The moral corruption of a moral crusade

 

In the UK we recently suffered the implementation of the 'Online Safety Act'. Labour assumes that it is wildly popular, with a minister saying that a usually vile and obnoxious man is 'on the side of child abusers' because he says he would abolish the Act if he were in power. 

I have no doubt that this man would be on the side of child abusers if he knew any wealthy ones, but this seems to be yet another case of a supposedly good cause being used to avoid all rational debate and thereby do bad things.

    The main purpose of the Online Safety Act is to protect children from pornography. This is nowhere near the most dangerous thing facing children, and nor does the Act protect them. The regulations are sensibly worded to ensure that big technology firms cannot just ignore them and pay meaningless fines: the penalties are the greater of £25m or 10% of global revenue. It is a good idea to make regulatory penalties meaningful to those being regulated. But it's an idea that needs to be matched with sensible regulation! These have collateral damage and fail to serve any useful purpose.

    For example, a long-running text-based game about zombies (along the lines of the original dungeon-crawler games from the '80s and early '90s) was run by a tiny community but now cannot continue, as the risk of a £25m fine is too scary for the organisers. Children are safe from text-adventure primarily about zombies! Hooray!

    Similarly, a website devoted to modifications of computer games, a way for players to adjust games to their own liking through crowd-sourced changes, is also struggling to navigate the new rules. Modifying games is what normal people call 'harmless fun', even if some of the mods give characters skimpy outfits. But now their community platform is responsible for preventing children from seeing such content, on pain of bankruptcy.

    Meanwhile, adult users of pornography are now required to share their identity online when accessing such recreational material. Given how much judgement there is of different sexual tastes, this is something that anyone sensible would prefer to keep private, but regulators have created a massive risk for innocent internet users who previously could have browsed anonymously and safely.

 

    There are already plenty of reports that the ban represents a minor, tedious barrier: that it forces people (both adults and children) to give their data to unreliable 3rd-parties who might not keep it securely or whose software could be dangerous, creating vulnerabilities in people's devices. The Online 'Safety' Act has reduced online safety, encouraging millions of people to be more susceptible to hacking, blackmail and fraud, while children and adults still access supposedly harmful materials.

    So what are we achieving by sacrificing millions of people's recreation and fun? What danger does any and all sexual content pose to children? 

    The NSPCC, the major children's charity, published a report about online dangers to children. There are clear dangers from sexual bullying by peers and adults: sexual exploitation using online communication. But the NSPCC reports that 'With the exception of cyberbullying, which has a relatively well-developed evidence base, there is only a modest amount of evidence about the outcomes and impacts of exposure to, and engagement with, ‘primary priority’ and ‘priority’ content [defined as pornography, content that encourages suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, cyberbullying and hate crime].'

    The report notes that recommender algorithms, quantification of social activity and popularity metrics all exploit psychological needs in humans and increase exposure to harmful content. Such a conclusion has broad applications to all content and all humans, but hasn't been acted on at all in the Online 'Safety' Act.

    The NSPCC suggests that the evidence base is poor and more research about online harms is sorely needed.

    The Children's Commissioner issued a 'report' using evidence from one police force and one clinic that found that some of the children referred to being inspired by violent pornography and/or overusing pornography. From these anecdotes about half of violent children citing violent pornography as something they used we get a call to restrict access to all pornography.

    There are multiple levels of argument here. First of all, there is the conflation of violent, abusive pornography as anecdotally mentioned with the 'any sexual content' controlled by the Online 'Safety' Act. Then there is the assumption that violent pornography caused the sexual violence, when it has been consistently shown in other such social furores (over computer games, Dungeons and Dragons) that the activity that correlates with misbehaviour is either chosen by people already likely to misbehave, or is an activity undertaken safely by many with no harm at all, disproving the suggestion that it is intrinsically harmful.

    The evidence seems to be that some children who have committed sexual harm have used violent pornography. Given the prevalence of its use, this is exactly what we would expect if these things were entirely unrelated. What we need, to justify the Online Safety Act, is evidence that any and all pornography causes children to commit sexual harm. We already know that children typically see pornographic content at 13, and yet we do not find that all teenagers are sex criminals. If we take a sample of murderers, we will find that over 50% of them are male. This does not lead us to conclude that being male causes murder and we should ban it. We will also find that a large proportion of criminals take medication for mental health. Should we ban such drugs because they cause criminality?

    The same reasoning applies to pornography. If a child has inclinations that cannot safely be satisfied in the real world, pornography could be a salve, not a cause. It could be one and then the other for a different child.

    Put simply, there is no evidence that pornography causes harm; that it causes more harm than good; or even that the violent subset of pornography causes harm.

    Why do people think it does? Why pick on pornography? Because a fair few people dislike it: it is seedy. It feels bad and carries a social taboo. It is not highly regarded and people conflate their dislike with it being bad for other reasons too. There is pornography of everything, and much of it is revolting; people have different tastes, and these seem to vary most when it comes to food and sex. Yet no-one thinks it reasonable to restrict children's access to pineapple, grapefruit or legumes. I personally find the former two distasteful, and could construct spurious arguments about how they are dangerous for children. Pineapple contains harmful enzymes that actively digest your mouth. Grapefruit contains a compound that interferes with your liver's processing of common drugs such as paracetamol, vastly increasing the risk of toxicity. Digestion of legumes creates gas that can cause discomfort, lack of concentration in class and bullying. 

