Olives @olives@qoto.org

If Google does get broken up, I hope it leads to better journalism, rather than having to deal with sensationalistic clickbait "journalism".

Incendiary click me type articles on a former journalist's blog... Uh, let's call it an "indie media outlet".

The sensationalism gets my attention, not because I see the original person posting it, but because I see a far right grifter posting it.

If you remember, there are two posts for this, this is the longer one with a lot more citations.

When someone tries to make the point that fantasy rape and torture are acceptable kinks but something strangely specific that the individual doesn't like isn't.

The United Kingdom. Where someone really wants to believe that some stupid morality law which was only passed for England and Wales somehow also applies to Northern Ireland and Scotland, because of their love for locking people up.

If someone consults Wikipedia on the law, they're either going to end up in prison or think they can be arrested for farting.

It's usually someone complaining about the same thing over and over and acting as if that something is novel.

I don't think it makes much difference but still.

For the past few months, I've been trying to track down a conference where someone supposedly said something negative about "AI" and I can't find it. It's as if it doesn't exist.

I get that someone might have a personal gripe with LLMs. Maybe, it consumes a lot of power to train or something to do with copyright. However, if someone's main point is that someone might go off to do something "offensive", then that gets silly.

I'm tired of things becoming "bad" because they're done with a LLM or whatever, when it wouldn't be noteworthy otherwise.

"online or verbal abuse"
Looks like "verbal abuse" is now being used in one estimate of abuse. UNICEF.

I'm not saying it's a good estimate.

Badenoch wasn't all bad. She was against some censorship laws, although she has her issues. Of course, there is probably someone better than her.

It might be this far distant country which someone knows next to nothing about, then they pull out these questionable nuggets of information from who knows where it even comes from. In one case, there were two partially overlapping laws.

Over the years, there has been a particular and rare kind of Internet troll (or moron) who might come up with "ages of sexual consent" for countries on a map or individually, and it would basically be wrong.

Apart from being obnoxious, I'm also concerned that this sort of misinformation might spur racism.

I don't run an unmoderated community (or close enough) for an apparent human rights org so I assume I'd have fewer troubles with trolls than someone who did.

The post debunking porn (and other such things) being spooky takes a more holistic approach rather than just leaning on one particular point / argument.

The points work best when they are taken as a *whole*. They don't work as well when they're taken individually.

"unpopular opinion"

Actually, the theory that porn or dolls or whatever is some sort of outlet which reduces crime is *anything* but an unpopular opinion. I'm not even kidding when I say that I've heard it from a number of people in private. They didn't get it from me either. And yes, from conservatives.

What someone might mean is that there are a few people on social media (with narcissistic traits) who performatively say the opposite.

Intuitively though, this crime reduction theory would make sense to someone, and there are piles of evidence which someone could interpret that way. It's not surprising that it keeps coming up.

The ironic thing about "unpopular opinions" is that they can actually be quite common.