Interesting that they'll combat child abuse but they still haven't changed their attitude towards [suicide].
A Google search for the term [suicide] gets you a onebox search result with a phone number you can call for help, plus some essentially harmless ads and results: http://i.imgur.com/aEzc1Tt.png
A Bing search for the term [suicide] gets you no help line phone number but does offer a bunch of prominent "related search" suggestions like [Easy Suicide], [Painless Suicide], [Painless Suicide Methods Pills], [Pictures Suicide Hanging], [Suicide Methods]: http://i.imgur.com/XEtevKf.png
This is actually better than it was a year or two ago, when you would also be offered special media content regions like [Videos of Suicide], [Pictures of Suicide], but it's still not very good!
Difficult to avoid the conclusion that although Microsoft is eager to reduce certain kinds of politically popular crime, they care less about harm reduction than their competition.
By the same token, google cares less about child abuse than the competition? Or maybe they just have a different view on when their intervention is appropriate or helpful.
Or... They simply might not have been as competent as their competition in addressing it.
I realize MS-hating is popular around here but we need not jump to the worst conclusion every time.
2013: Warning: _____ is illegal. Your IP address and search terms have been logged and we will give this information to the police if they ask.
2015: Warning: _____ is illegal. Your IP address and search terms have been automatically sent to the Department of Homeland Security's _____ enforcement unit.
2020: Warning: _____ is illegal. You haven't searched for it yet, but your search history to date indicates that you might have _____ tendencies, and your friends include several people who have searched for _____. The Thought Police has been notified.
As internet filtering expands in the West, the only bright side of these types of notifications is that they will remind people that nothing they do online is really private and the internet is not really free. I know that I'd rather have filtering with notifications than silent filtering for my non-government-approved searches.
In the case of pedophiles, maybe some will seek help but I imagine most will quickly adapt by seeking abuse images via other channels like tor, hidden wikis, etc.
The issue of how to deal with people who seek out child porn troubles me. The tone accompanying an article such as this inevitably vilifies those who consume such material, as though this is a clear moral issue. This implies all of us have pedophilic urges, with only those who lack the moral fortitude to resist going on to seek out child porn. But this is not accurate -- I don't have the least desire to view such images, but instead feel a visceral disgust. Most others, I imagine, have the same reaction.
People who want to view sexually explicit images of children are sick, not immoral. They suffer from a deviant urge from which the rest of us are free. The issue, then, should not be how to punish them, but how to cure them of this urge. (Whether such a cure is possible is another matter altogether -- our sexual desires exert regrettable power over our behaviours.) In conjunction, we must do everything we can to halt the dissemination of such material, just as Microsoft is doing here. By shifting our reaction from wanting to punish consumers of child porn to wanting to rehabilitate them, we will encourage more to come forward for treatment, ultimately reducing the amount of such material that is consumed, and thus the number of children harmed in its creation.
I appreciate that you are trying to take a reasonable stand here, but I do think there are some things wrong with your reasoning.
First of all, it is not at all clear that mere consumption of child pornography leads to the production of more child pornography. This gets asserted all the time, but I have never seen anyone produce a shred of evidence for it. Because people tend to see red at this point and stop reading closely, I want to be very, very clear that I am not advocating child abuse in any way. Rather, I think that focusing on consumers of child pornography is a waste of energy that would be better directed at the producers.
When I press people on this (which is not usually a popular move), the response I always get is along the lines of "they wouldn't make it if people weren't watching it", which is, in addition to begging the question, totally at odds with what we know about human sexuality in general. Look at non-pedophiles and you'll find no shortage of people documenting their sexual experiences in various ways that are never meant to be public. Hell, the whole "revenge porn" thing can only exist because people enjoy documenting their sexuality. Perhaps if you eliminated consumption of child pornography, so that the producers of it were truly shouting into the void, you would cut down on some of it. But that's not going to happen, and there's no middle ground. As long as they have some audience, those seeking an exhibitionist thrill will keep doing it.
And if CP stopped existing, would that really plausibly lead to less child abuse? I seriously doubt it. It seems overwhelmingly likely that people who abuse children on camera are doing so primarily because they like to abuse children. Yes, having images of their abuse float around the internet probably adds to the child's psychological pain. But that seems like kind of a drop in the bucket compared to the abuse itself, and the globs of shame and disempowerment that our society smears on victims.
And that's my point here. We waste a tremendous number of resources on trying to solve what is a fairly minor part of the problem. Why? Well, as far as law enforcement is concerned, I suspect that it's because it's easier to catch the consumers (there are more of them), and the rest of us cheer just as hard for either. As far as the rest of us are concerned, I reckon that part of it is that we need someone to pin our anger on for the injustice that's happening to these children. And, reaching into the darker parts of our psyches, we really love to see someone get stomped down, and not have to feel guilty about cheering for it, or worried that we might be next (for evidence of this, pick a random page from any history book and start reading).
