I feel exceedingly bad for the humans that have to consume and categorize the media for Google. Working at a photo lab Back In The Day was bad enough - I can’t imagine getting paid to do it.

So..this entire thing is bait - it’s the ‘stop beating your wife’ of traps for anyone with concerns.

I think that hiding the pictures/content is most likely in the best interests of everyone but there are also considerable (at least in the US) barriers into effective enforcement that make the situation worse - Merely seeing the image/media is a crime and if you attempt to report it you face having your entire electronic appliance suite confiscated and reviewed for any additional illegalities. There’s also to my knowledge no central method or contact information to report the issue to ICE.

That being said I think the dudebros are conflating several separate distinct issues which clouds some legitimate concerns.

Is google/bing etc. a common carrier? If they are then censoring is a problem because as a common carrier they don’t get to pick and choose what to allow through their gatekeeping. At this point Bing and Yahoo both partially rely on google searches and there are few viable search engine alternatives. There is a worry that once it is acceptable to censor particular search results that it becomes easier to add additional categories. Remember that Ma Bell did at one point block what you could use a telephone for and the US Mail would also open and refuse to ship ‘objectionable’ material so this is not something without precedent. This is how the ‘common carrier’ structure evolved and it is an important idea to preserve.

You couple that with the current state of US ‘child porn’ laws (hope all your ‘pictures’ on your HDD have copyright stamps of companies that have complied with the Bushies ‘war on porn’ law lizards - otherwise you have to put up an affirmative defense proving that the models were all of-age when the media was created) that continue to catch 17 year-olds sending selfies to their bf/gfs and what you have is a gigantic dudebro bait ball of suck.

In short - child porn bad. We should probably change the subject to something less triggery if we want to have a rational conversation about when, where and how Search Engines, ISPs and other common carriers should be censoring things but if we are going to have a constructive conversation about these ideas we’re going to need a new subject.

How about we just replace all the slope theory subjects with ‘porn legal at the US federal level and the states asking google to block content that violates local laws’ I think you’ll get a much better outcome.

Because I really don’t see anyone able to say in good faith that they are in favor of sexual exploitation of children.