Of course, in this case they’ve set up the counter move easily:

“So what you’re saying is that Zoom is fine protecting pedophiles from law enforcement, as long as you profit?”

This is why you shouldn’t play such dumb games as a company, there is only downsides from a PR perspective.

I thought it was the Four Chans of the Infopocalypse? shrug

Nice, the upside of posting a comment with >10 upvotes (not a common occurence in my case) is that:

1. you end up getting more responses

2. more responses === a higher probability of seeing gems like this wikipedia wormhole I'm about to get sucked into:) I had no idea about the horsemen/chans or that May identified the reason behind the alpha particle problem. Cheers.

I didn't know there was a specific term for this concept. Thanks!

We are rarely given more than two choices. There is no room for nuance in 140 characters.

> I feel like "we need to protect the children" is the new reductio ad hitlerum.

At the risk of being pedantic: it’s not new at all. That’s part of almost every political campaigns from the past century. Technically “reductio ad hitlerum” is the new “protect the children” argument.

I don't think history supports that. There were essentially zero childrens' rights until post-war. In some locations child abusers were originally prosecuted via animal-protection laws.

The “protect the children” argument has little to do with actual children protection laws. It’s about using pathos of the crowd to manipulate opinion.

Regarding history, I don’t know about the US specifically, but Europeans countries have legal children protections since end of 19th, beginning of 20th centuries (depending on the country).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_t... for a pre-WW2, international effort.

These fall into the class of 'thought terminating cliches':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

With all of the calls for platform inter-mediation of content for the protection of the disenfranchised b) is just turning into 'do you hate?'

It's not even new, "the children" have been routinely trotted out since the 90s

And the Satanic Panic of the 80s.

As one of said children in the 80's that stuff freaked me out. Riding bikes at night with friends and hearing weird noises in the woods would get the ol' heart (and legs) pumping.

I was just the opposite. It just sounded so bizarre to me, that when the rumors started flying in my area of certain group's activities at certain locations, my friends and I would sneak off to investigate. It wasn't that we were interested in said activities, or that we were necessarily investigating the validity of the rumors. We were just curious. It turns out, it was all false and made up. Put serious doubts in my mind at an early age about "believing everything you hear", but also seriously lowered the credibility of the people repeating the information in my mind. Had it not been for my interest in computers, I might have turned into some sort of investigator.

And the Communists of the 50s.

And the prohibitionists of the 1890's.

Good point, let me rephrase it to "reductio ad hitlerum du jour". If we're scoring the internet points, we might as well be a bit pretentious.

It’s not new. Schneier has been saying this for a long time.

Uhm, it's definitely way older than Hitler even being a person.

Not clear from history.