I know this topic, as well as most online topics, is more about emotions than facts. But here we are. You probably don’t understand how Discord’s new policy is intended to help protect children because you aren’t trained to think like a child predator. (That’s fine.) I’ve had to take a lot of child safety trainings over the years for professional reasons. Here’s how online child predators work.

They start by finding a kid with a secret. Just like a lion will generally choose to attack the weak gazelle, child predators go after vulnerable kids.

They find the kids with a secret and say “hey want to see some porn?”, and of course the kid is curious. They didn’t start with anything bad. This is a process for them. But they will tell the kid, “be sure you don’t tell your parents about this. This is our secret." Then they slowly try to pull into deeper and deeper secrets and start to blackmail the kid. They start to demand that the kid send them nude photos. They trap the kids into deeper and deeper secrets and guilt to get more and more out of them. In the worst cases this results in meetups with the predator in person.

The easiest places for the predators to start this process is porn sites where the kids are visiting in secret to begin with. Especially those on Discord where the messaging between users is the main feature. Those are the kids that are most vulnerable.

How how is Discord’s policy supposed to protect kids? The goal is to keep the vulnerable kids out of spaces where they would be targeted to begin with.

So there you go. I’m all ears for how to do this better. That’s one beef I have with the EFF right now. They offer no alternative solutions to this. They just didn’t want any kind of protections at all.

  • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    Everything on the fediverse is publically viewable (although Piefed has private communities capacity now), but banning DMs is pretty unacceptable really.

    • 1dalm@lemmings.worldOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      Not exactly, and not for long. Mastodon, for example, is working on end-to-end encryption in messages. Matrix is also private by design.

      And again, it’s not that I think end-to-end encrypted one-to-one messaging is bad. But if you are going to offer it then you need to be held responsible for it.

      • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Not exactly, and not for long. Mastodon, for example, is working on end-to-end encryption in messages. Matrix is also private by design.

        I meant publicly viewable in the sense of being viewable by the wider audience. Excluding private messages specifically here.

        And again, it’s not that I think end-to-end encrypted one-to-one messaging is bad. But if you are going to offer it then you need to be held responsible for it.

        So what do you propose then?

        • 1dalm@lemmings.worldOP
          1·
          2 days ago

          ID and age verification for users.

          That’s not the only solution, and I’ve offered several others. And I’m also not the only one with ideas. But completely frictionless encrypted anonymous one-to-one communication is probably not going to last much longer. And shouldn’t.

          • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
            3·
            2 days ago

            ID and age verification for users.

            Unaffordable. Not going to happen. This is what would kill the independent internet.

          • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            Also everyone here unironically thinks you’re a shill. You’re coming to a federated platform promoting big-tech, big-government controls.

            • 1dalm@lemmings.worldOP
              1·
              2 days ago

              I don’t care.

              If I can get some people on this site to start thinking about child safety in new ways that will be a win for me today.