I'm old enough to remember when seeing two men kiss was called ptsd inducing.

People are outraged by whatever they are told to be outraged over and ignore everything that they aren't.

You have no idea what content is being discussed here if you even think about bringing identity politics into this topic.

"More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism."

What part here are you suggesting is similar to seeing two men kissing?

To a 1980s Christian mom? All of them.

But we're not talking about an 80's christian mom since you proceeded to make the observation that "People are outraged by whatever they are told to be outraged over and ignore everything that they aren't".

Which is to say, being exposed to extreme violent/abusive content could only cause PTSD iff one is subject to a specific social construct that define these acts in a certain way. Let's just assume you're right, what kind of employees would that imply are immune to getting PTSD from such content given your previous observation?

The answer is in the question: Whoever has been raised in a culture that doesn't make a big deal out of whatever the given content is.

And what culture is that?

You're lying and you know it. I remember the 80s as much as anyone else. Especially the part where Elton John and Freddy Mercury where at the peak of their popularity, unless you where living in a religious shithole but that was (and still is) a small part of the world.

In 1980 75% of adults thought that homosexuality was always wrong and 20% that it was never wrong or only sometimes wrong.

https://lgbpsychology.org/html/gss4.html

https://lgbpsychology.org/html/prej_prev.html

Your feelings about the period mean nothing.

Seeing something you think is culturally wrong is not necessarily traumatizing, is it? And surely there are degrees of "wrongness", ranging from the merely uncomfortable to the truly gross to the utterly horrifying. Even within the horrifying category, one can differentiate between things like a finger being chopped off and e.g. disembowelment. It's reasonable to expect a person would be more traumatized the further up the ladder of horror they're forced to look.

This would be believable if not for the fact that hanging gutting and quartering was considered good wholesome family entertainment to watch while getting fast food in the market not three centuries ago literally everywhere.

How did that go away, if people only do what they're brought up to do?

We found out that keeping people homeless to die of exposure slowly was much more effective at keeping the majority in line.

No one is actively trying to keep people homeless or watch them die on the streets, much less use that as a lesson to keep people in line. Drawing and quartering is way more scary and effective if you want to make people obey. You're just mixing nihilistic bitterness with outright nonsense.

Depends seriously on the country, the Netherlands was way ahead there. In many ways more ahead than it is now because it has become so conservative lately.

In what 80s fantasy were you living in where gay people were open. Rumor was John was bisexual and Freddy getting aids in the late 80s was a huge deal. Queen's peak is around 1992 with Wayne's world. No men kissed on stage or in movies neither did women.

It might have induced 'disgust', but no, two men kissing didn't give 1980s Christian moms actual PTSD.

Not defending this person in particular, but you should take a look at how anti-LGBT, including at the government level, most countries are in Africa. Maybe a decent number of them do regard seeing homosexuality as PTSD inducing.

There are several places where they legally can and will kill you for homosexuality.

The existence of anti-LGBTQ wasn't where their argument was leading to though.

Their line of logic was that our society moral values are but social construct, that change from place to place and with time, therefore being exposed to sexual violence, child abuse, gore etc. is PTSD inducing only because we're examining it through our limited perspective whereas it's quite possible that all these things those FB mods were exposed to can be perfectly normal in some cultures.

I wanted to see where that argument would lead them to, as in, what kind of people would FB should have hired that would be resistant to all these horrible stuff, but other than to let me know that in fact there are such cultures, I never got a straight answer out of them.

In this context, this is dangerously close to asserting "people are only outraged about CSAM because they're told to be." I don't think that's what you mean.

It is exactly what I mean.

If you don't nurture that outrage every day than you'd be rather surprised what can happen to a culture in a single generation.

I think your logic is backwards. The main reason for a culture to ban pedophilia is because it causes trauma in children. For thousands of years, cultures have progressed towards protecting children. This came from a natural sense of outrage in a majority of people, which became part of the culture. Not vice versa. In many of your comments, you seem to assume that people are only automatons who think and do exactly what their culture teaches them, but that's not the truth. The culture is made up of individuals, and individual conscience frequently - thankfully - overrides cultural diktat. Otherwise no dictatorship would ever fall, no group of people would ever be freed, and no wicked practices would ever be stamped out. It has always been individual people acting against the culture whose outrage has caused the culture to change. Which strongly implies that people's sense of outrage is at least partly intrinsic to human nature, totally apart from cultural practices of the time.

I'm now old enough to have seen people who treated homosexuals in the 1980s the same we treat pedophiles today start waving rainbow flags and calling the people they beat up for being gay in highschool Nazis.

There maybe a few people with principles who stick with them.

The majority will happily shove who ever they are told to in a gas chamber.

Wait, why are they calling gay people Nazis? This story is very unclear. And I can't see how it relates to CSAM and the moderators who have to see it, which is a categorically different issue to homosexuality, so different as to be completely unconflatable.

I'm not saying there aren't a lot of people who are natural conformists, who do whatever they're told to, and hate or love whatever the prevailing culture hates or loves. They may be a majority. And yes, a prevailing culture can take even the revulsion of murder out of people to some extent (although check out the state sanctioned degree of alcohol and drug use among SS officers and you'll see it's not quite so easy to make people do acts of murder and torture every day).

What I am saying is that the conformists don't drive the culture, they're just a blunt weapon of whoever is driving the culture. That weapon can be turned toward gay rights or toward burning people at the stake, but what changes a culture are the individuals with either a conscience or the individuals with wicked plans. Both of which exist outside the mainstream in any time and place.

