Olives @olives@qoto.org

I've resisted commenting on a few internet control lobbyists. I thought I'd cover this one though:

It was a worry that someone might encounter child porn on the Internet (or something they think is it).

1) It seems to be pretty rare. I suppose if someone spends a lot of time on the Internet, they *might* encounter it, especially over the years. Maybe.

2) I don't understand what the expectation here is supposed to be. It's not realistic for every bad thing on the Internet to never appear...

3) Burning things down simply because something *might* appear doesn't seem very proportionate or rights preserving... It's also unlikely to make a difference, or much of one, but that is secondary to this.

Do you know one of the things which struck me last year in regards to the #chatcontrol?

Someone pointed out they rely on things like E2EE to talk to their psychologist. It was a form of teletherapy. This proposal would be essentially invading the sanctity of that space. That was one of the reasons they opposed it.

It really makes you think. What sorts of cases of therapy might be covered here? Also, could you feel secure knowing your words could be plucked out and twisted against you? Something said in therapy used against you? Or viewed by a third party?

"She unabashedly continues to spread the narrative of supposed "urgency" of indiscriminate chat control that has been scripted by PR agencies."

It does kind of feel like that, doesn't it, Ylva says what the lobbyists say word by word, line by line, even if it is nonsensical.

https://jezebel.com/ashton-kutcher-thorn-sex-workers-1850852760

"Spotlight is regarded as especially dangerous as it uses Amazon’s Rekognition facial recognition technology, even though one test by the ACLU showed Rekognition misidentified 28 members of Congress, who were disproportionately people of color, as having previous arrests, and studies have discredited the accuracy of facial recognition algorithms generally."

"Kutcher claimed in 2017 that Thorn helped identify 6,000 U.S. sex-trafficking victims, including 2,000 children, in a six-month period by using Spotlight. But, as some journalists pointed out at the time, those numbers didn’t seem to square with reality.

From 2009 through 2015, FBI agents working on child sex trafficking cases identified just 175 underage trafficking victims on average per year, per the attorney general’s 2015 annual report to Congress on trafficking reviewed by Reason.

A 2020 version of this report specifies that the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s Trafficking Victim Assistance Program served 105 underage victims in 2018, 144 in 2019, and 307 in 2020."

https://newrepublic.com/article/175653/anti-trafficking-movement-gave-cover-opportunistic-men Interesting...

There is a lot of chatter against chat control lately. You can help oppose this terrible idea by writing to E.U. MEPs.

You know what, I'll avoid giving them attention for now.

A think of the children lobbyist is commenting on an apparent "link between child abuse and bestiality". There doesn't seem to be meaningful evidence of one, and it's hard to stretch it that way.

Also, why is he so worried about anal sex, bestiality, and "ritual abuse"? o.O

1) Anecdotal cases. A more shocking case is more likely to pique interest than a more mundane one.

2) Definitions can be poor. Someone might conflate content which isn't actual child abuse with content that is. In fact, this very lobbyist is known to do this, and encourages others to do so.

3) In one case, the grounds were that someone "accessed" both. This doesn't tell me a whole lot other than that someone uses the Internet a lot. ???

4) While bestiality is frowned upon, as is (real) content of it (real, unless, we want to start burning the furries at the stake), it's probably also far less likely for a government to investigate (unless something else is involved).

That probably contributes to a selection effect, that is they're more likely to skew towards an overlap among those cases catalogued by government, than they would out in the wild.

5) Conflating physically acting with viewing.

6) Even if there was a correlation, it doesn't mean it is causal. It could be biological third factors which contribute to both in those particular cases*.

7) Intuitively, if someone is willing to abuse a child, the other might not be a big deal to them? The same would apply to viewing content.

If so, that would be "causal" for some subset of people but it would be causal in the opposite direction. If we're looking to intuitive theories, it's not clear why I have to hypothesize how someone might be pure evil.

8) Engaging in and viewing bestiality can be explained by "zoophilia"** (not that I'm saying that they necessarily will do that).

