level of establishing "causality" in consideration of a natural experiment that is being run across all of humanity simultaneously?

What populations are protected from violent media?

How would you even disentangle all the countless confounding factors?

The arguments here are well-worn by the industries that peddle in these types of media, with obvious incentives, and obvious incentives on our side as consumers to not be restricted from consuming whatever we enjoy.

This is why I spent so much time referencing all the other ways in which humanity tends to emulate the behavior of other humans or be influenced by advertising/media, as it seems unlikely that these tendencies would suddenly cease around the sole category of "violent media".

[rockskon]

Large-scale exposure caused no discernible degree of trauma. That's not a small phenomena that seems to have been ignored by policymakers and those who inform them.

[pegasus]

> Large-scale exposure caused no discernible degree of trauma.

How do we know this? All I've seen so far is anecdata. As my own anecdata, an ex of mine felt she had been traumatized by watching horror movies at a very young age. Many years later she still had flashbacks.

[rockskon]

Statistical anomalies exist, sure. But if there was any meaningful negative impact at scale, you'd think it would've shown up over the decades in trending therapy topics, to people bringing up traumatic memories of the old Internet, to....to something at scale.

[pegasus]

Knowing what she's seen at that age, I'm pretty sure I'd have flashbacks as well. This wasn't the old internet, and it's not like the new internet is free of such content. I really don't think that we have a way to quantify this, but, as one sibling comment said, expecting no influence seems unrealistic – as is expecting that influence to be easily detectable. I'm sure my ex is not the only one bringing up such experiences in therapy and I bet if you ask experienced therapists they will have similar stories.

[noduerme]

Here's an anomaly:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-mod...

[ChoGGi]

I recall an article back in 2016 or '18 about workers in the Philippines experiencing the same. May not have been Facebook, Google maybe?

[47282847]

Even if it were reported at scale to each and every therapist, they rarely share even anonymized stories with others. Anecdata: I’ve talked to a bunch, and processed some of that shit, but nobody else hears.

[only-one1701]

Just because it can’t be easily measured doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

[rockskon]

No, but there's rough heuristic that are generally reliable. Psychologists talk. If a problem is recurring - they talk a lot amongst each other regarding the prevalence of the problem.

I don't recall there ever being a trending issue among psychologists - child or otherwise - dealing with clients who have been traumatized about the minimally restricted Internet of the 90's and 00's.

But if you don't trust this heuristic, then tell me - what distinguishes the belief that seeing horrible content on the Internet in the 90's and 00's led to a large number of traumatized individuals vs the belief that the ready availability of horrible content hurt a statistically negligible number of people and that it was a significant net benefit?

Actions and policies should be based on something more than intuition and belief alone.

[kivle]

And in the olden times, people got nightmares from reading books, or by hearing a horror story around a campfire. Banning everything that is scary or can cause nightmares or trauma would be a very difficult effort, and deciding a boundary of what is too traumatic and what is not would be very arbitrary.

[noduerme]

Can we agree that there's a difference between banning things and making things difficult to access?

I'm an extremely liberal-libertarian free speech and free information advocate. I grew up in a world where as a 12 year old, on IRC, in 1992, I had people sending me fetish porn and child porn, and I developed the belief at that age that that was fine, if you were 12, you had the right to see anything you could, including other 12 year olds naked. But this was not something most 12 year olds were exposed to, and by the time I was 14 I was pretty clear on why they shouldn't be.

We live in a world where there is no such thing as a "ban". Oh, I know, I hated bans and railed against bans, and I don't think the government has any right to ban anything. But a ban is just an obstacle to people who want to violate the norm. A ban is only a way for societies to set up barriers between people and bad shit which is bad for society, and sometimes it's okay for there to be barriers. In 1992, the reason most kids were basically incredibly innocent and had never seen any porn at all at 12 years old, was that the barriers to it were reasonably high. If you were some kind of command line warrior child who could figure out IRC over dialup, then yeah, people would literally mail you brown paper boxes with porn tapes on VHS.

There are, actually, boundaries on what is too traumatic to show someone. Personally, I'd like to obliterate the behavior that fuels those things, rather than need to address the downstream issues of people seeing them. But there are things that are poisonous to society because they poison individuals, and there's a role for society and government to play in prohibiting those things, or at least preventing their spread as much as possible.

There is evil in the world, and it is sometimes necessary to stop it. Free information is not an unalloyed good.

[anal_reactor]

I think that gore is an easy scapegoat because this allows us to shy away from the difficult discussions. "We should ban porn" occupies the bandwidth of social discourse, and therefore we cannot discuss topics like "ok but really, what do we do about the demographic collapse". I honestly think that the kids growing up now are going to be much more traumatized by the fact that they'll find themselves in a world of insane wealth inequality while needing to support an army of retirees, rather than seeing a pic of a dead body.

BTW seeing death, disease, and misery was completely normal through entire human history. We live in abnormally safe times. Maybe there is some mechanism akin to allergies, where immune system cannot believe that everything is chill so it overreacts to tiniest threats.

[actionfromafar]

OTOH inflicting death and misery was also pretty normal.

[seltzerboys]

the idea that information can't cause harm is obviously absurd. third parties should not restrict free speech, but that's an extremely simplistic/optimistic view. everything is about trade offs, there is no perfect solution. the truth is probably closer to: exposing young children to disturbing imagery at a young age is not optimal for healthy development, but free speech is important to a functioning democracy.

[shevy-java]

This kind of conflates two issues though.

I have no real interest in any shock video or shock image; but I reject any form of censorship even more so, such as is currently tried via age sniffing on everyone and killing off VPNs. The world wide web is currently privatized.

[homeonthemtn]

Yeah I disagree. We've normalized a lot of bad shit because it was pressed into the strata of our lives like road kill on asphalt.

My kids do not need to see beheadings and exploding people. I could have done without that exposure. It was certainly traumatic.

[Xmd5a]

I know someone who developed schizophrenia in contact with rotten.com

[iamnothere]

I know someone who won the lottery after watching the film National Lampoon’s Vacation

[fittingopposite]

How do you know those two are/were related?

[Yossarrian22]

My mate Paul went there once and spent the rest of the week staring at the sun which was hard at night time

[solumunus]

Surely correlation and not causation.

[porkpiepants]

It sounds to me like you've already decided, sans facts, that your opinion is correct. Which is provably incorrect by decades of medical research. Or perhaps you are one of those "because it didn't bother you and your friends, the idea is a joke." It's impossible for me to present you an argument that would teach you to understand compassion, let alone trauma, because you probably think I'm some woke soyboy rando on the internet and you've got your bros to go chest-bump about how badass y'all are. But the reality is, prolonged exposure to graphic images can cause trauma, from social media moderators, to EMTs, to even everyday police that have to sort through graphic evidence as part of a report. I hope some day you learn compassion, for your sake as well as everyone else you harm.