• Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    Making the claim that adult content = predators preying on children has a couple issues:

    1. Predators are incredibly rare, and it has been repeatedly shown that these claims of predators-behind-every-account are blown out of proportion for political scare reasons (see Satanic Panic, all of human history for more examples).
    2. Even if the above weren’t true, why on earth would those people be spending their time on adult content instead of, say, roblox or minecraft? You know, games for children, that children play?

    The debate over steam hosting adult content is some really regressive stuff. An alternative take, the one I hold, is “It’s really heartening to see a major content platform not giving in to the conservative moralists that view anime tiddies as somehow damaging to the fabric of society. Making sexuality a less shameful topic for discussion also, conveniently, reduces ‘shame’ as an effective lever for preying on children, and makes them more likely to come forward and tell people when they’re actually in danger”.

    • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
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      18 days ago

      All it takes is another client, a lot of argument for not wanting to take one iota of minimal responsibility. Predators are not rare, they literally fuel television series regarding them. They don’t have to be many to be a threat, either, all it takes is a small number of very active ones. They do target children’s game, having adult content facilities introducing children to it as “lol lemme gift u / giv u dis CD key its so sik”. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/07/us/video-games-child-sex-abuse.html - What alternate reality do you live in?

      • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        The first sentence of that article lists Minecraft and Fortnite.
        Neither of those games are available on Steam.

        So, and stop me if this is too wild a conclusion, it maybe just might possibly be the case that having separate storefronts doesn’t actually have any impact on sexual predation of minors in videogames.

        (Edit: actually, none of the games listed in that article are available on steam. Did… did you even read it?)

        • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
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          18 days ago

          You were the completely utter moron who said predators “are incredibly rare”, I was just disproving it. Now you are just moving the goalpost. Yeah, time to disconnect from pervs who are asking to handhold them through basic logic they don’t want to see when all they will do is try to troll on whatever minutiae they think they can focus on to move the goalpost again.

          • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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            18 days ago

            That’s not moving the goalpost, that’s keeping the goalpost on the original topic. “Is steam making online predation worse by not having two separate storefronts” - Answer: Clearly, no, since there are multiple storefronts and that has nothing to do with how children are exploited online.

            But if you want to talk about the rarity of predators (I’m taking the numbers in the article here): 1500 reported cases / year of sextortion in the US and nation partners is pretty damn rare. Even assuming non-reporting rates are 500x the value given in that article, that’s still 750,000 victims among ~1,000,000,000 people, or a 0.00075% victim rate. You’re only twice as likely to have been victimized per year as you are to have been struck by lightning. I don’t… like, I don’t know what else to call that but rare.

            (The above numbers are just about sextortion, a very broad category of crime and that which is the crime in question here. Broadly, “pressuring kids online to send naked photos of themselves”. This number doesn’t include physical abuse crimes, I did confirm that in their sources.)