Why this is troublesome:

1) Speculation leads to fundamental misunderstandings and misinformation. It's simpler to just debunk it at the start.

I don't understand why someone can't discuss the actual issues at hand, and instead, have to work to make every crime look like someone is pure evil in every single way.

2) It leads to censorship, including of fictional content. I have seen cases of this reported in the past.

* https://bigthink.com/the-present/correlation-causation/

** https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36192665/

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/19/uk-drug-advisers-recommended-decriminalising-possession-in-2016-leak-reveals U.K. Government concealed report recommending decriminalization of drug possession.

Important points for #chatcontrol:

1) Is it all actually someone being abused?

Around 90% of reports made by PornHub in 2020 were not deemed child porn by the Canadian Police.

Around 90% of reports passed to Switzerland were not deemed to be criminally relevant.

Around 60% of reports passed to Ireland were not deemed to be "CSAM", although it's not clear whether this is an actual difference, or if the police are avoiding giving the benefit of the doubt.

The U.K. has reported they receive many reports which are not actually child porn.

Keep in mind the police have every incentive to play up the number of reports which contain it, or to use "clever" definitions to classify content which isn't it as it.

News publications reported there were many false positives as early as 2019.

2) Duplicates are prevalent. Facebook reported in 2021 the majority of images involved the same ten images slightly modified.

3) An internal study carried out by Facebook where they sampled x images revealed many things classified "exploitation" were posted for "shock" or as "memes". ???

4) In 2021, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the Fourth Amendment was violated when Google sent a report to NCMEC and NCMEC sent it onto law enforcement without a human (at either of them) reviewing the content.

That means that Google was *not even bothering to look at incidences* (or not all of them) and may still not be now in a number of cases.

* This incidence was automatically detected by Google's internal systems.

When these chat control advocates start talking about "nuance", this is when they're about to mix a bit of truth with misleading statements and omitted statements.

They'll throw around language like "I support what you want but..." and write things to nullify that point. #chatcontrol

Also, something to be aware of is that these kinds of people tend to mix in decontextualized numbers in with speculation and assertions existing ex nihilo.

That is they're likely made without reference to existing knowledge insofar as that knowledge is inconvenient to the point they're trying to push.

They construct a conceptual space devoid of that, and speculate towards whatever end results in the most control.

Improper over-generalizations made from unusual samples are probably also something which are not unlikely to make an appearance.

These are annoying and keep getting debunked in way or another.

#chatcontrol

https://www.aclu.org/documents/coalition-letter-to-leader-schumer-on-opposition-to-stop-csam-act Civil rights groups send another letter in opposition to the terrible EARN IT Act... And that other bad bill.

To give you an idea of the sort of quality you can expect from these lobbyists for control, one went on a rant about how someone who is being oppressed by their country can "just vote for someone else".

When all else fails, a think of the children lobbyist goes back to conflating apparent statistics of adults talking to minors with "abuse".

While this sounds bad on it's face, it gets worse when you consider the statistic comes from a "European group" (seemingly created in 2020 by an outside group out of thin air during an impasse on privacy legislation).

They appeared to be best buds with the usual suspects for no particular reason. Well, now we know why. This appears to be part of a trend of localwashing.

They don't bother digging far, or for any number which might contradict theirs. They craft surveys in such a manner that it would be easy to produce ambiguous easy to spin numbers, they draw crude correlations without thinking hard on them, their practices don't appear to improve over time, and they're in the gallery to support greater control.

At one point, they tried to promote a "prevention program".

They stated there was something like a 80% success rate. This was inaccurate. There were apparently thousands going in and a handful of people going out, they then surveyed those people about whether it was "helpful" (80%).

This was stated by they themselves... For anyone who bothered to click past the flashy number.
Crucially, they didn't seem to be too bothered to collect data from people currently undergoing it.

This is particularly problematic as some U.S. states have previously been found to be running impossible to complete programs (which just served as excuses to treat individuals in a more punitive manner, not as genuine therapeutic programs).