[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.