97% of the internet has no idea what Matrix channels even are.
I’ve been able to explain it to people pretty easily as “like Discord, but without Discord administration getting to control what’s allowed, only whoever happens to run that particular server.”
A more apt comparison would be people who go out of their way to hurt animals.
Is it? That person is going out of their way to do actual violence. It feels like arguing someone watching a slasher movie is more likely to make them go commit murder is a much closer analogy to someone watching a cartoon of a child engaged in sexual activity or w/e being more likely to make them molest a real kid.
We could make it a video game about molesting kids and Postal or Hatred as our points of comparison if it would help. I’m sure someone somewhere has made such a game, and I’m absolutely sure you’d consider COD for “fun and escapism” and someone playing that sort of game is doing so “in bad faith” despite both playing a simulation of something that is definitely illegal and the core of the argument being that one causes the person to want to the illegal thing more and the other does not.
…and most of the people who agree with that notion would also consider reading Lemmy to be “trawling dark waters” because it’s not a major site run by a massive corporation actively working to maintain advertiser friendliness to maximize profits. Hell, Matrix is practically Lemmy-adjacent in terms of the tech.
eventually they want to move on to the real thing, as porn is not satisfying them anymore.
Isn’t this basically the same argument as arguing violent media creates killers?
They have to deal with old men masturbating to them getting raped online.
The moment it was posted to wherever they were going to have to deal with that forever. It’s not like they can ever know for certain that every copy of it ever made has been deleted.
it says “this hidden site”, meaning it was a site on the dark web.
Not just on the dark web (which technically is anything not indexed by search engines) but hidden sites are specifically a TOR thing (though Freenet/Hyphanet has something similar but it’s called something else). Usually a TOR hidden site has a URL that ends in .onion and the TOR protocol has a structure for routing .onion addresses.
Even then, a common bit you’ll hear from people actually defending pedophilia is that the damage caused is a result of how society reacts to it or the way it’s done because of the taboo against it rather than something inherent to the act itself, which would be even harder to do research on than researching pedophilia outside a criminal context already is to begin with. For starters, you’d need to find some culture that openly engaged in adult sex with children in some social context and was willing to be examined to see if the same (or different or any) damages show themselves.
And that’s before you get into the question of defining where exactly you draw the age line before it “counts” as child sexual abuse, which doesn’t have a single, coherent answer. The US alone has at least three different answers to how old someone has to be before having sex with them is not illegal based on their age alone (16-18, with 16 being most common), with many having exceptions that go lower (one if the partners are close “enough” in age are pretty common). For example in my state, the age of consent is 16 with an exception if the parties are less than 4 years difference in age. For California in comparison if two 17 year olds have sex they’ve both committed a misdemeanor unless they are married.
It also likely gives you the best $ spent/children protected rate, because you know the producers have children they are abusing which may or may not be the case for a viewer.
That’s…not how AI image generation works? AI image generation isn’t just building a collage from random images in a database - the model doesn’t have a database of images within it at all - it just has a bunch of statistical weightings and net configuration that are essentially a statistical model for classifying images, being told to produce whatever inputs maximize an output resembling the prompt, starting from a seed. It’s not “seeded with an image of a 15 year old”, it’s seeded with white noise and basically asked to show how that white noise looks like (in this case) “woman porn miniskirt”, then repeat a few times until the resulting image is stable.
Unless you’re arguing that somewhere in the millions of images tagged “woman” being analyzed to build that statistical model is probably at least one person under 18, and that any image of “woman” generated by such a model is necessarily underage because the weightings were impacted however slightly by that image or images, in which case you could also argue that all drawn images of humans are underage because whoever drew it has probably seen a child at some point and therefore everything they draw is tainted by having been exposed to children ever.