One of the remarkable things about this is that the campaign orchestrated by Something Awful users caused this happen in less than 4 hours. Even the CNN exposé took days.
On the other hand: What took ’em so long? Jailbait was shut down, what now? A few months ago?
The admins must have been aware that the exact same crap was happening in copycat subreddits all over Reddit soon after Jailbait was shut down. Why was another campaign necessary in the first place?
I don’t think the Reddit admins can take the moral high ground here. They will only do the right thing when you threaten them with bad PR.
(I’m guessing they reacted so fast this time because they know that those kinds of things can escalate quickly and national press attention is not nice to have.)
Speaking as an interested outside observer, my opinion is that the personal connections between a few of these subreddit owners and reddit's admins were a stumbling block. Business and PR is now overwhelming those friendships.
I didn't get this impression. It seemed to me that while the admins found the content personally distasteful, they did not want to erode freedom of speech. This is why it "took so long"; it was a debate, not a clear-cut decision (in their eyes).
It seems like the potential PR/legal fallout has now outweighed any philosophical musings.
It actually started a few days ago. The account creating the preteen girls subreddit and posting most of its content was 3 days old. It is very suspect and a plausible explanation is that someone from SA was running a smear campaign from the start.
These sort of subreddits have existed for years, although it is most definitely the case that the actions of Something Awful caused them to be shut down, they did not create them. For example r/teen_girls has existed for 6 months.
Do you really believe those bullshit conspiracy theories?
Yeah, right. Some goon posted CP on Reddit, causing outrage among some Reddit users but also flaming (and highly upvoted) defenses of said CP – presumably all by goons.
There were numerous jailbait subreddits for years. This is no conspiracy. That doesn’t even pass the sniff test.
If they did, good for them. While I don't normally condone the "ends justify the means" approach. I'll gladly make an exception for this one. Because of that persons effort, the world is just a bit better than it was yesterday.
Of course, for that hypothesis to work, it would have to be the only relevant subreddit in existence. In reality, almost every conceivable permutation of the turn "jailbait" had a subreddit that trafficked in the same kind of material.
Something Awful has a reputation for Internet war campaigns. (They ARE the source of 4chan IIRC.) Anything coming from SA is expected to be so bad that it's not an uncommon occurrence for sites to change (stupid) policy simply on the hype generated by a SA scheme.
What I don't understand is how a "Jailbait" thread/subreddit could really be considered "legal" since the term "Jailbait" refers to people who look like they're at the age of consent but aren't. And thus will land anyone who has...intercourse; with them in jail. So the illegality is implied in the title.
Jailbait refers to people it would be illegal to have sex with, this doesn't make pictures of them (clothed) illegal and it's only child porn when the subject is not clothed and even then they have to be engaging in sexual acts or the focus being their genitals for it to be (in the eyes of the law) child porn.
edit: see comments below, I was wrong. No idea how reddit has not been shut down then...
"Nudity is not enough for a finding that an image is lascivious, but clothing does not mean a photo is in the clear: 'a photograph of a naked girl might not be lascivious (depending on the balance of the remaining Dost factors), but a photograph of a girl in a highly sexual pose dressed in hose, garters, and a bra would certainly be found to be lascivious.'"
In theory, sure. In practice you are not likely to find a prosecutor interested in a case without some form of nudity. (background; I work in digital forensics).
Ive seen the sub-reddits in question. Most were fairly "meh", by which I mean nothing that would ever get you in court. But beneath the surface there was active trading of real CP and this, I think, was what caught SA's attention.
>Ive seen the sub-reddits in question. Most were fairly "meh", by which I mean nothing that would ever get you in court. But beneath the surface there was active trading of real CP and this, I think, was what caught SA's attention.
Please don't normalize child pornography by saying "you've got the bad stuff and then there's this..." TBH, that's part of the problem.
Perhaps it might not be prosecuted, but it's illegal nevertheless.
Images are either child pornography or not. Lots of images are up for interpretation by the Dost test & other case law surrounding the issue, but at the end of the day, we're talking about a binary here. If someone is willing to risk hosting or viewing images that are up for interpretation, it's their own ass on the line -- but many people consistently underestimate exactly what child pornography is.
But my main issue here is that your speech normalizes child pornography. By trying to frame the issue as "gut-wrenching abuse images of young children" versus "grey area stuff", possession of the "grey area stuff" seems less bad. But that's wrong. Both categories of images represent the victimization of children, and both can land you in prison.
