
Children exploitation via YouTube - jgamman
http://thespinoff.co.nz/society/21-11-2016/hello-my-name-is-ally-how-children-are-being-exploited-by-youtube-predators/
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c3534l
I guess when your fetish is so weird it's not even really sexual, you can
trick kids into doing something that is pornographic only to a very small
number of people. Like, it is really disturbing that some creep is able to ask
a kid about if she's ever stepped on any bugs and that he's getting off on
that. On the other hand, I'm not really that concerned about it. I do agree
that you absolutely should not be contacting a minor for sexual gratification,
even if they and 99% of the population don't understand how it can be for
sexual gratification. But so long as they're not stalking the kid, sending
messages back and forth asking for details where they live, or really doing
much of anything, there are probably far more dangerous sexual predators on
the internet to be worrying about.

~~~
cldellow
You can worry about these people and worry about the more dangerous sexual
predators, too--doesn't have to be one or the other.

One good reason to worry about these ones: they're already comfortable
publicly using children for sexual gratification, who knows what else they're
asking the children to do in private. The article notes that some of the
comments left on the videos solicit one-to-one contact information, for
example.

~~~
coldtea
> _You can worry about these people and worry about the more dangerous sexual
> predators, too--doesn 't have to be one or the other._

Everything is "one or the other" \-- opportunity cost.

Besides, even if you could worry about these people too, you probably
shouldn't. That's kind of the message from the parent comment, and I agree.
Where does it stop?

~~~
cldellow
Hmm, yes, at some point, opportunity cost is a thing. I think there's a risk
that that line of thinking can be very reductio ad absurdum where only the
most gruesome of offences deserve investigative resources and all others are
dismissed out of hand.

OK, I'll take a new tack and try to quantify it better. People who are
grooming hundreds of children for sexual exploitation (in the open, no less)
merit real concern. That the children don't know it's happening now is not, in
my opinion, the standard we should use to decide how bad it is.

Rather, we can ask: what will happen if no intervention is done? The evidence
suggests that they are being exploited; the network of children being
exploited is growing; their exploitation leaves breadcrumbs for others to
follow and potentially expand upon; and in the future, it is likely that some
of the hundreds of children involved in this will realize that they were used
as a sexual plaything.

Where does it stop? I dunno--I'll agree that this it's hard to find the right
balance. As long as the bad guys are self-curating playlists with hundreds of
victim videos whose comments include easily searched terms, I think the
effort/reward here is likely pretty good.

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orclev
This seems like a really hard problem to tackle. The article kind of nails the
problem in that none of what the children are doing on the videos actually
violates any rules nor would it be classified as sexual in any way. There's no
nudity, they aren't doing anything sexual, they aren't even truly saying
anything sexual.

In a way this is the flip side of the "it isn't porn, it's art" argument. Not
all nudity is porn, and not all porn involves nudity or sex. Trying to figure
out where to draw the line is very much non-trivial, and is made even more so
by the fact that exactly where that line falls varies quite wildly from person
to person. As someone with no attraction to either of the fetishes (or is it
three fetishes, are we counting pedophilia as one of them in this case?)
mentioned in the article or as the focus of the videos I'd be hard pressed to
classify any of the videos they're talking about as pornographic or erotic,
but apparently there's a subset of the population that that isn't true of.
Aside from banning __any __interaction between adults and someone under age I
'm not sure it's going to be possible to prevent something like this from
happening.

There's also the question of if we __should __be trying to prevent something
like this. I know everyone 's gut reaction is "BUT THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!"
and "OMG! PEDOPHILES!!!", but honestly if the children aren't being creeped
out or feeling intimidated and threatened, aren't being stalked, and aren't
doing anything sexual, how much effort should we be wasting worrying about
some weirdo getting turned on by someone talking about stepping on bugs or
whatever?

Edit: I'd also like to point out the best way to help prevent something like
this is for the parents to be monitoring what their children are doing online.
It wouldn't stop all of it, after all as pointed out the contents of most if
not all these videos seems rather harmless (which is kind of the point I
guess) so many parents might not have issue with it, but they should still be
aware of what's going on in case it doesn't stop with something relatively
harmless like this. E.G. the guy mentioned in the article asking the kids to
Skype with him.

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taneq
The issue that the article seems to take with this phenomenon isn't that
there's any harm being done (although some of the stuff with lego seems
questionable), but rather that someone somewhere is having 'bad thoughts'
about the minors involved.

This is getting into a very thoughtcrime-y area.

