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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Swartz wasn’t involved in the origins of Reddit. He got involved when Y Combinator combined his company with Reddit (something along those lines?). He was not an actual founder, just an early influencer. In many ways, decoupling him from the shitshow that Ohanian and Huffman have engendered is a good thing.
This is very similar to the argument of Musk being a founder of Tesla.
Also Swartz had a section of his homepage defending child pornography as "not necessarily abuse" and that possession & distribution of it should be a first amendment right. He also advocated for a violent overthrow of the US government. Here's a cache of one instance of him defending it. Aaron did some really great tech stuff, but he's not a person that should be regarded as some hero as he had a lot of views that were misguided at best.
That website has been the same since it’s first archive on 2002-12-17. Aaron Swartz had just turned 16 a month earlier. I know I had some seriously immature opinions at that age. As well, that website was still up as of this January, a decade since his passing. http://www.aaronsw.com/ is also still up, and it doesn’t look like it was updated since 2002 either. Neither is any of this referenced on his wikipedia page, nor on it’s talk page. This feels like such a reach…
I said some dumb things too, but not "child porn isn't abuse and should be legal". That's straight up predatory. You can't tell me a 16 year old shouldn't know better
Yes, I can. 16 years old is a child. I also live in one of the first jurisdictions in the world to legalise 15-17yo sexting images. I wonder if his frustration came from restrictions he faced at the time. I thought it was pretty dumb as a teen that I couldn’t take a picture of my own naked body. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think that this is not true. It definitely is abuse. But I also think that the argument for why it is so, is not that trivial.
I mean, can you make it? Try it out!
Let's say someone distributes CP. How does what happens here, the sending of 0s and 1s across a wire, constitute abuse?
If you think about it like that, it doesn't.
Of course if you take into account a broader context, then this argument does break down. For the details you would probably need complex words and terms like "retraumatization" and "inability to consent", and "right to one's own image", and know a bit about what those things are, and how they work.
I wouldn't expect every 16 year old today to be able to get all of that straight. And I would not expect any 16 year old in the early 2000s, an age long, long before metoo, and any sensitivity toward sexual trauma, to be able to get that.
I'm sorry but I'm not about to hold people accountable for dumb things they said as a teen.
I sure love it when people use a single opinion to smear a person's entire legacy, he was great not only for the tech stuff but his stance on scientific articles piracy and a lot of other stuff too.
I won't say that that his opinion on cp is a great one (there is no doubt at least for me that distribution should always be illegal), but he wrote it as a 16 years old and it was guided due to his extremism for free speech over the internet, regardless, it's not like he himself was an evil person distributing child pornography, to paint him as an overall shitty person for an opinion like this seems idiotic imo
This is q bit personal and maybe slightly unrelated, but it reminds me of when people defend non-offending pedos (as in they are attracted to children because yhey are born that way but have not offended, nor groomed, nor harmed a child) saying the stigma should be erased because that would allow us to actually help this people who constantly hide it, therefore reducing the harm to children. This position has unironically got me called a pedophile and a lot of horrible stuff over the internet, and I would draw parallels to this situation, no matter how you slice it this opinion should not be used singlehandedly to state he is someone that shouldn't be respected. Especially since he is not defending the harm itself being done to children (as in the production of CP) which would still be a crime under his view. (Although distribution of course grows the market so it's idiotic not to go after that too), but as I said, it's a bad opinion but that doesn't make him a bad person.
I'm not saying Aaron was 100% bad, my point is that I don't really think he's some modern-day hero either. And I've already replied to someone that dismissed the his child porn views as a forgotten childhood comment. It wasn't merely a poorly thought out comment he made at 16 and forgot about, he maintained and edited that page until his death, even restoring it after a server crash deleted it.
If you want to celebrate his tech contributions or his views on scientific piracy I'm all for it. I just don't agree with this view of him getting spread that he's some hero co-founder of Reddit that is being unfairly erased from history when that's inaccurate at best. He's just a dude that did some great things, had some great views, had some really really shit views, and never gave a shit about reddit.
I don't know if that's the reason CP is actually banned, but his logic is even worse and dumber by a mile.
I mean, the article linked in that page (albeit horribly long due to useless info) does raise a point against current laws on viewing illegal material.
But sharing it? Yeah that’s a bit of a stretch. Thinking that isn’t going to lead to more actual children being exploited is extremely naive.
That particular argument doesn't hold water. We don't generally subscribe to this kind of argument.
The general principle behind the specific argument you bring up here is this: All expression which is likely to inspire someone toward illegal action should itself be illegal.
CP is likely to inspire some people toward child abuse. Child abuse is illegal. Thus the distribution of CP should be illegal.
We don't do this anywhere else.
Descriptions of non consesnual violence are likely to inspire some people toward non consensual violence. Non consensual violence is illegal. Thus the distribution of all descriptions of non consensual violence should be illegal.
If we take this seriously, we have to ban action movies. And I am not even getting into the whole porn debate...
No, the only valid reason for banning the distribution of child porn which I can think of, lies in the rights of the victims. The victims were abused, and their image was used without their consent. Without them even possibly being able to give consent to any of that, or the distribution that follows.
So anyone who shares child porn, is guaranteed to share a piece of media which shows someone being subjected to a crime, while they couldn't possibly give consent for that to be recorded, or shared publicly. Making it illegal to share someone being a victim of a crime, without them being able to consent to that being shared, is a reasoning which has far fewer problems than what you propose here.
You raise a few valid points, but the problem with the action film thing is that it is fiction, and thus protected by free speech rights.