When we say "grey area" the test is "could this image be absolutely non-controversial in a "normal" context". For example; if you seize a computer containing lots of images of girls in swimwear the owner has some issues. But if one of those images appeared, in, say a family photo album no one would bat an eye lid.
In that case I absolutely do prefer to frame the situations differently. On the one hand we have a someone who's tastes directly drive gangs to abuse more children. On the other hand we have someone who is contributing to the violation of childrens privacy (through sites that distribute these images).
At no point am I suggesting these crimes should be treated differently, just that we should consider the differences.
Both are forms of victimisation; however in the latter case the victimisation takes place after the photo is taken (when it finds its way on line) rather than at the time (when the child is being abused).
The problem here is not how I describe these. It is with a society that sees the word "Child Porn" and goes off half cock, but sees "Invasion of privacy" and "Emotional Trauma" and shrugs.
Just to be clear; I work within the field of forensics, which means that, yes, I do investigate such cases - and I am exposed to the legal structure and opinion related to these crimes. If you read over my comments carefully at no point do I try to dismiss the severity of the issue - I just gave some very brief feedback from my experience.
What I was noting, legally speaking, is that many images are in a grey area where they are not explicitly abusing a child (although they are abusive in being traded around online). If all you have in your possession are such images you will not likely see the inside of the court room.
Speaking personally I don't entirely agree with this state of affairs (perhaps I should have made that clear in the first posts :)).
EDIT: I should explain that this state of affairs has come to evolve because of how juries tend to react to CP prosecutions. If the case involves images of children being abused sexually then the defendant is seen as reprehensible/evil. On the other hand, if all you have is a collection of - individually innocuous - pictures of kids the defendant tends to be seen as having more of a mental issue, and elicits sympathy - "he didn't actually hurt anyone". The jury, obviously, fails to see the secondary abuse in distributing the image.
I don't think you can prosecute someone for being attracted to children, that would be thought crime and is a slippery slope. But clearly, participating in sites that distribute those images are is reprehensible abuse of another sort - and that is what they need to be punished for.
Thanks for the inside view on things. It sounds we're definitely speaking from the same position, and I'm glad that we agree on the meat of the argument.
I'm going to grab my soapbox and expand where I'm coming from regarding the normalization of child pornography. By allowing a de facto distinction to exist between hardcore abusive pornography and other forms, we are essentially saying that some types of child pornography are okay. This primes individuals to regard possession as acceptable; this is why reddit's inaction until now was so reprehensible.
I understand that the legal system is unlikely to investigate cases of child pornography that don't consist of egregious child abuse. That's fair. The legal system has a limited amount of time & money. But the moment we allow people to mistake this inaction for tolerance is the moment everything starts to go wrong.
But again - it looks like we're on the same page, and I definitely appreciate the inside view you bring.
Ignoring the legality of it for a minute. The title "Jailbait" implies sexualization (My spell checker insists this is not a word, but it's meaning should be obvious to infer.) of the images within. Even if the images were all "legal" by the standards of United States law, (I'm assuming Reddit is hosted in the US.) they're still being used to fuel sexual fantasies related to the images. As I understand it the reason that child pornography is illegal is because it's distribution and consumption encourages the sexual abuse of children worldwide. If the end result of the Reddit "Jailbait" subthread is sexual fantasies of children, then the damage done is the same. For example, if the FBI seizes your computer and finds a file labelled "Porn" on your hard drive full of images like children tricycling around a neighborhood, your almost certainly going to be asked about it in the police interview(s) even if it's not necessarily prosecutable.
Everything thats illegal isn't necessarily immoral; and everything thats legal isn't exactly moral either. The sexualization of children is immoral, legal or not.
True. However, the years between childhood and adolescent are blurry. This is the reason you have the term "Jailbait" in the first place. Some people are "late bloomers" and look like children well into their teens. Others end up looking like they've reached the age of consent, but haven't; the "Jailbait". I think that in general sexualizing the under 18 crowd should be avoided. (Even if the age of consent is lower than that.) Just because of how blurry these lines are.
> Something Awful has a reputation for Internet war campaigns.
Note this hasn't been true for many years.
They do have an extremely parochial attitude towards other general interest forums, and their dislike of Reddit is in the same vein as making fun of Fark/Ebaumworld/etc. The jailbait thing is just the one point they have broader PR traction on.
I think there have been a few high profile posts/submissions over the last couple of days related to child porn on Reddit so it has been a big issue the last 48 hours.
