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Facebook asks users: should we allow men to ask children for sexual images?
Facebook has admitted it was a "mistake" to ask users whether paedophiles requesting sexual pictures from children should be allowed on its website.
On Sunday, the social network ran a survey for some users asking how they thought the company should handle grooming behaviour. "There are a wide range of topics and behaviours that appear on Facebook," one question began. "In thinking about an ideal world where you could set Facebook's policies, how would you handle the following: a private message in which an adult man asks a 14-year-old girl for sexual pictures."
The options available to respondents ranged from "this content should not be allowed on Facebook, and no one should be able to see it" to "this content should be allowed on Facebook, and I would not mind seeing it".
A second question asked who should decide the rules around whether or not the adult man should be allowed to ask for such pictures on Facebook. Options available included "Facebook users decide the rules by voting and tell Facebook" and "Facebook decides the rules on its own".
Also at The Verge, TechCrunch, The Mercury News, CNBC, and Engadget.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08 2018, @09:31AM (7 children)
Pedophilia is about attraction to prepubescent children, not 14 year olds. Especially considering that 14 y/o girls these days seem to be as fully developed as girls of 16 would have been many years ago.
Prepubescent girls are usually children younger than 10 years old. Boys a couple of years older.
The media obsession with fling around the term pedophile is all about sensationalism and click-bait. Too bad for guys that are attracted to hot chicks, some of which might be 14 years old, even though they look like they're 20.
Doesn't matter either that the 14 y/o chick is out banging half the guys at her school, but the moment someone older comes along, they get tossed into the clink for some perceived action that was no different from the girl's POV to what she'd already been doing with so many other guys.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday March 08 2018, @11:58AM (6 children)
Simply getting a fucked is not the major problem with early teenagers being preyed upon by adults. The problem is the vast gulf in life experience and wisdom between the two. Manipulation isn't just likely, it is pretty much impossible to avoid.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by nekomata on Thursday March 08 2018, @12:48PM (3 children)
Isn't manipulation impossible to avoid in any interaction between humans?
Also, if the gap between the two persons is the problem. Should it be legal to bang if one person has an IQ of 130 and the other of 80? I'd wager the difference is bigger there than it is between a 16-yo and a 40-yo, both of average IQ.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday March 08 2018, @02:39PM (2 children)
An IQ of 80 is probably acceptable, but if they've got an IQ of 75 it could definitely be considered rape, even if they're a consenting adult. This is actually a bit of a problem that gets reported on from time to time -- the mentally handicapped aren't legally allowed to get laid in many jurisdictions, as it's considered statutory rape because they aren't deemed sufficiently competent to give consent.
But I think it's more than just the intelligence/experience gap too. It's about legal authority. We don't let children or the mentally handicapped consent to surgery or sign a credit card contract either. It's perfectly legal for credit card companies to use slick marketing tricks to fool stupid people into signing up for bad deals, but the law does draw a line at a certain point in all of these cases, where people are too easily fooled and it's just not fair anymore. You might not agree about exactly where or how that line is drawn, but it does exist.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by jmorris on Thursday March 08 2018, @08:23PM (1 child)
You are on dangerous ground here, bringing IQ into this discussion. You do know there are certain countries where the average IQ is under 70, right? If we accept that reasoning, having sex with over half the people in those countries would be "rape."
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday March 08 2018, @11:03PM
I'm not trying to encourage you to accept any particular reasoning, I'm just discussing the facts of existing law, at least in parts of the US...although I'd be surprised if some other western nations didn't have similar laws too.
http://crimefeed.com/2016/03/important-concepts-know-comes-consent-laws-people-disabilities/ [crimefeed.com]
https://behavenet.com/node/21026 [behavenet.com]
Based on those references I suppose I should have used 70 as the example instead of 75...the more formal legal/medical definitions seem to all use 70 as the cutoff. But those results are known to have some variance too, so you might score 75 one day and 70 the next.
Also relevant to the original point -- note from that first link that there's at least *policies*, if not actual *laws*, that just use a vague "intellectual impairment" metric. So back to the IQ of 80 vs 130 example -- it probably won't get anyone thrown in prison yet, but it could potentially get them fired or kicked out of school if the wrong person decided they had a problem with it. IQ isn't everything, but at least it's a quantitative metric. And I don't think comparing across countries is entirely valid for this either...whatever metrics are used ought to include some compotent of social and cultural understanding, since this is ultimately about a person's ability to understand and consent to certain types of social interaction. So I don't see why it would be surprising that different cultures might need to use different metrics to try to measure that. And yes, I know that's not what IQ is supposed to measure, but I'm not sure that it's even possible to design a test that doesn't indirectly measure oen's familiarity with the testing procedure itself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08 2018, @06:44PM
Manipulation is still not pedophilia. Even if the child being manipulated is under 10. Considering 14 y/o is not prepubescent, I still only see scare/hate mongering in the media’s penchant in using the term incorrectly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08 2018, @07:48PM
There's this idea that most adults are good at long-term thinking, but they aren't; they're only marginally better at it than children. As such, it's easily possible to "manipulate" adults as well, and it happens quite often. I would imagine that adults who are drunk, high, sleepy, or suffering from emotional turmoil would be easier to manipulate, yet I don't think most people would be so quick to say that it would inherently be rape to have sex with such people. And how do you even determine what is and is not "manipulation"?
That's really the problem with laws that fail to take individual circumstances into account. Instead of investigating to see if there was consent like we would do if it was a case that involved adults, our current laws just determine that there can be no real consent if someone is under a certain age. You know, because children.