Saw a giant billboard with something along the lines of "Apple hosts child sex abuse imagery on iCloud. They are complicit."
Really wonder what groups are putting these up and where they're getting their funding. This was in California. It happens every few years, where organizations try to go after encryption or other privacies under the guise of public safety or "save the kids" type stuff, but I've never seen huge billboards like this before.
I find this stuff very alarming. The reporting in TFA about European politics (and the recent Heat Initiative pressure campaign here in the US) illustrate how much unaccountable dark money is flowing into these causes. I don’t think that there are huge pools of anonymous donor cash looking to influence child-safety campaigns for the sake of anyone caring about children, because that’s not typically how altruistic donors donate their money.
Instead I think it’s likely that some commercial interests see a lucrative financial opportunity in this private data (either selling AI-based scanning tools, or mining it directly as a service.) This data is currently locked up with big firms like Apple and Meta, who are (for various reasons) leaning towards encrypting it rather than exploiting its contents, and the way to solve this problem involves passing laws through naive legislatures who don’t understand what they’re doing. And frankly that possibility worries me much more than where I thought we were previously - which was just a boring dispute between government and tech firms.
I'm not in favor of public scaremongering like spreading half-truths about a random other company on a billboard, but I will say that perfect is the enemy of good. You can say "sort out your own back yard" about virtually anything.
If you believe that what they do is good, it doesn't matter so much if their own back yard is sorted out, it's still good. If you don't, then not, and it still doesn't matter what their own state of affairs looks like.
The Catholic Church has a long history of actively protecting child abusers, and it keeps happening. They then, as one of the richest organizations on earth, set up their organization to allow them to "bankruptcy" their way out ever having any consequences.
Couple that with the catholic church's long standing stance of "anything LGBT or adjacent is child abuse" and you have an organization who's stance on "stopping child abuse" is "we must criminalize anyone or thing that is LGBT, but abusing children is a-ok, and we must make child victims feel like they are the guilty party, and making them aware that telling anyone about the abuse might send them to the 'police' is absolutely something abusers use".
It is absolutely correct to call out the involvement of any such organization in any claimed "child abuse prevention" system, especially a system that has no path to stop actual predators and criminals and by design has no possible mechanism for checks or audits.
I won't even consider trusting the catholic church's involvement in child welfare until they: compensate every victim, publicly report every abuser they have protected and provide all documentation to police, and they send every single person involved in covering up and protecting these child abusers to the police (because jfc they are child abusers), and then we can start addressing the various "schools" for native children that were basically torture centers for children that abused, killed, and raped hundreds if not thousands.
Isn't this sort of a useless line of reasoning ultimately? I mean sure, blah blah everyone is aware of the history of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. But the same issue is just as, if not more, prevalent across public schools in the United States. Would the same argument seem as reasonable if it read "Maybe the federal/state government should sort out its own back yard before making demands"?
It depends. Are the state attempting to cover it up? Is it to the same extent as what has happened in the Catholic Church? Are they offering the protagonists protection and sanctuary? Either way, I’m sure we can all agree that the measures they’re promoting are unacceptable. My point though is that organisations, such as the Catholic Church, and organisations that purport to operate under their auspices, have no moral standing to make these demands of other entities. From where I’m standing, it looks as if they are pointing the finger of responsibility at big tech, instead of the organisation that is covering up child abuse.
The first thing that comes to mind is the conservative movements growing obsessions with pedophilia, real and imagined. It has become the visceral hook that seems to emotionally motivate a lot of the far-right, not unlike abortion.
Look, as a liberal-turned-conservative parent, many of us have simply had enough with the gaslighting.
For decades the lesson was "don't talk to strangers online," yet every kids' app has a social component that encourages their doing exactly that. The channels by which this could possibly be supervised are rendered deliberately opaque. No supervision is possible by MITM.
Then you get the influencer crowd. The kids flock to innocent unboxing videos on YouTube, because ooh shiny. Because there are no broadcast decency standards on the internet, they're free to follow it up with "hey kids now let's check out my animal dildo collection."