Now sometimes, every once in a while, someone notices that consumers of CP are people, like you did. But seeing the cognitive failure is often not enough to recognize the damage that it has done. People's brains are consistency engines, and wrong ideas tend to pollute the ideas they're connected to, like a ripple of wrongness. It's natural, then, when you see a problem with the way people are thinking, to smooth over the inconsistency by saying "well, we should focus on curing them instead of punishing them", and to miss that we're actually focusing on entirely the wrong part of the problem.
And that brings me to one last point: pedophilia is very likely not something we're going to cure - at least, not until we're able to do extensive, direct brain modification. A lot of effort has been put into trying to cure paraphilias and sexual orientations, and it just doesn't seem to be something you can do.
But what we might be able to do is help people who are sexually attracted to children to find harmless outlets for their urges, and teach them to handle them without acting on them. It would also help if we could stop filling them with shame and guilt over something they can't control.
And it would help even more if we could stop filling the victims with shame and guilt over something they can't control. When someone says something like "child abuse is soul murder", we shouldn't let that slide, and we certainly shouldn't nod sadly in agreement to such a fucked up sentiment. We have to stop telling people that they're broken, that they're lost causes, no matter how much delicious anger at the perpetrators it stirs in us. It's selfish.
And it's also selfish to bask in our moral superiority as we obsess over the easiest and most futile part of the problem.
I am one of them. Some of you know me, but seven proxies.
I will never make advances on a child. The law has nothing to do with it.
Still it's aggravating when people offer to cure me, just like it would a closeted homosexual to tell them they are going to hell because of how their brain is wired. Society wisened up about homosexuals, but I still have to hide.
It might be surprising that I am an opponent of child abuse; but these laws help nobody, especially children, who get terrorized with "stranger danger", "online safety" and other gobbledygook, ignoring that child abuse almost always happens within the family. Banning child porn prevents a father from abusing his child in private... how? Might as well ban condoms to prevent rape.
You think the war on drugs was a disaster? Sexual urges are even more basal than the drive toward altered states of consciousness. Abusers will abuse and druggies will drug. It sucks, and I don't know what the real solution looks like.
But this whole CP thing? It's a political tool to piggyback agendas onto, like the anti-piracy lobby or thinly veiled justification for sweeping spying programs. Anything can be justified if the discussion can be conveniently derailed into For The Children territory.
Personally I have some sympathy for the argument that possessing child porn should not be criminal. There are arguments for this. They satisfy urges and curiosities without victimizing real children. They are documents of abuse that could lead to more victims being discovered and perpetrators being prosecuted.
We do not, for instance, ban rape porn (yet) because there is no evidence it harms society. Cp is somewhat different because the children can not legally consent, whereas in produced rape porn the acts are consensual.
What's also concerning is that child abuse help sites will likely get caught up in all this depriving victims of much needed resources. Just like already many gay help websites and now being blocked and hidden.
And so in the naming of helping vulnerable victims we're actually hurting them.
I wonder if these warnings will also pop up for search terms into fictional art that depicts children in sexual situations, even though no children were obviously harmed in the production of such material... After all, "but think of the fictional children!" has been getting more popular around the world lately.
Japan's going through one of these phases once again[1], with some politicians wanting to ban such things. The thing that truly boggles the mind about this is that they have no intention to do anything about "junior idols", which are much closer to actual child abuse (how about some camel toes of 12-year-olds in suggestive positions?) than any drawn fictional art ever will, even if it's hardcore tentacle rape pornography or something.
just think how great this technology would have worked back in the day when homosexuality was taboo. Think of how many people could have been cured or could have found help for their illness.
Yes. In the future when child abusers are liberated from political oppression we will look back shamefully on these offensive popups suggesting they seek help.
See this is the thing: I can guarantee you the majority of the people that are getting those type of images aren't using a standard web connection and searching generic search terms into Google/Bing.
My assumption would be that they exist outside of Tor too, just hidden away in private communities. I'm sure there are even legal things on the web that you've never come across because you haven't looked for them, and I would imagine child abuse images aren't particularly easy to search for.
Even on Tor... where do you find them there? It's not like suddenly when you load a site through Tor you see child porn on every site yo visit.
I think this is a problem implicit to anonymous imageboards. By definition, you (as administrator or moderator) can't stop someone from posting CP, you can only be reactive about deleting it after you find it. The policy for moderation can be as rigid as possible but regardless it still requires the offensive content to be posted and discovered first.
