At a stretch, /r/jailbait and the associated subreddits may have, but reddit took the decision to ban those a long time ago.

It makes perfect sense. Both posting photos of people in public on the Internet and 'doxxing' someone who does this are legal. However, the former is in compliance with Internet culture (the free sharing of information, no matter how controversial) and the latter is not. The latter is an attack on the Internet.

I provided that intellectual clarity for you, by explaining how these prima facie inconsistent views are actually entirely consistent with the principles of Internet culture.

Any questions?

The content on /r/creepshots was not, generally speaking, illegal. I cannot fathom any way in which it was harmful. I'm sure you will disagree on this latter point, and I will be very interested to hear you articulate in what sense you thought it caused harm.

You don't win the game by slapping the word "harmful" on controversial content.

Surreptitious, candid, compromising photos of minors are harmful. They put a very public spotlight on people who have neither the life experience nor the cognitive development nor the emotional stability to handle it. The photos themselves are fed into the random social eddies an currents these people have to live in, which currents are made of similarly dysfunctional teenagers making a whole new set of bad decisions based on those photos. Every snarky, gross, nasty, or salacious comment posted on the public threads in which the subjects of those photos are objectified also feeds into the drama.

At the same time, the practice of causing this harm solely for the amusement of groups of anonymous Internet commenters provides social reinforcement not just for the continued posting of harmful photos, but also for the fundamental sick ideas that animate those photos: that teenagers are not developing human beings with their own rights to privacy and personal space and well being, but instead objects for the amusement of strangers.

We are just now beginning to comprehend how harmful peer-bullying is among teenagers. It seems to me that it shouldn't be difficult at all to wrap our heads around the harm caused by the bullying of teenagers by adults.

How you know that there is at least some force to these arguments is, you're arguing on a thread that isn't simply about banning the posting of these photos, but rather about why it's inconsistent to tolerate those photos while banning the mere naming of the people who post them.

Photos of women, predominantly of age, seen in public. Statistically, and by virtue of the photos being taken covertly, very few of the women featured would have known there was a photo of them floating around on the Internet.

Very rarely is a name put to a photo, and reddit specifically prohibited the posting of personal details on the site.

Even if the subjects did find out, so what? I'd be flattered if someone had taken a photo of me in public and posted it online saying they'd like to have sexual relations with me, that I have a nice ass, etc.

I'd be a little creeped out, but not to the point where I'd be calling for the banning of the activity.

This thread is about the /r/creepshots debacle, which has nothing to do with compromising photos of minors.

I don't see how /r/jailbait is relevant to this discussion. violentacrez's involvement in that subreddit does not somehow justify his doxxing.

Besides, there was nothing wrong with most of the content on /r/jailbait either. Almost all of it was legal, rarely were any photos sexually suggestive, and actual child pornography was strictly prohibited.

Reddit only shut it down because the media furore over it was threatening to damage the reddit community as a whole.

Unfortunately, I do agree with you that the only reason anything actually happened on Reddit is that it hit the media, and the admins just want to avoid the wrong kind of media attention. It's unfortunate because there is a more important reason to ban subreddits like that: they exist in order to milk amusement from harm.

You're dragging /r/jailbait into the discussion because you think it adds weight to your argument. I'm saying it is no only irrelevant to the current discussion, but even if it were relevant, there was nothing 'wrong' with /r/jailbait.

/r/creepshots and /r/jailbait are completely different animals.

(b) The controversy we're discussing is the outing of the person responsible both for creepshots and for jailbait.

(c) The root comment in this thread isn't specifically about either subreddit, but rather "photos of minors". The distinction you're trying to draw between the subreddits isn't relevant to my point.

(d) It is nevertheless disingenuous to try at this point to back away from defending photos of minors after you've specifically attempted to justify them. The subtext in this little branch of the thread is that you do in fact think it's wrong to "censor" photos of underage children, so it's not productive for you to fall back on "creepshots wasn't about that".

If, by switching back to "creepshots isn't about underage subjects", you mean to concede the argument about the legitimacy of posting photos of underage subjects, just say that. Don't pretend that you're formulating a convincing argument by repeatedly moving the goalposts. It's not like I'm suddenly going to forget that you stuck up for "jailbait", or that there were in fact underage photos on "creepshots".

I think the content on both /r/jailbait and /r/creepshots was, with only a few exceptions, legal and harmless.

Neither subreddit was shut down because it was illegal or harmful. The former was shut down as a result of media hysteria, and the latter as the result of blackmail.

I don't think you know much about either subreddit, to be honest.

I kind of suspected this from the start, but it's nice to have you finally admit it.

Nice try, though.

Most of creepy captions were hyperbolic if you hadn't noticed. The Internet is not, after all, serious business.

So, it's OK to share the personal information of people on the Internet?