Technology

This 100%. I can't even bring myself to buy new content for my Quest now that I'm aware of the issues (no matter how much I want the latest Beat Saber and Synth Riders DLC), especially since Meta's Horizon, in my experience, puts adults into direct contact with children. At first I just dismissed metaverse games like VRChat or Horizon as being too popular with kids for me to enjoy it, but now I realize that it put me, an adult, straight into voice chats with tweens, which people should fucking know better than to do. My first thought was to log off because I wasn't having fun in a kid-dominated space, but I have no doubt that these apps are crawling with creeps who see that as a feature rather than a problem.

We need education for parents that sharing pictures of their kids online comes with real risks, as does giving kids free reign to use the Internet. The laissez faire attitude many people have towards social media needs to be corrected, because real harm is already being done.

Most of the parents that post untoward pics of their kids online are chasing down opportunities for their kids to model, and they're ignoring the fact that a significant volume of engagement these photos receive comes from people objectifying children. There seems to be a pattern that the most revealing outfits get the most engagement, and so future pictures are equally if not more revealing to chase more engagement...

Parents might not understand how disturbing these patterns are until they've already dumped thousands of pictures online, and at that point they're likely to be in denial about what they're exposing their kids to, and/or too invested to want to reverse course.

We also need to have a larger conversation, as a society, about using kids as models at all. Pretty much every major manufacturer of children's clothing is hiring real kids to model the clothes. I don't think it's necessary to be publishing that many pictures of kids online, nor is it acceptable to be doing so for profit. There's no reason not to limit modeling to adults who can consent to putting their bodies on public display, and using mannequins for kids' clothing. The sheer volume of kids' swimsuit and underwear pictures hosted on e-commerce sites is likely a contributor to the capability Generative AI models have to create inappropriate images of children, not to mention the actual CSAM found in the LAION dataset most of these models are trained on.

Sorry for the long rant, this shit pisses me off. I need to consider sending 404 Media everything I know since they're doing investigations into this kind of thing. My small scale investigation has revealed a lot to me, but more people need to be getting as upset as I am about it if we want to make the Internet less of a hellscape.