One possible way to solve this would be to force images through some kind of premoderation process before being posted, but that would probably destroy the conversational flow of the threads, especially if the mods happen not to be awake and sorting through the queue at the moment.
Any measures to prevent a sinister variation on rickrolling [1]?
Are Microsoft planning to keep records of the IP addresses/MAC addresses triggering the popups?
I think Google's approach is more sensible. Most people leave Google's safe search defaults switched on anyway.
Edit: oops, does Google search default to safe settings on Windows these days? Just checked on Firefox/CentOS and found the safe settings unticked. This is a fresh install.
I don't think MS are going to keep the IPs. There's no point just keeping a long list of IPs and times - they'd need to actively report those to police for the police to take action or not. It seems trivially easy to flood with bad data.
MS and Yahoo are implementing this in an effort to prevent MPs forcing regulation onto them. Any forced regulation will be stupid.
Google has said they're considering something similar.
I wish MPs would understand the vigorous efforts that search engines go to to find, remove, and report images of child sexual abuse.
I don't think Microsoft, Google etc... keep IP addresses specifically with regard to filtered searches, but they do keep logs of all searches/IPs for analytic purposes.
We should all be conscious of the fact that any amount of "web usage" generates logs somewhere. How much of your details end up in these logs depend on what your system/browser leaks and how much detail your ISP has on you.
Technical solutions may help to combat the issue, but imagine a society where
- you're not judged for seeking help (maybe even applauded or even rewarded?)
- everybody receives complete information about how to get help
- everybody is socially integrated (called "social life") and therefor gets feedback on his/her behavior (and thus gets a hint on when it's time to correct an issue)
> everybody is socially integrated (called "social life") and therefor gets feedback on his/her behavior (and thus gets a hint on when it's time to correct an issue)
Paedophiles are often socially isolated; hated by society. They only speak to other offenders.
This means that they can start to have thoughts about offending behaviour which are reinforced by other offenders.
If paedophiles had access to non-sex-offenders to talk to they'd get early nudges about how unacceptable their thoughts are, and guidance about avoiding those thoughts and behaviours.
Saying that paedophiles often only speak to other offenders suggests that paedophilia is a crime. It could be better to make a distinction between people of certain sexual orientation and people who commit certain crimes, unless you believe that these two groups of people intersect completely.
I have not encountered any evidence that a certain treatment or social surrounds can change a person's sexual orientation, so avoiding unacceptable thoughts may be impossible for these people. Avoiding unacceptable behaviors is certainly achievable, though.
That might be an unrealistic psychological profile. Jimmy Saville and Stuart Hall had abundant access to the views of non-sex-offenders. Both those figures could hardly be described as being isolated from society during the time when they were committing their crimes.
It seems to me that the types of people involved in those activities are well integrated into society, but abuse their positions of trust.
> Paedophiles are often socially isolated; hated by society. They only speak to other offenders.
>
> This means that they can start to have thoughts about offending behaviour which are reinforced by other offenders.
Hum. No. Moreover they can't be socially isolated and in contact with other offenders at the same time.
Are you refering to the UK scandal from months ago where it was found out that an unusual number of pedophiles were actual member of "protect-the-children" state-sponsored association ?
How is everyone having at least a bunch of friends, or even just people they know and who know them, beyond a very superficial level, "horrifying"? I didn't read that as "everybody needs to receive all the benefits of full integration into the borg matrix", myself. It's just a fact of life that nobody is an island, and to live off other people, but not with them, is not an ideal I'm ready to defend. I wouldn't call it evil but certainly "lacking". I'm all for those who actually provide everything for themselves to want to be left alone, but that doesn't apply to anyone posting on the web, sorry.. shoutouts to the Sentinelese (who I assume are rather tight knit btw)
How about "solitary like trees, together like a forest"?
In theory this is aimed at doing that - people searching will be provided advice about where to go to get help, and this is a nudge for people early on who are thinking about this and just starting.
I agree that current situation doesn't seem to be working that well.
A Google search for the term [suicide] gets you a onebox search result with a phone number you can call for help, plus some essentially harmless ads and results: http://i.imgur.com/aEzc1Tt.png
A Bing search for the term [suicide] gets you no help line phone number but does offer a bunch of prominent "related search" suggestions like [Easy Suicide], [Painless Suicide], [Painless Suicide Methods Pills], [Pictures Suicide Hanging], [Suicide Methods]: http://i.imgur.com/XEtevKf.png
This is actually better than it was a year or two ago, when you would also be offered special media content regions like [Videos of Suicide], [Pictures of Suicide], but it's still not very good!
Difficult to avoid the conclusion that although Microsoft is eager to reduce certain kinds of politically popular crime, they care less about harm reduction than their competition.