Talk:Internet child pornography/Archive 2

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User:Paranoid's comments on child pornography

The article has obviously been written by a paedophile and it has absolutely no place in an encyclopaedia. What wil be next - "The ten easiest ways to commit murder"? "How to buy class A drugs"? "Rape someone in 5 easy steps"?!
Saying "[child pornography] sometimes harms children" is about as ludicrous a statement as "Pol Pot made a few small mistakes as a national leader".

Have you read the text? Yes, usually children have much bigger problems than their future psychological health and sexual exploitation. They are usually starving (and their families too), there is no job, no unemployment benefits, no nothing. The only feasible way is to sell something. But the caveat is they don't have that something, the only valuable thing are the children themselves. Working as prostitutes or child porn models makes enough money to provide comfortable life for themselves, their parents and siblings. Can you understand (however horrendous that sounds to you) that in such cases child pornography benefits children.

When a child is kidnapped in the US, raped and filmed, that's a crime and an extremely bad thing, no doubt about that. But paying a child prostitute in Philippines to pose for a video does not make her life worse. She is already a prostitute, she already has sex with tens of adults for money. Filming her will not make her life worse, only better, because she will be paid. That's a difficult concept to swallow, but you have to, if you want to have a realistic picture. -- Paranoid October 9, 2003

Are we telling people how to commit crimes?

I'm not sure that Wikipedia should be in the business of telling people how to commit crimes. And you can't argue that the end result of these instructions is the possession of material illegal in the United States (where the server resides) and in a number of other countries.

My other issue with this article was that I think it is a troll and you (User:Paranoid are trolling by posting it. In other words, I don't think your motives are clean. You're posting it HOPING for a fight so that you can have a nice little 'Help! I'm being oppressed!' fit.

Morven 23:23, 9 Oct 2003 (UTC)

2 questions, legality and trolling

As I can see, there are two questions (see Cyan's comment at the top). One is whether this is legal and second is whether it should be posted despite that fact that some people consider this kind of speech offensive and generally what is the value of the article. I said anought about the legality already. I also don't think that offensive speech should be banned, deleted or nuked only because it's offensive. I also disagree with characterising this text as "download illegal child pornography" or instructions for committing crimes. The text can be used by friends and relatives of the paedophile to uncover his activities and by LEOs to fight child porn on the Net. The text itself, just like nuclear physics or any other knowledge, doesn't care what you use it for. And although one can clearly conceive more bad uses than good ones, that doesn't automatically qualify the text as bad. As for the quality, I think that it is definitely better than some of the other articles at Wikipedia that are allowed to stay, although future improvements would be, of course, welcome.

As for the trolling, I am honestly not a troll. You can check my Everything2 posting history to see that I am not trolling, just posting controversial and provocative posts sometimes (not very often). The right to download at least speak about child porn is a free speech issue for me first and foremost. And I am not a paedophile, although I would support (not to the death though) the right of a paedophile to be one (without acting on his thoughs and impulses towards actual children, of course). I understand some of the concerns here, but many are fallacious (slippery slope fallacy). If a law enforcement officer (from the censorship anti-porn division) reads this text, it will be considered a helpful guide, a useful tool and will be printed and posted on the wall for everyone to see. The text itself is value-neutral and is protected speech. But what you do with it is your free choice. So the text should be undeleted. Paranoid 03:29, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Aiding and abetting?

If child pornography is illegal, and downloading it is illegal, and in most places it is, then writing a "how to find it" is therefore a crime called "aiding and abetting", surely? Therefore it's not free speech, it's a criminal piece and should not be part of WP. GRAHAMUK 03:47, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Legality

However much you like to reiterate it, the point is not whether this is legal or not. The point is whether we think it is appropriate for Wikipedia. This text is a poorly disguised "download illegal child pornography" How-To. I don't want to speculate about the uploader's motives, but it looks like plain trollbait. I have no desire to feed trolls, but this can not stay. Wikipedia is not a criminal's toolshop. Kosebamse 23:31, 9 Oct 2003 (UTC)
Agree completely, it should be removed. In addition, I think that the "defence" put forward a few paras above is on very thin ice, morally speaking. Using a child prostitute may be thought acceptable because that child is already a prostitute, but there was a first time, at which point that child probably lost a large part of her soul - without a ready market she would not have done that. There are other ways one can avoid starving - a moral person would have given her the money for food, or helped her otherwise. You (Paranoid) may consider morality is relative, and to a large extent of course it is. But there are some things that most right-thinking people agree on, and child abuse is one of them. Comparing the moral situation with Satanic Verses is simply dishonest, or self-deluding. You may feel it's OK to use a child prostitute, in which case, you are immoral, by most people's standards. You must either accept that if you wish to use a child prostitute you are therefore immoral, or you give up the abuse in order to call yourself moral. You cannot have it both ways. GRAHAMUK 03:40, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)
If this had been intended as a legitamate article and not as a guide for paedophiles, there are many very easy changes and modifications which the poster could have made to make it simply neutral information. As it stands, however, the article in many places actually justifies child pornography or at the very least strongly hints at its justification, with comments to the effect of "But the children would starve otherwise", and "child porn is better than children starving". Either, as I wrote earlier, the author is a paedophile (and let's face it, a very tiny minority of non-paedophiles would ever have the inclination to find such information, assuming that it is in fact correct...), or he really has very little idea and understanding of the impact of this practice on the child victims. Either way, I think the article was deliberately intended to be highly questionable, and therefore shouldn't be taken as a serious contribution. If it were a serious contribution, the poster would have easily made it far less contestable in its structure. 80.255 02:36, 11 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Not illegal

At least under US law, no. Paranoid is quite right when he says that this information is probably legal under American law.
The information in this article would be a LOT less controversial if phrased differently. If it read less like a 'how-to' and more like a 'how-they', incorporated into an article that also covered other aspects of the Internet child-porn issue as (Martin?) suggested, I'd be much less opposed to it. --Morven 04:17, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)