Then there's Discord, on which even the fucking FBI is putting out advisories about pedophiles grooming kids from Roblox. The feds are 3-5 years late to every party, so in time that problem is going to prove way worse than anybody realized.
It's not an "obsession with pedophilia;" the idea that there needs to be a culture of "child sexuality" at all is distasteful enough to elicit strong reactions. We don't encourage kids to smoke or get facial tattoos, but we're forced to support their decision to be castrated based on ideas put in their head by Tumblr and the virtual environments they take part in, grooming them in the very games they play. Fire up Splatoon 3 and see how many names and profile images have something to do with yaoi, yuri, gayness or countdowns to HRT. There are none to be found that have anything to do with heteronormative sex, and most games banned sprays depicting such years ago. To each their own, but saturating kids with this stuff explicitly teaches them that transgressive sexuality is how you fit in. It's not for everyone, so they end up miserable, castrated, sexually assaulted, and dragging everyone else down with them and killing themselves, their families or their classmates. Thanks, Big Tech.
It's a visceral hook (and an appealing one) because it appeals to collective frustration. Everything parents try to do gets undermined by Big Tech. They do nothing to help us, and deride us for poor parenting where we fail to keep up with their tactics.
I'm just one guy burdened with a day job, trying to fend off teams of experts who each spend 40+ hours a week inventing efficient ways to sap as much of my kids' attention as possible while replacing their values with ones more friendly to pedophiles and advertisers.
The whole thing can burn to the ground for all I care. It's an entirely emotional reaction on my part, and I'm not alone in feeling this way.
I know several people in transition (and post) and the one thing that stands out is how carefully it is done. You don't go to the doctor and order a sex change like it's a Big Mac. There's a whole support trajectory of psychological evaluation and support and transition is the last option. Of course they know gender dysphoria is often a temporary phase.
No kid will get "castrated" just to fit in. Actual gender change operations aren't even done until adulthood, only puberty blockers are sometimes used which are reversible. And only if the child's dysphoria is so extreme it really impacts their quality of life or endangers them (think self-harm). In this sense it's entirely "for the children".
Also 99% of trans people have no regrets. The system works. I think it's amazing that we live in a world where people can decide their own life and body. And I don't really get the whole hate against trans people. It's not like they're harming anyone.
> Actual gender change operations aren’t even done until adulthood
This seems to be false according to this article [1] which claims that “In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo’s data analysis of insurance claims.”
In Holland it's forbidden under 18, I don't know about the US. But 776 people is obviously not a lot on the population of the US. That's one in half a million. Don't forget a transgender transition isn't the only reason people have genital reassignment surgery. Some people are simply born intersex and have corrective surgery for this earlier. Dysphoria can be quoted as a reason there too, but there are also more pressing medical concerns.
You are talking about such a tiny number of people compared to the overall population that many of those individuals could be intersex or otherwise have health or genetic problems that led to procedures at such a young age.
In fact, it's kind of fucked up how the entire anti-trans movement completely pretends intersex people do not exist.
> And I don't really get the whole hate against trans people. It's not like they're harming anyone.
Tell that to all the lesbian women who've had their social and dating spaces overrun by men pretending to be women. Or to the female prisoners forced to share cells with such men. Or indeed to any woman who's had to deal with one of these men invading a female-only space for his own selfish delight.
> They're not men pretending to be women, they are women.
This reality-defying assertion always reminds me of the Catholic belief in transubstantiation. Their position is that even though the bread looks like bread, tastes like bread, behaves like bread, has all the properties of bread, and so on, it somehow is literally the body of Christ in substance.
Just like how these men are somehow literally women, according to acolytes of the transgender belief system.
Yeah there's a strong "castration" thing being pushed by right-wing media but it's not a thing. Kind of cool in a way to watch it spread like a virus across social media and general society though, but also a little horrifying.
Yeah and I think the whole "rise" in transgender cases is better explained by considering that it was a huge taboo until recently and there's now actual operations available and accessible (insurance) to people that weren't before
People forget also that the parents have the final say in these matters until the child matures. Nobody is coming to castrate your kids :P
Puberty blockers are not reversible. If used for more than a year or so, they significantly stunt brain development and greatly increase the odds of infertility and other future health problems.
