it sounds like this issue is enormously more of an abstract concept to you than it is for me, which may be why you're more interested in whether a proposed policy such as limitations on anonymous communication will result in you seeing pictures of child abuse than whether it will cause child abuse. because i have a lot more knowledge of the issue than you do, i don't want the policies you favor, because, as i said in my previous comment, they perpetuate the abuse and protect the abusers more than the victims

my vietnam war example wasn't some kind of analogy or metaphor. it was, literally, a photo of a naked child being horribly abused. at the time, publishing it was legal, although plausibly today it wouldn't be; if i recall correctly, wikipedia has been blocked in various countries for containing that picture, and it has been blocked on facebook: https://breakingnewsenglish.com/1609/160909-napalm-girl-phot.... public opinion was not in fact divided on the topic of horribly abusing children; it was simply uninformed about who was doing it and how to impede them. you are similarly uninformed today

but you already have enough information to understand that you are in the wrong. when you opened that page, why did you just close it? why didn't you send those pictures to the police, to investigative journalists, or to a private investigator? unlike the http web, freenet was protecting you by ensuring that whoever uploaded the pictures to freenet (probably the abuser) didn't have your ip address or any other way to figure out who reported them. perhaps you made that decision because you're living in a legal regime which penalizes their mere possession. but when you did, you personally became complicit in perpetuating that abuse, in order to comply with the very censorship regime you are defending

and that is the general pattern of how censorship relates to abuse

here's another photo of an abused five-year-old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State#/media/File:N... more accurately, it's a photo of all that was left of her after the abuse. this kind of abuse continued for years in the congo free state, only stopping when foreigners with diplomatic immunity were able to visit, document it, and force the king himself to give up the colony where he had institutionalized such abuses. if the congolese had had access to freenet, it would have stopped years earlier

and that is why right now journalists and other people in the gaza strip are being killed when they try to get internet access to share the news of what is happening there. even the un high committee for refugees complains that its own workers there are unable to communicate reliably. even today, systems like freenet remain marginal and relatively ineffective, and mass human rights atrocities—including sexual and even worse abuse of children—is the predictable result of that situation

so no, it wasn't whataboutism