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Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

Most of these platforms start off trying to be content neutral and end up adding more moderation as a result of how badly it ends up hurting them. There's only so many times advertisers are willing to have their brand shown next to child pornography (ie, reddit's former /r/jailbait) or hate speech.

If complete neutrality was an answer these companies would be doing that, since it's the cheapest option.

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It seems to me that content neutral (neutrality? neutralness?) and copyright violations are there in order to build eyeballs and brand. You use them for growth.

Once the size is there, you curate. Profit becomes the issue and the tendency is to simply become cable TV with thousands of channels.

I wonder how you could architect video access for content that gets peoples' knickers in a twist but is still legal. There's loads of single points of failures still. TV settop box access, smart TV/Roku access, the difficulties and expense in storing and serving up video, etc.

> There's only so many times advertisers are willing to have their brand shown next to child pornography (ie, reddit's former /r/jailbait) or hate speech.

I’m not sure advertisers care about this as much as people claim. YouTube’s censorship really ramped up in 2017 after Trump was elected, and was fairly limited before then. I don’t think they had trouble with advertisers before then all those years. I could be wrong - have any sources that could help?

Many times advertisers honestly just don’t know. You’re spending a lot of money across a lot of different channels, and then all of a sudden somebody says, “uh-oh, we’re getting dragged on Twitter for advertising on $bad_page.” You definitely don’t like child porn or covid disinformation or anything like that, and the tweets make you look like an idiot, so you email the owner of $bad_page (some sort of advertising network, or maybe a site like Reddit) and say “if my ads are ever on this page again, I will pull my budget from your entire network.”

I greatly dislike the conflation of things like jailbait (which is mostly provocative clothed images taken voluntarily by teens) and classic child pornography where a 6 year old is brutally raped.

One is harmless the other involves lifelong trauma.

It's not necessarily harmless. JB includes nasty creepshots. And even if the subject took the photo themselves, it's unlikely they wanted a bunch of weirdos on the internet to lust over it. And if they somehow did want that lust, it's even more unlikely that they fully understood the consequences.

All of that can end up being very harmful to one's mental health. And that's not even accounting for the people who try to physically go after those children after seeing them and convincing themselves that they "love" the child.

That subreddit was exploiting children for sexual gratification. It wasn't just teens, and it wasn't people posting purposefully provocative images. It was children living their normal lives and having their pictures exploited for the sexual gratification of perverts.

Calling this harmless is absolutely disgusting.

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