Puberty blockers don't make you dumber, they could affect fertility sometimes but it's not a huge issue if the eventual goal is a transition anyway (which it must be for them to be given). As fully transitioned people can't conceive naturally. It's a good tradeoff.
Suicide here in Europe is not higher (in fact it's higher when not carried out die to dysphoria) but I can imagine that in strongly conservative areas bullying is very strong driving people over the edge :'(
Ok, so people have had "child sexuality" since forever. Every time some person is talking about a kid's boyfriend or girlfriend they're talking about child sexuality.
The only change is that now we recognize that bullying and abusing children because they're the "wrong" sexuality is wrong, and homophobes have decided that instead of doing it directly they're going to try the "sex is sin" path of abuse and then say that the only reason for a non-straight relationship is sex, and therefore is adults only.
The fact that you go on an uninformed transphobic rant tells me which camp you're in.
There are a number of objections to specific points in your comment, as well as your overall perspective, but I think the biggest one is that your kids don't need to be using YouTube, Discord, or other apps.
Maybe because the fact that a (presumably) healthy adult such as yourself chooses not to procreate because it "seems so difficult" indicates that there is something very sick about the society that we live in.
As a soon-to-be parent who is left-leaning but disturbed by what the so-called 'progressive' movement are pushing, I agree with you. It gives me immense concern, knowing what my child is likely to be exposed to online.
The only thing that gives me some peace of mind is seeing the growing backlash to all this nonsense. Seems to me that thrusting this crazy ideology onto kids, chopping body parts off teenagers, celebrating creepy pedophilic men if they happen to align with some bespoke 'gender identity', attacking free speech and attempting to ruin the lives of those who criticize this delusional denial of reality is most likely not a winning strategy after all.
I just hope this is all done away with before my kid is old enough to be affected by it.
The comment I responded to was specifically speculating about who was responsible for billboards they saw that relate to the topic of the article. Incidentally, the responses to my comment are indicative of exactly the kind of rhetoric I have seen many times coming from the right on this topic.
Let's stick with "real" for a moment. There is absolutely nothing about real pedophilia that makes it a far-right-only concern. In fact, with the left's concern about sexual abuse of women, they ought to also care about sexual abuse of minors.
You are asserting that people who are not far-right do not care about the abuse of minors, which is a nonsensical belief with no connection to reality and completely undermines whatever point you're trying to make.
But it is a good example of the over-the-top rhetoric being used around this exact issue.
"It [pedophilia] has become the visceral hook that seems to emotionally motivate a lot of the far-right, not unlike abortion."
I am claiming that pedophilia motivates many people, not just the far right. It is beyond me how you could misread that claim into something that would lead you to reply as you did.
[Edit: My use of "ought to" may be the problem. The left, based on their positions, should be emotionally, viscerally motivated to oppose pedophilia. If they aren't, then that is an inconsistency in their position. But I think that they (or at least many of them) are motivated. So, to sum up, I'm not sure why you singled out the far-right in your initial statement.]
Yes it's your use of ought to, and no there isn't an inconsistency.
Being "emotionally, viscerally" motivated, to the extent that it's very obvious, tends to make people do stupid and counterproductive things. You shouldn't be demanding that.
> I'm not sure why you singled out the far-right in your initial statement.
Because of their horrible politicized accusations that take attention away from the actual problems.
It's much easier to misinterpret your statement that the left ought to care about paedophilia as a claim they don't (even if that was not your intent) than it would have been for you to interpret the OP about "obsessions... real and imagined" as a claim that paedophilia in general is a far right only concern...
Particularly in the context
of the appeal of an ad dubiously associating a California tech co with paedophilia to people who believe stuff like Pizzagate and Q because they're inclined to suspect everybody they don't like is in league with the paedos
I have never met anyone on the left that isn't disgusted by the sexual abuse of minors. Just the perfectly rational acknowledgement that the sexual abuse of women is a more widespread problem.
