Is Reddit (web site with a big corporate parent behind it) spreading child porn?

Great Debates
1

Anderson Cooper explored the question of whether Reddit is engaging in spreading child porn (admittedly borderline child “porn”…air quotes in this case because that is the debate here). Note the above is a link to a YouTube video. I’ll try to summarize it here but for this thread you really need to view the video.

Reddit was, till recently, owned by Conde Nast. Reddit has seen huge growth recently (especially after Digg spectacularly killed itself) and Conde Nast moved them from under their umbrella to be on its own under the larger parent corporation Advanced Publications.

Reddit is a social website where members vote up or down on various things they find on the internet which pushes popular stories to prominence. The site also has numerous (over a thousand I think) of what are called “subreddits”. These are user created areas that focus on a specific topic. Such topics can be most anything you can think of.

One such subreddit is “jailbait” (semi-safe for work…as in no nudity but scantily clad such as bikinis or lingerie pics may be found there).

It is this subreddit that is in question.

Does that count as child porn? It is pictures of underage (adolescent) girls looking sexy (clothed but often in things like bikinis). Where the photos come from and whether the people posting them have any right to is open to question.

For my part I’d say it is in bad taste to have a page dedicated to ogling teenage women but that said I cannot see it as child porn. No picture there is illegal in the sense of being child pornography. Hell, go to any beach in the summer in the US and you can see these girls live and in public.

Opinions?

2

When I was living in Japan, it was fairly easy to come across manga or anime where underaged characters are presented as sexual objects – presumably actually be treated as such in the erotic equivalents.

My first reaction was that this couldn’t possibly be a good thing. You’re telling people that this is something acceptable, you’re getting them used to fixating on underaged girls (or boys), and overall just revving them up to go at it.

Later, though, I realized that this is effectively the same exact argument that was used against pornography in general. If you show adult women as sexual objects, tied up, being used and abused, etc. then you’re just going to get people (i.e. men) used to thinking in that way, and overall just revving them up to go at it. And yet, all the evidence we have points to pornography either having no particular effect on the incidence of rape, abuse, or anything else. In fact, we have circumstantial evidence that wide spread pornography actually decreases these things (rape was less prevalent in places where pornography was widespread, and I believe I heard has gone down overall, now that the internet has started to spread).

While you can make the argument that porn revs people up, you could also make the argument that it lets them let off steam in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone else. You can rape your ex-girlfriend, or you can put in a video of a guy jackhammering a porn star in a way that doesn’t look all that pleasant. If the reason you’re doing the latter is because you want to rape your girlfriend, to be certain, that’s a bad thing; but it’s still better than the alternative.

So overall, minus real world numbers, it’s impossible to say what is better as regards something like what you’ve pointed out in the OP. But the closest evidence that we do have suggests that where it doesn’t actually hurt anyone, perhaps it’s best to let it go.

The right answer is, of course, to try and get some real numbers on it. I’m just not sure how one does that.

3

“Revving” people up is not the issue. Your post comes scarily close to arguing child porn could be a good thing (it will keep pedos at home jerking off instead of in the park stalking kids).

For this it is important to note this is not about pedophilia but rather ephebophilia. An important distinction in my view but both are illegal in the US.

4

The sexual comming of age is 14-15 in most of the world. These pictures are neither illegal nor paedophilia.

5

I believe it’s just one guy starting all of these subreddits in order to test the limits of Reddit’s adherence to freedom of speech. There’s also a subreddit called picturesofdeadkids started by the same guy.

6

I seriously doubt anyone at Conde Nast is behind it. As suggested, some guy trying to see how far he can go. I’m not saying this because I think corporations are wonderful. I think if there were a law allowing corporations to send armed thugs to your house to beat you til you gave the corporation money, then corporations would be sending armed thugs to your house to beat you til you gave them money. The Supreme Court may have declared corporations to be people, but as people, they’re sociopaths whose only concern is making money.

That said, corporations tend to gravitate toward low risk/high reward means of making money. And I can think of few riskier, less rewarding ways of making money right now than child porn. Child porn is exclusively the province of those who are into it.