    But if on the basis of these vague claims we decided to force anyone wanting legumes (chickpeas, perhaps) to sign a waiver that they were an adult happy to inflict gas on any companions, it would be seen as a gross overreaction and imposition on normal life. And people would also understandably be unhappy at the prospect of such waivers being made public, even though such behaviour is entirely legal and normal biology.

    I have chosen such an apparently silly comparison because the principles are the same. I know that pornography 'feels' different to food choices. It feels seedy, distasteful and unpleasant. But I would say exactly the same about grapefruit and be more literally truthful. We must separate these culturally-ingrained feelings from the factual justification for new law.

    Some people hate pornography with a passion; they think it's deeply immoral, or that it demeans or abuses women. I think they haven't a clue, but such opinions are also irrelevant to the Online 'Safety' Act. The Act is supposedly about protecting children from harm. If you think that something is entirely wrong, that's a different argument. Of course it might make you very relaxed about interfering with adults' freedom to do it; that would, for you, be a welcome side-effect, or even the secret purpose, of spurious arguments about protecting children. Children are merely the Trojan horse to manipulate and control adults into conforming to your personal tastes, and as such you would never want to delve into the substance of the argument, because you know it is merely a front.

    You would want to shout loudly about saving children, making the most of any goodwill towards such a commendable goal, rather than losing that goodwill by admitting that this goal will not be achieved and the real goal is something else.

    Some pornography does demean women, and some is made by abusing the participants. This is much the same as capitalism: some companies abuse their workers, and many demean them. Let us ban pornography only when the larger entity of capitalism has been defeated. Or, and this might be shockingly novel to you, we could specifically ban the nasty behaviours! Why should we punish everyone producing the same product because some people do it wrong? Did we ban all paint from the country when we found that some Chinese-made white paint had toxic lead in it?

    I think that getting sexual pleasure from visual (and auditory) stimulation disgusts some people who either have no libido or whose sexuality is more stimulated by environment or social setting. Their narrow-minded intolerance of people who are naturally different is disgraceful. I find it revolting to be desired only because of a fancy location or fat wallet, rather than who I am. 90% of the population finds homosexual interaction unpleasant, but we understand that what consenting adults do with each other is, broadly, none of our business.

    It is only our business if it causes wider damage, or harms the participants in a way that we must mend (costs the NHS, perhaps).

    On the subject of harms, even if you think that pornography is harmful, it's impossible to argue that it was the most harmful unregulated threat in the country. As the NSPCC reported, the very nature of recommendation algorithms that funnel people to ever more niche and radical content and the nature of social pressure created by measures of interaction and popularity create toxic environments online. Cyber-bullying and sexual exploitation by other children and by adults happens primarily on communication platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp. Right-wing and religious extremism directly leads to vast amounts of nasty, unpleasant behaviour even before we get to the crimes committed by believers. Online disinformation has distorted our democracy, and echo-chambers have undermined the desire or ability to engage in proper debate about important, life-changing issues (such as this one)! Large technology firms have created monopolies, or virtual monopolies, and are now mining the new economic territory thereby stolen for themselves for all they can get, spoiling without regulation or control what could have been a beneficial new world. 

    That's just a start. Children are radicalised into religions: delusional beliefs about non-existent sky-fairies. Children are taught to interact with others through manipulation and drama rather than generosity and reason, by television and parenting. Gambling online and in person causes great distress and financial ruin to many for no inimitable benefit. Advertising distorts people's desires and behaviours beyond unhealthy food, the advertising of which to children is already banned. Why should children be persuaded to pester their parents for specific holidays or toys? 

    And of all that list, it is teens giggling at naked titties that we decided to regulate? That we decided to apply penalties of 10% of global revenue to?

    I know what any anti-porn nutjobs are thinking. They want to scream at me that it's not children giggling at titties that's the problem: that there are serious issues of sexual violence being depicted and enacted. To which I can only ask: why then did we not regulate that? We could have limited the law to sexual violence, not all nudity or sex. The scope has been expanded for one reason that I can think of, and one reason alone: prurient interfering busybodies who want to force others to live according to their own tastes and made-up moral rules, but who know that their evilly illiberal goals cannot be achieved without the deceit of pretending this is all for a different cause.

    What better good cause to pick as deceitful cover than 'for the kiddies'? Those poor, innocent kiddies who need protection from everything until they miraculously become perfectly able to deal with it at 18. The innocent kiddies who never bully others, commit crimes or mistreat others. 

    Children are not the innocent models of perfection that such people imagine: humans start as brutal animals and must be taught good behaviour. Mostly they learn from those they interact with most; their parents. And some parents are just not good. Others want to 'protect' their children from outside influence because this makes indoctrinating them easier. If children are exposed to the outside world, they might find some of it more interesting, and choose for themselves what they want, rather than being moulded into the new mini-mes that the parents want.

    Despite all this, people imagine children as sacred. Invoke the holy term 'for children' and suddenly you are a saint working for a holy cause, unquestionable and pious. Modern society loves such quick and binary distinctions. It's tiresome to work out if someone really is doing what they claim: easier to ignore that question and engage in a bit of moral grandstanding yourself, jumping on the bandwagon to show how upright you are. 

    The truth, of course, is that it's deeply immoral to have such disdain for truth, or be so uninterested in whether someone is doing good or not. I think it's disgusting to corrupt decision-making about national issues that affect so many with personal reputation-enhancement by simply shouting "I'm in favour of good things too!" It might appear morally upright to mob anyone who questions assertions, but by failing to determine whether (or demonstrate that) what you support is actually the right thing to do, you demonstrate a sad lack of regard for morality. 

    And that, in my opinion, sums up the supporters of this disgrace of a law. We should ban moral crusading.