Child sex abuse is more common that it ever should be, but it is not the epidemic of child abuse that the right characterizes it to be. Accusations of pedophilia are extremely commonplace on the right, even when there is absolutely no evidence, largely because it is the most horrifying thing you can accuse another person of doing, and because the moral panic you can instill in your supporters if you convince them is a highly effective political weapon.
If anything, the people who scream about pedophila the loudest are the ones showing their apathy towards actual real-world child sex abuse, because they are doing so in bad faith, not to protect actual children, but to score political points through slander. If anything that helps obfuscate and enable child abusers, since the focus is now on conspiracy theories and targeted defamation.
Pretty weird. I mean, I guess since SD cards can be used to host it, SanDisk is also complicit. And you can use the open Wi-Fi at the airport to send it, so JFK airport is complicit. Just how many entities are obligated to scan all bits for these illegal sequences of ones and zeroes?
Why not actually focus more effort on the twisted people who create the content by abusing minors and less on a global dragnet for all communications?
Absolutely.
We already know why the interest groups focus on the communications, instead of proven ways.
Because it is a false flag operation. The topic is used as a vehicle to undermine private encrypted communication.
The CIA's hacking tools were leaked in the Vault 7 leaks from WikiLeaks. They were fairly amateurish. The nearest component was some 0 days for smart tvs to turn them into wiretaps. It seems like the NSA really does get the focus for signals intelligence.
No, lol. They don't. Maybe Windows, because Microsoft doesn't seem to care much about privacy, but Apple doesn't mess around. And if there were backdoors in Linux, we'd definitely know about it, because people are actively looking for stuff like that.
This is just wrong. Apple's public position could differ from its actual one. And Hiding a backdoor (or hiding with the deniability of an innocent bug) in open source is possible. "we'd definitely know about it" is not how security works.
There have been exhaustive third party reviews of the Linux kernel, nothing is impossible, but a government backdoor would be extremely hard to hide from the level of scrutiny that codebase is put under.
I would certainly consider it unlikely enough that any suggestion to the contrary, without evidence, is just a conspiracy theory.
Spyware companies would be a good guess. There's a lot of money to be made in helping abusers spy on their partners and/or kids by installing malware on their devices, and of course there's a big enterprise/govt market for that as well whether your goal is to capture dissidents, bust internal unions, or do a little industrial espionage.
If I was Apple, I would be getting that torn down and suing immediately (or hiring their quasi-police force to tear it down with or without permission). I doubt Apple "allows" it. Apple probably even forbids it in their Terms of Service.
Just because Apple willingly avoids knowing what their users store on iCloud does not mean they are taking the active role of allowing illegal content to be stored.
There are lots of good reasons for Apple to avoid a defamation lawsuit about this.
(1) Streisand effect (mentioned by another commenter) - it would generate tons of free publicity for their opponents.
(2) Civil discovery - the defendant would get to demand access to Apple's internal e-mails about this issue in order to try to prove its case.
(3) Possibly losing - even though this feels obviously intended to make people believe false things about Apple, a court might accept that there is some interpretation of "allows" and "complicit" that are protected criticisms of the company under some jurisdiction's defamation standard.
> I doubt Apple "allows" it. Apple probably even forbids it in their Terms of Service.
Encrocrypt and Cyberbunker probably had terms saying not to do illegal things...
What matters is how they respond to problems as they are pointed out. If it would turn out that links to their hosting service keep popping up in child abuse cases, do they respond by deleting them piecemeal or do they put a system in place that tries to identify the content by fuzzy hash and flags it for proactive review? Do they actively cooperate with the countries' law enforcement where the picture got uploaded from? That sort of thing. That has infinitely more impact than "you wouldn't download a car" notices
I saw that and a car driving around with that on it in San Francisco and had the same thought. Who funds that and who is their real target audience? With the tech crowd you might need a bit more nuance.
If in doubt, look towards churches. They're always neck deep in anything involving sex or sexuality, mostly to distract from their own considerable issues.
Really wonder what groups are putting these up and where they're getting their funding. This was in California. It happens every few years, where organizations try to go after encryption or other privacies under the guise of public safety or "save the kids" type stuff, but I've never seen huge billboards like this before.
Pretty jarring.