Corporations won’t be doing child porn unless it becomes legal and profitable.

7

Perhaps so but it takes others to populate those subreddits. The jailbait one seems to be fairly active with posters. I have not checked out “picturesofdeadkids” but I cannot imagine it gets a lot of activity.

That said I did not realize it is the same guy and he sounds like a troll trying to find something to shock people.

8

Sure, but r/jailbait is still popular enough to show up on the first page of Google’s results for ‘reddit’ - and has been for a while, so it’s not a spike from the article.

Anyways, this sounds like a tempest in a teapot to me. We’re talking about clothed pictures, not nudes, so I can’t think of it as porn.

Also, Whack-a-Mole, I’d go so far as to say, yes, I think having access to child porn is probably a good thing. Now, I’ll also say that PRODUCING child porn is a pretty fucked up thing to do - if anything, that’s your reason for outlawing it. But evidence seems to point to porn reducing sexual crimes.

I’m not familiar enough with the situation to know where the balance lies - outlawing child porn so that there’s less production vs. allowing possession but not production (which may or may not work, since crime does pay, quite well in fact). I will say that I’m unambiguously in favor of allowing animated child porn - if there’s no actual child involved, I say go for it.

9

No one at Conde Nast is “behind” it (i.e. someone at Conde Nast corporate thought this subreddit is a good idea).

I think the issue is this is a website that is run by Conde Nast (or was till recently) that allows this content.

The question is whether the corporation should censor this or adhere to a free speech motto of, “If it’s not illegal then it is ok to be here.”

10

The JC Penney clothes catalog is child porn under those standards (photos of people under 18 who are fully dressed, wearing bathing suits or in their underwear).

11

Well, JC is in the news…

12

I checked the JC Penney web site and the girls swimsuit section has no models. Only pictures of the swimsuits.

13

Reedit is no more responsible for spreading child porn than Google is.

14

Reddit is a slightly more socially acceptable version of 4chan.

/r/jailbait has no child porn on it. It’s skeevy, but it ain’t porn. It’s the online version of creepers watching the kids in bathing suits at the community pool.

15

It doesn’t have to be nudity in order to be pornography. Moreover, nudity itself doesn’t constitute pornography.

What’s required is a portrayal of “sexually explicit conduct,” which can include “lascivious display of the genitals,” the latter of which does not (legally) require nudity.

People have served prison time under child porn laws for distributing pictures of completely clothed minors.

16

More saliently, from a cursory browsing of the OP’s link we’re talking about mostly MySpace-angled self-portraits. I can’t think of it as unwilling. Or maybe I mean undeserved. Bloody camwhores.

Gotta say I found this one hilarious, in a “this is so wrong” kind of way.

17

Fake though.

18

I’m pretty confident that sites like /b/ - Random - 4chan, motherless.com and /r/jailbait aren’t so popular from providing purely platonic pictures of pubescent people. Let’s not kid ourselves. Pedophiles are scanning these sites for occasional nipslips and borderline stripteases to masturbate to.

I don’t appreciate the attitude of some Redditers that Anderson Cooper is in Maude Flanders mode. The entire idea of jailbait is to push it as close to the line as you possibly can, with many a wink wink and nudge nudge, without taking that last final step. I don’t consider this an overreaction on his part. It is skeevy and gross.

Is it actually illegal? I have no doubt such sites have distributed child porn before but generally, no. I’m also confident that such sites could do much more to prevent the distribution than, say, Google.

19

One creepy element of this is that not all of these girls are there of thier own accord. There is a significant number of pictures that have been trolled from Facebook pages and the like and posted without the girl’s knowledge. That was one thing AC mentioned in his report and I have seen that in other reports about this site and others like it.

20

According to this thread over on SA, there was another subReddit that was filled with honest-to-God child porn, and that’s what prompted the OP over there to contact Anderson Cooper (among other media figures). It’s not likely that Conde Nast is actively supporting this, but they’re sure not doing much to stop it.