[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.

[jrflowers]

Wayback Machine goatse marathon dot com

It’s not really something anybody could just replicate on a whim. It is not like ordering taco bell

[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".

[lostmsu]

Water flows, until it's ice. I imagine it was very hard to get freezing temperatures in Singapore.

Your argument has no strong data to back it up.