Living under authoritarian regimes is both relatively boring and normal AND incredibly corrosive to the human soul. These things can absolutely co-exist.
This is why everyone needs to resist authoritarians, even people who privately assume they’ll be just fine.
The damage this causes across generations (even if the regime is short lived!) is so hard to grasp if you haven’t lived with it. It touches every aspect of life. It makes trust impossible, and without some level of trust and a belief in the possibility of justice, *nothing in society works.*
The first time I saw it I seriously considered making a similar game for moderation using actual content (ie not the more abstract way Moderator Mayhem went with) to provoke the same understanding of how corrosive a force it is, but the fact it legally couldn't include the worst stuff would blunt it
yeah if it doesn’t realistically depict looking at thousands of ads for acai powder with slightly different wording, punctuated by the occasional teenage Brazilian girl posting CSAM to get Justin Bieber to notice her for some reason what’s the fucking point
Exactly! Just the subconscious pressure valve of knowing the game could never throw CSAM at you when you hit "next report in queue" would change the experience too much to really make the point, I concluded
Not to be dramatic but I feel like a lot of problems stem from people assuming, somehow, that stuff that isn't csam can somehow be the same as a record of actual harm to an actual child.
But also yeah, absolutely, that game has the problem of you know it's a simulation and you're safe
There are people who will volunteer moderate on Reddit even knowing that they have a nonzero chance of encountering an ISIL propaganda “music video”
No one but CSAM collectors would mod if they reasonably believed they’d encounter even one instance of CSAM.
I see where she's going, like you could make it a jump scare and that might be as close as you could get, but yeah I also can see how it's nowhere near close enough (even as a person who really does not deal well with jump scares)
Yeah. I mean, I have a horrible imagination and those letters alone, if I dwell, could get troubling. But you'd need someone with a similar kind of horrible imagination capability, just to get a little taste...
And I do think MM is a great game that gets its point across wonderfully! But that point is more about the difficulty of the problem (which is also a good point to convey, don't get me wrong) and less about the cost to the people who do it, which is really really hard to convey to people.
I almost do regret that "tricking people into seeing goatse or getting rickrolled" is less of a thing now, because when it was more common it was a good, though still imperfect, analogy for the level of hypervigilance the job instills in you
Hypnospace Outlaw has an interesting case where you're tasked with tracking down the source of a shock image, but the game is rated T so the shock image is just weirdly-shaped fleshy bits
there's a tweet by @writnelson.bsky.social about how he pitched it to @jaytholen.net like "okay, so obviously we can't do this directly, but you know how it is the first time you catch a glimpse of goatse?"
It seems from reading your posts that "legally couldn't include the worst stuff" stifles a lot of research/discussion on T&S (and then of course there's also the ethical issues)
On the whole, I think it's a very good thing that people can't post the worst examples of the content T&S has to deal with, even though it makes it hard to convey the experience. I do wish for better research exemptions, though.
Having participated in an FBI investigation into CSAM in the earlier days of the internet as a sysadmin made me never want to be involved in T&S but I have the utmost respect for those that can handle it. I was the one that found the material and reported it. I'll never forget.