Maybe another way of saying this is that I think most people are capable of murder and most people are capable of empathy (and therefore trauma) with someone being tortured, but primarily they're concerned with being a good guy. What throws the arc of history towards a higher morality is that maybe >0% of people naturally need to perceive themselves as "good" by defending life and the dignity and humanity of other people, to the extent that needing to be a good person overrides their cultural programming. And those are not the only people who change a culture, but 51% of the time they change it for the better instead of worse.

That's just my view on it.

I'm trying to interpret this post in the best light and, regrettably, I'm failing.

Can you clarify what you think the change to society will be if we expose more people online to CSAM and normalize it?

Equating outrage to PTSD is absolute nonsense. As someone that lives with a PTSD sufferer, it is an extremely severe and debilitating condition that has nothing to do with “outrage” and can’t be caused by seeing people kiss.

PTSD is what happens when you see someone standing next to you reduced to a chunky red salsa in a split second.

The idea that seeing images of that can match the real thing can only be said by people who haven't smelled the results.

You’re very wrong, it can be caused by different things to different people- as the causes are emotional it requires severe emotional trauma, which does not have to happen through a specific category of event- a lot of different types of trauma and abuse can cause it.

It’s hard to imagine a more disgusting thought process than someone trying to gatekeep others suffering like you are doing here.

actually, not everybody gets PTSD in for example a combat situation, and Gabor Mate says that people who do develop PTSD are the people who have already suffered traumas as children; in a sense, childhood trauma is a preexisting condition.

A lot of PTSD is also not from combat all all- childhood emotional trauma alone can cause it. This is recognized now, but it took a while because initially it was discovered in war veterans and categorically excluded other groups- eventually they discovered that war wasn’t unique in causing the condition.

However, I would point out that Mates’ views are controversial, and don’t fully agree with other research on trauma and PTSD. He unrealistically associates essentially all mental illness and neurodivergence with childhood trauma, even in cases where good evidence contradicts that view. He claims ADHD is caused by childhood emotional trauma, although that is proven not to be the case, so I don’t put much stock in his scientific reasoning abilities- he has his hammer and sees everything as a nail.

You were literally gatekeeping ptsd from Christian mom's not one post ago.

HN ethos is to assume good faith, but my imagination is failing me here as to how you might be sincere and not trolling- can you please share more info to help me out?

What makes you think people have experienced clinically diagnosed or diagnosable PTSD from seeing someone kiss? Has anyone actually claimed that?

You used the word outrage, and again outrage is not trauma- it describes an outer reaction, not an inner experience. They’re neither mutually exclusive nor synonymous.

Your assertion seems to be that only being physically present for a horrific event can be emotionally traumatic- that spending years sitting in a room watching media of children being brutally murdered and raped day in and day out is not possibly traumatic, but watching someone kiss that you politically think should be banned from doing so, can be genuinely traumatic?

How else would you stop the perpetrators?

Large scale and super sick perpetrators exist (as compared to small scale ones who do mildly sick stuff) because Facebook is a global network and there is a benefit to operating on such a large platform. The sicker you are, while getting away with it, the more reward you get.

Switch to a federated social systems like Mastodon, with only a few thousand or ten thousand users per instance, and perpetrators will never be able to grow too large. Easy for the moderators to shut stuff down very quickly.

Tricky. It also gives perpetrators a lot more places to hide. I think the jury is out on whether a few centralized networks or a fediverse makes it harder for attackers to reach potential targets (or customers).

The purpose of facebook moderators (besides legal compliance) is to protect normal people from the "sick" people. In a federated network, of course, such people will create their own instances, and hide there. But then no one is harmed from them, because all such instances will be banned quite quickly, same as all spam email hosts are blocked very quickly by everyone else.

From a normal person perspective on not seeing bad stuff, the design of a federated network is inherently better than a global network.

That's the theory. I'm not sure yet that it works in practice, I've seen a lot of people on Mastodon complaining about how as a moderator, keeping up with the bad services is a perpetual game of whack-a-mole because everything is access on by default. Maybe this is a Mastodon specific issue.

That's because Mastodon or any other federated social network hasn't taken off, and so not enough development has gone into them. If they take off, naturally people will develop analogs of spam lists and SpamAssassin etc for such systems, which will cut down moderation time significantly. I run an org email server, and don't exactly do any thing besides installing such automated tools.

On Mastodon, admins will just have to do the additional work to make sure new accounts are not posting weird stuff.

Big tech vastly underspends on this area. You can find a stream of articles from the last 10 years where BigTech companies were allowing open child prostitution, paid-for violence, and other stuff on their platforms with little to no moderation.

> Switch to a federated social systems like Mastodon, with only a few thousand or ten thousand users per instance, and perpetrators will never be able to grow too large.

The #2 and #3 most popular Mastodon instances allow CSAM.

If you were a tech billionaire you'd be a sociopath like the others and wouldn't give a single f about this. You'd be going on podcasts to tell the world that markets will fix everything if given the chance.

They are not wrong. Do you know any mechanism other than markets that work at scale and that don’t cost a bomb and don’t involve abusive central authority?

Tech billionaires usually advocate for some kind of return to the gilded age, with minimal workers rights and corporate tax. Markets were freer back then, how did that work out for the average man? Markets alone don't do anything for the average quality of life.

Quality of life for the average man now is way better than it was at any time in history. A fact.

But is it solely because of markets? Would deregulation improve our lives further? I don't think so, and that is what I am talking about. Musk, Bezos, Andreessen and cie. are advocating for a particular laissez-faire flavor of capitalism, which historically has been very bad for the average man.