re: #107 goddamnedfrank

Okay, but why should they continue to serve up content that depicts and that they reasonably know to have been created via the sexual exploitation of children?

I’m sorry but objectively your “freedom” to access the entirety of the information contained on the internet isn’t a very compelling reason. In this context your freedom is just hypothetical, an abstract, although I’m sure it feels subjectively real to you. You want to be able to access all that there is to access even if you never will and there’s no legitimate plausible reason for you to. You’re pitting this abstract notion of your personal freedom against the very concrete suffering of innocents and the harm perpetuated by an underground market that pathologically trades on that suffering.

To put it bluntly, I’m seeing a very immature, me me now perspective articulated with almost none of the complexity and nuance we all know to be the hallmark of actual reality.

I think you’re overstating how much this impedes child pornographers and under estimating the long term effects of this.

The way I view this is that it introduces further structural weaknesses into the internet for marginal gain.

Google isn’t stopping child from being produced, and stripping it out of search results won’t make it disappear (them providing to technical assistance to various anti-child porn groups is a laudable step in this direction though).

What google et all are doing is further increasing the space between what’s actually on the internet and what’s actually searchable on the internet. Every time that happens it weakens what the internet was built for, the free exchange of information.

This is the same reason I dislike personalized search results, and many of the other changes google is rolling out so much, they present increasing barriers to finding what is there rather than what you expect to be there.