It's worth noting that the mods on 4chan have always been shit-hot at removing this content, but /b/ used to get just _so_ damn busy would take a while for it to be spotted. Like really busy. Multiple pages of new posts every second busy.

And stolen or extorted images of late teens, in particular, are all over "amateur" porn sites even if you're not looking for them.

"Thousands of gigabytes" is consistent with a single cheap hard drive. If that's the threshold for alarm then the alarm is permanent.

The concern ("alarm" if you will) is not based on the count in gigabytes (which is of course trivial), but in the harm caused to real, actual people. As explained in the article.

Was it explained? I saw plenty of discussion of the harm done to children, and the lasting emotional problems carried into adulthood, on the part of the people who abuse children. Then there were a few words from one of those victims who said that it is upsetting to know that images of his abuse are still circulated and consumed. It seems like a stretch to say that the existence of those images causes harm; at most it would seem that the possibility that such images exist complicates things for victims, but that the actual harm was and has always been caused by the actual abuse that occurred.

The fact is that nobody can ever know with certainty that child abuse imagery has been thoroughly deleted from ever storage medium on the planet; there are just too many computers in the world, too many ways for the imagery to be stored, transmitted, and shared. Victims will always have the possibility that someone out there is viewing such images hanging over there head no matter how many forums are taken down and no matter how many file sharing services remove files. It is one of the darker realities of the Internet age.

Not a stretch at all; I'd recommend you so some reading into the stories of the many, many people whose lives have been permanently upended (or worse - there have been many suicides) after finding leaked images of their abuse (or simply revenge-dumped images of consensual relations) posted in easily searchable websites.

As to the rest of what you're saying -- "There are too many, computers, we'll never really be able to completely stop this" -- look, it's a matter of degree and ease of access. Just because we can't bring the effective visibility of these archives down to zero -- doesn't mean we can't reduce it very substantially, down 90 percent or more from the current level.

There is a lot of really sick shit out there.

In the simpler times of a much smaller web, pedos were not very cautious and you could come across it whilst just looking for regular pr0n.

From what I read you can still find some with a tiny bit of work, but most of it exists in closed forums and other methods of private sharing.

A somewhat similar quandary relates to a Norwegian black metal band (some say they started the whole thing, others not). They were a troubled bunch of men. There is a movie about them (Lords of Chaos).

Anyways skipping over most of it, the singer in Mayhem, the first one, went by the nick Dead, his real name was Per Yngve Ohlin. (from Sweden). He blew his brains out quite literally with a shotgun. (1991)

When band member Euronymous (Varg Vikernes, now Louis Cachet) discovered Dead, being quite dead with a big mess, he ran (or drove) to a nearby gas station and bought some disposable cameras.

He then documented the scene with a series of pictures. (Allegedly he also collected skull fragments)

These pictures are gruesome.

The family of Per Yngve Ohlin (Dead) has attempted and struggled to have the images of their dead family member removed from the net. They have been unable to do so. It always pops back up.

(One of the photos was used for a bootleg (I think) release as the album cover)

This is such a small, limited event, but getting rid of them is near impossible.

The scope of getting rid of all horrible photos on the net is vast and, I think, nearly impossible today.

I imagine the laws and the infrastructure changes required to better be able to remove offensive / illegal / violent / gore material from the Internet would be so pervasive that it would destroy what we have today.

(Plus whatever would move to some other platform)

[1] Scorpions – Virgin Killer, Blind Faith – Blind Faith, etc.

Reading the article, I guess it's still common for such content to be made available online with no security other than a bland and misleading filename. Seems like low-hanging fruit for harm reduction, if it can be done in a way that respects civil liberties. When you say something as absolute as "wiping it out" of course that suggests draconian, intrusive measures, but it would be reasonable for a service provider like Dropbox to be able to detect unencrypted child porn shared openly to the public via their service. Even if the only result is to force predators to use encryption and basic access control, that could have a disproportionate effect on how widely individual images are distributed.

EDIT: Downvoters, I'm not doubting or implying it does or doesn't exist, I'm just asking what it is.

Those are things I inadvertently ran into over a decade ago, but these days that virtually never happens, especially in terms of the latter.

And no, I didn't search for those things, so don't make jokes.

The characterization that mainstream social media platforms are "filled" with such material seems disingenuous, unless I've been living on a completely different planet. I'm sure it exists but I believe that you'd have to actively seek it out.

I'm not on social media very much at all, but- my partner used to spend quite a bit of effort reporting Instagram accounts advertising this stuff. Reports were routinely rejected, and she eventually burned out on it. Meanwhile, misinformation is very actively and preemptively policed.

Yes, you'd probably have to seek it out. But, what was troubling is how it's just routinely ignored, despite reporting.

/shrug

Fortunately it does seem like a lot of that has been expunged. I recently revisited hidden services, as well as the Hidden Wiki (which I'm almost certain had CP links a long time ago but my memory is cloudy), and it seems like that filth isn't tolerated anymore on most indexes I found.

And you know something, I don't know if I'm even opposed to that.

The idea that the government must have a ton of CP stashed somewhere for such purposes feels about as disgusting as disgusting gets, but I'm not sure how many of those monsters you can catch without placing bait.

2. Calling people who view these images "monsters" contributes to a stigma that makes people hesitant to seek help before their urges lead them to abuse children.

2.5. If they are "monsters" and someone you know and love is not a "monster," what do you do when you discover that your loved one is one of those people? We go around asking why people look the other way; the way we reflexively dehumanize pedophiles is one of the reasons. We need to recognize pedophiles as human beings who have serious and potentially dangerous mental health problems, and instead of calling them "monsters" we need to reoriented ourselves to say "let's get this person help before they do something monstrous." Obviously a person who is actively abusing children needs to be arrested, but let's not forget that we are talking about people who actively consume imagery of children being abused, many of whom are not necessarily abusing children (yet).

Why? If someone is using those sites, they are extremely unlikely to tell anyone they're being shaken down because doing so requires admitting that they have used those sites. I would imagine that that group of people is a lot more likely to stay quiet and pay up than many other people.

That aside, I'm not entirely sure how people using those Tor sites would even be shaken down given Tor's anonymity. Unless, of course, they paid with a CC and not a form of digital currency.

Honestly, it reminded me a lot of the early 90s www - that is that anything and everything just couldn't be trusted unless you knew the source outside of the web, too. (Like you know the author's personally, or you have confirmation it is a university site, etc.) and that put me off quite a lot. I really didn't fancy the idea of even accidentally opening the wrong link and seeing these images so I basically stopped using Tor altogether and haven't been back since.