That's actually the main argument against lolicon being illegal: depictions of other crimes, including heinous ones like murder and rape, are not illegal.
Ultimately it comes down to inconsistency in the law, and sensationalism makes it very difficult to discuss rationally.
Yes we do. Plenty of stuff is banned by federal law. Snuff films, for the same reason as CP/CSAM. Obscene pornography (stuff showing abuse or degradation, even if it’s just acting) isn’t illegal to posses, but it is illegal to buy, distribute or carry across state lines. Ivory is illegal, unless you have a certificate proving it is from pre-1989. These are all banned to stop demand.
And that’s not even getting started Americas long history of banning books.
Do you get what I mean? If you do, why are you being so overly literal here?
And action movies are not. Neither are horror or slasher movies. Neither is porn. Even though each of them might (or might not) inspire and incentivize illegal deeds.
It is not a general principle we subscribe to. It is enforced very selectively, and only in areas that we find most shocking. Which is understandable, but neither reasonable, nor consistent. I don't know about you, but I think criminal law should be based on principles which are reasonable and consistent.
One such principle may be: "Media which may inspire illegal action, should be illegal themselves"
But that's not consistently enforced, but selectively, limited by criteria which seem dubious at best.
This is what I mean, when I say "This argument does not hold water"
And that's the interesting question: Why only these things, and nothing else? There is plenty of stuff out there which may inspire people toward illegal action, from real world depictions of violence, to action movies.
To me it’s more like “All situations where committing illegal actions could bring a positive feedback to the perpetrator should be avoided”.
Allowing CP to be shared, and thus sold/hosted on for-profit sites creates a market for it, and makes abusing children an actual profession. That’s not ok and already a talking point against the current, legal, porn industry.
Yes, that’s why CP is banned. It being distributed and sold encourages the further making of it, thus leading to more instances of children being abused.
What the fuck. How is this guy a CEO and not publicly shunned?
Edit: My bad, I thought that was text posted by Spez.
He’s dead
i heard that Ohanian and Huffman have people out there trying to suggest that he was a pedo or some shit, what about that
I'd say you can read Aaron's own defense of child porn on his website and draw your own conclusions. If you're trying to suggest that I'm somehow defending Ohanian and Huffman, far from it. I can think Swartz shouldn't be considered a modern folk hero and still not like the other two.
Huffman was a mod for the jailbait subreddit.
Here's an interview with Ohanian after CNN reported on the jailbait subreddit which caused Reddit to close it down. Alexis blames CNN for "making up jibber jabber" and the children who allowed images of their abuse to be posted online.
This type of view was apparently support by all the original Reddit folks, just because Swartz has a better reputation now doesn't mean he didn't also share those views.
He was 16 years old when he posted this. The statement is disgusting and not really defensable by itself, but I wonder if this was a dumb naive teenage take, or if he still thought this way up until he died.
I also don't know if he was actually a pedophile, or if he just thought freedom of information on the web should be taken to the extreme. I would lean towards the latter since he seemed to have a relationship with an older woman at some point, but I don't think I will ever truly know for sure.
That archive date I linked is from shortly after his death. If you go through the various archive dates you can see that he made changes to the page over the years. He added the bit about wanting a violent overthrow of the government when he was 18 or 19. In 2007 when he would have been 21, the archive just shows a note that he had a server crash and the site is gone but you can email him if you want a copy of it. By the time he was 22 he'd put the site back online. He made more edits visible through the following years until his death. So yeah we don't know his thoughts but we do he continued to maintain that page, even choosing to restore it after a server crash, until the point he killed himself. It's not as though it's an online post he made as a kid and forgot about.
Thank you for the clarification there. I was not aware of the history of that cringey page. I had no idea that he kept it up and running like that.
I hate it when this happens. Why do feelings always play into this discussion? "The statement is disgusting", is not an argument, and should never be part of any discussion.
No matter how disgusted a statement might make you feel, if it has a good argument behind it, it should be regarded as true.
I agree that the argument doesn't quite work. And that's that.
I just meant that it makes me feel gross. I imagine many people feel the same. I guess the statement itself isn't disgusting, but what it is advocating for is. On the other hand,
is putting it a bit lightly, in my opinion. Mostly because pedophilia is a generally despised act that should probably not really be argued for in the first place.
i really don't give half a shit about any of them, they have their heads so far up their asses
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=OXZYvrue1BE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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I thought the mod thing was because you used to be able to be modded for a subreddit without your approval
What. The actual. Fuck. This guy is comparing peas to pies.
Imagine wanting to legalize that shit because "We don't arrest everyone with videotapes of murders, or make it illegal for TV stations to show people being killed.". Can't he imagine what would happen if we legalized that shit?
I think someone needs to get their hard drives examined.
I mean, he's dead, so bit late for that.
The feds did come after him for other computer crimes (unrelated to those views) and he hung himself and investigation into him stopped at that point.
FYI your link is broken and is just leading to the archive home page
Your link isn’t working for me
It's a link to an archive of his http://bits.are.notabug.com site on the wayback machine as his site is no longer online. It's working for me on my PC and my phone. I can take a screenshot and share it if your browser is unable to load the wayback machine?
Oh...oh no
It's why all the appeals to "what would Aaron think" with the whole API thing were really off the mark.
spez and kn0thing were college buddies. Swartz was kind of pushed onto them by YC. I've never had the impression that they felt any particular attachment to him; he was a business partner that became involved at the behest of the people funding them, who left in the first couple of years.