> a new child safety group known as Heat Initiative
Doesn't even have a website or any kind of social media presence; it literally doesn't appear to exist apart from the reporting on Apple's response to them, which is entirely based on Apple sharing their response with media, not the group interacting with media.
Because when they couldn't win the war on porn, some right Christians decided to cloak their attack in "concerns" of "abuse". See project Excedus. Of course it has nothing to do with abuse and everything to do with their attempts to keep people from seeing pixels of other people having sex. Backpage was shut down despite being good at removing underage and trafficed women - which meant that sex workers had to find other places that didn't have nearly as good protections.
So yeah. When these things pop up I assume malicious intent.
But being critical of pornography and considering it to be abuse isn't a view limited to right-wing Christians. For example, here's what Noam Chomsky has to say about it:
> Pornography is humiliation and degradation of women. It's a disgraceful activity. I don't want to be associated with it. Just take a look at the pictures. I mean, women are degraded as vulgar sex objects. That's not what human beings are. I don't even see anything to discuss.
> Interviewer: But didn't performers choose to do the job and get paid?
> The fact that people agree to it and are paid, is about as convincing as the fact that we should be in favour of sweatshops in China, where women are locked into a factory and work fifteen hours a day, and then the factory burns down and they all die. Yeah, they were paid and they consented, but it doesn't make me in favour of it, so that argument we can't even talk about.
> As for the fact that it's some people's erotica, well you know that's their problem, doesn't mean I have to contribute to it. If they get enjoyment out of humiliation of women, they have a problem, but it's nothing I want to contribute to.
> Interviewer: How should we improve the production conditions of pornography?
> By eliminating degradation of women, that would improve it. Just like child abuse, you don't want to make it better child abuse, you want to stop child abuse.
> Suppose there's a starving child in the slums, and you say "well, I'll give you food if you'll let me abuse you." Suppose - well, there happen to be laws against child abuse, fortunately - but suppose someone were to give you an argument. Well, you know, after all a child's starving otherwise, so you're taking away their chance to get some food if you ban abuse. I mean, is that an argument?
> The answer to that is stop the conditions in which the child is starving, and the same is true here. Eliminate the conditions in which women can't get decent jobs, not permit abusive and destructive behaviour.
The main impetus behind "child safety" advocacy nowadays seem to be by cells of extremist right-wing Christian / QAnon types who believe in conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and the "gay groomer" panic. It's a reasonable assumption to make about any such group mentioned in the media that doesn't have an established history at least prior to 2016.
It sounds like an entirely unreasonable assumption to me. Advocating for child safety is something that transcends political differences, and generally unifies people across the political spectrum.
I mean, there aren't many people who want paedophiles to be able to amass huge collections of child abuse imagery from other paedophiles online. And pretty much every parent wants their child to be kept safe from predators both online and offline.
I didn't claim otherwise. The fact remains that a specific subset of a specific political party has been using "advocating for child safety" as a pretext to accelerate fear of and harassment against the LGBT community and "the left" in general for years now, and they put a lot of effort into appearing legitimate.
And yes, because their politics are becoming normalized within American culture, it is necessary to be skeptical about references to any such group. Assuming good faith is a rule on HN but elsewhere, where bad faith is what gets visibility, it's naive.
Well, paedophiles hijacking leftist movements for their own ends is a known problem, it's happened before and it will happen again. One particularly infamous instance occurred in the UK back in the 1970s:
So if there are indeed some right-wing groups talking about this, maybe it's best not to brush off their claims without some scrutiny first. And I say this as someone who mostly agrees with the left on most things.
Anyway I don't think that any of this has much to do with Apple being asked to implement specific technical measures for detecting child abuse imagery.
> So if there are indeed some right-wing groups talking about this, maybe it's best not to brush off their claims without some scrutiny first. And I say this as someone who mostly agrees with the left on most things.
Figlet indeed.
> figlett 5 months ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | context | prev [–] | on: Florida courts could take 'emergency' custody of k...
> This is excellent news for children at risk of being abused by militant transgenders and the medical establishment who are enabling them. Thank you Florida for trying to put an end to this menace.
Exactly, this is one area where the political left, particularly in the US, are failing terribly on child safety.
I'm in the UK and we're doing better here though, the main left-wing party is backing away from the particular ideology that has enabled this. I was going to vote for them anyway as we desperately need our public services to be restored and welfare for those less fortunate in society to be improved, but I'm pleased they're moving towards a sensible, harm-reducing stance on this issue rather than assuming everything the gender activists say is reasonable.
> a new child safety group known as Heat Initiative
Doesn't even have a website or any kind of social media presence; it literally doesn't appear to exist apart from the reporting on Apple's response to them, which is entirely based on Apple sharing their response with media, not the group interacting with media.
> Sarah Gardner
on the other hand previously appeared as the VP of External Affairs (i.e. Marketing) of Thorn (formerly DNA Foundation): https://www.thorn.org/blog/searching-for-a-child-in-a-privat...
So despite looking a bit fishy at first, this doesn't seem to come from a christofascist group.