>It creates a moral asymmetry where one group is "defending children" and another group is "defending an abstract concept", but group A wins out primarily due to millions of years of human evolution. It has very little (IMO) to do with the actual underlying concepts being debated.

You aren't actually engaging with why group A wins. Those "millions of years of human evolution" actually instilled in people a desire to protect children.

I am engaging with why group A wins: they win because the emotional prior is doing most of the work, not because the underlying argument necessarily has merit.

Of course, just like it instilled a desire to consume a lot of calorie-dense food. "Desire to protect the children" in this case is a knee-jerk reaction, or a thought terminating cliche.

For example, how many children will this actually protect? How many children will this harm? How many adults will be harmed by inevitable side-effects that arise? Those questions are not discussed or even considered.

Because those questions are meaningless to many people if you aren't offering any solution of your own to address their concerns. For the people who genuinely care about this issue, an obvious response you will get is "how many children are you willing to allow to be sex trafficked to preserve your privacy?"

You can't win a debate by claiming your concerns invalidate their concerns. You need to actually engage with them on the issue they care about.

Ok, but by this logic all freedom of citizens can be taken away, because it could lead to a single child being trafficked.

The end result is that even the children you're trying to protect are now under permanent surveillance of an authoritarian government where sex trafficking probably still happens, but the law permits the government to wrongfully ruin more people's lives than are saved by the claimed "noble" act.

>Ok, but by this logic all freedom of citizens can be taken away, because it could lead to a single child being trafficked.

No one is advocating for this. You're creating a straw man argument and those type of arguments are never persuasive. Once again, if you want to actually end this debate once and for all, you need an actual argument that can persuade people to your side.

It's not a straw man that's the natural extrapolation of your earlier logic.

> For the people who genuinely care about this issue, an obvious response you will get is "how many children are you willing to allow to be sex trafficked to preserve your privacy?"

I think you are confusing genuine caring with political radicalization. The behavior you're describing there isn't that of rational supporters but rather inflamed zealots.

Wait a minute. If the claim is that we're going to destroy privacy to protect children, asking first for proof that it will actually help children doesn't seem like an unreasonable request.

I can admit that your concern is perfectly valid, even share your concern, and still oppose your solution if your solution won't actually work. In fact, I would argue that I have a greater concern for the problem, because I care enough to worry about actually solving it, instead of just doing some ineffective measure that looks good.

That's at the level of reality, though. At the level of how this gets spun in media and politics, it doesn't often work that way. Performative action too often rules the day. Recognize it for what it is, though - performative. Asking if the solution actually works is a valid real-world response, even if it doesn't play politically.

Do they though? In this debate only the facade of appearing to desire to protect children matters. They don't actually need to protect children.