It shows that exposure doesn't always cause trauma (which I don't think anyone claimed), not that it can't.

virgildotcodes 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The uncomfortable truth is that monkey see monkey do is a real phenomenon. The majority of people who play violent video games and watch violent movies and watch real snuff vids online won't commit these acts.

That said, to say they do not influence you in any way is to deny all of advertising, if not the basic reality that the stimuli to which we are exposed in life are the primary thing that shape us beyond our genetics.

Do they make you more likely to feel detachment at the thought of horrors being inflicted upon others, does that influence your career path or political leanings?

The number of times I've seen a commercial for pizza or taco bell or seen a food mentioned on a tv show or movie and thought "hmm that sounds good right now, i'm gonna order that" is way more than 0.

To be clear, I'm against any censorship of violent video games, movies, art, etc.

You can of course argue that school shooters and Stephen Miller would do what they do without all the media (social or not) they've consumed.

That said, what are we, after all, other than some sort of combination of our genetics and environment?

It's hard to argue that there isn't some sort of link between the mention of taco bell and me immediately doordashing it, which makes it hard to reconcile the two positions.

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jrflowers an hour ago | parent | next [-]

>The number of times I've seen a commercial for pizza or taco bell or seen a food mentioned on a tv show or movie and thought "hmm that sounds good right now, i'm gonna order that" is way more than 0.

Goatse has been online for thirty years and I’ve never seen anybody say “I would definitely have never tried that if nobody showed me that website”

	▲	virgildotcodes an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Do you think the number of people who have tried to reproduce the photo, specifically because they saw this photo, is 0?

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lostmsu an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Evidence?

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virgildotcodes an hour ago | parent [-]

Evidence of the fact that I ordered doordash? Evidence of the fact that people are a product of their genetics and their environment?

Are you asking for evidence that humans tend to emulate what they see other humans do?

Are you asking the more direct classic question of if there's evidence that violent media correlates with violent acts?

	▲	lostmsu an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The latter. And not just "correlates".

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rockskon 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Large-scale exposure caused no discernible degree of trauma. That's not a small phenomena that seems to have been ignored by policymakers and those who inform them.

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pegasus 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Large-scale exposure caused no discernible degree of trauma.

How do we know this? All I've seen so far is anecdata. As my own anecdata, an ex of mine felt she had been traumatized by watching horror movies at a very young age. Many years later she still had flashbacks.

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rockskon 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Statistical anomalies exist, sure. But if there was any meaningful negative impact at scale, you'd think it would've shown up over the decades in trending therapy topics, to people bringing up traumatic memories of the old Internet, to....to something at scale.

	▲	noduerme 28 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Here's an anomaly: https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-mod...
	▲	pegasus 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Knowing what she's seen at that age, I'm pretty sure I'd have flashbacks as well. This wasn't the old internet, and it's not like the new internet is free of such content. I really don't think that we have a way to quantify this, but, as one sibling comment said, expecting no influence seems unrealistic – as is expecting that influence to be easily detectable. I'm sure my ex is not the only one bringing up such experiences in therapy and I bet if you ask experienced therapists they will have similar stories.
	▲	only-one1701 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Just because it can’t be easily measured doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

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kivle an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

And in the olden times, people got nightmares from reading books, or by hearing a horror story around a campfire. Banning everything that is scary or can cause nightmares or trauma would be a very difficult effort, and deciding a boundary of what is too traumatic and what is not would be very arbitrary.

	▲	noduerme 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Can we agree that there's a difference between banning things and making things difficult to access? I'm an extremely liberal-libertarian free speech and free information advocate. I grew up in a world where as a 12 year old, on IRC, in 1992, I had people sending me fetish porn and child porn, and I developed the belief at that age that that was fine, if you were 12, you had the right to see anything you could, including other 12 year olds naked. But this was not something most 12 year olds were exposed to, and by the time I was 14 I was pretty clear on why they shouldn't be. We live in a world where there is no such thing as a "ban". Oh, I know, I hated bans and railed against bans, and I don't think the government has any right to ban anything. But a ban is just an obstacle to people who want to violate the norm. A ban is only a way for societies to set up barriers between people and bad shit which is bad for society, and sometimes it's okay for there to be barriers. In 1992, the reason most kids were basically incredibly innocent and had never seen any porn at all at 12 years old, was that the barriers to it were reasonably high. If you were some kind of command line warrior child who could figure out IRC over dialup, then yeah, people would literally mail you brown paper boxes with porn tapes on VHS. There are, actually, boundaries on what is too traumatic to show someone. Personally, I'd like to obliterate the behavior that fuels those things, rather than need to address the downstream issues of people seeing them. But there are things that are poisonous to society because they poison individuals, and there's a role for society and government to play in prohibiting those things, or at least preventing their spread as much as possible. There is evil in the world, and it is sometimes necessary to stop it. Free information is not an unalloyed good.