~~~
cle
The issue is that children are actively solicited by these adults to make
these "harmless" videos specifically for indulging their sexual fetishes.

~~~
taneq
But if the children were 'innocently' being actively solicited to make
identical videos by other children, it wouldn't be an issue. It would just be
children interacting socially.

Don't get me wrong, it's creepy as heck and I can totally understand the
visceral discomfort, but the issue people are having with it is the prurient
interest of the viewers, not the effect on the children.

~~~
superbatfish
This might sound weird, but I think the primary "victim" here might be
parents, not the children.

Here's an (admittedly imperfect) analogy: There are a lot of reasons to oppose
constant government surveillance, even if you're not a criminal. But one of
those reasons is just the simple fact that, as human beings, we are
psychologically stressed out by the fact that someone might be watching us at
any moment. Even if I'll probably live my entire life without feeling any
tangible effects of the surveillance, believing that it's out would be a
legitimate harm to my quality of life.

Parents are entitled to be legitimately troubled by the fact that pedophiles
are thinking of _their_ children in their sexual fantasies. That's not
"imagined" harm; it's real. After all, psychology is what it is, and it's not
changing any time soon.

Of course, enforcing any rules/laws against such behavior will be tricky, but
probably not impossible.

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mxfh
As it's true for all media in general, never leave your kids alone with
youtube, especially if only clicking on recommendations, even with toy videos.
Things get really weird, really fast after some iterations.

Every small, in itself harmless, subculture apparently draws in some outright
creepy to exploitive people after a given time.

~~~
orclev
There's also the fact that youtube comments are an absolute cesspool. I don't
even bother reading them anymore because it's almost exclusively trolls and
the scum of the internet that dominate there for some reason. Whatever the
most deplorable, offensive, ignorant, or disgusting thing you can think of,
someone has probably said it in the comments to a youtube video, most likely
to a video of someones grandmother knitting a sweater or something equally
inoffensive.

~~~
mxfh
One could even extrapolate from this, that for emotional health it's good
thing to postpone teaching that skills to as late as possible, or until Adobe
VoCo ruins it for all.

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Y_Y
When will DeepMind be good enough to detect YouTube perverts?

~~~
msane
When it can, detecting thoughtcrime might not be far off ...

AI could soon filter some of this stuff or screen it to alert humans, which
will obviously be a good thing.

But I think it's up to us to adapt to new technological environments. Parents
shouldn't be allowing their young children to post videos of themselves on
youtube for a variety of reasons. And kids should be warned not to do things
strangers on the internet ask them to do, just as we warn them about strangers
on the street.

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superbatfish
What the fuck is wrong with people.

~~~
superbatfish
Downvoted for ...language, I guess?

I dunno, when faced with a somewhat troubling and frankly just bizarre concept
like described in the OP's article, I think a recaction of "WTF" isn't exactly
off-base...

~~~
csydas
More than likely because your comment, while a reasonable reaction, isn't
really a comment that facilitates discussion, which is not preferred and seen
as white noise. Most people are fine with profanity in reasonable amounts but
it should have more content. Reactions alone tend to not give a lot of room
for discussion on the topic so much as the reaction itself, inquiring and
understanding the commenter's position instead of the article.

~~~
superbatfish
Sure, I was even a little worried that it would be perceived that way
immediately after I posted it. (Although my concerns weren't articulated to
myself as well as your point.)

But at the time that I left my comment, this thread had very few votes and
only 2 comments. It looked like it was just about to fall off the bottom of
the front page.

I figured a simple "dude, wtf" comment for the (very) few of us who were
participating in this thread at the time would be interpreted as: "If you
don't know what to make of this, but you know you don't like it, I'm with
you."

As it turns out, at least some of downvoting was due to some people's serious
misunderstanding of the original article. See for example, aaron695's
misguided comment below about "gay sex".

Anyway, sorry for the meta-meta discussion.

