Ah, an outlier edge case! I'll go ahead and address this one while taking note that using extreme outlier examples is not a good method for testing general-case principles.

In the case of child porn, the legal theory behind suppressing its distribution, not just its creation, is that distributing it reinforces the incentive structures that motivate its creation, which is where the actual harm inheres. So suppression is justified as a means of stopping assaults against children, not merely because the thing itself is regarded as harmful to the user.

This might be a rationalization for suppressing something that the vast majority of us find disgusting per se, but if so, then the motivation to rationalize it in relation to a more concrete harm means that we are rejecting the notion that most of us finding it disgusting is a sufficient justification in its own right to suppress things.

In other words, it's still something that, even if the motivation to suppress it originates from the "gut feeling" of a large number of people, acting on that gut feeling must still be gated by legal/constitutional norms that set the bounds for the assertion of power. So even as an outlier edge case, this one still conforms to the general principle, respecting boundaries even as it tries to go as far as possible within then.

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inigyou an hour ago | parent [-]

So in the child porn case you're willing to concede that limits on power don't matter, shouldn't exist, or should be overridden, in order to reduce harm. Why not also in the social media case?

	▲	Gormo 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> So in the child porn case you're willing to concede that limits on power don't matter, shouldn't exist, or should be overridden, in order to reduce harm. No, I'm not. I'm not certain as to whether I didn't explain my position well, or you misunderstood it, but I definitely was saying the exact opposite of this. For the sake of clarity, I'll attempt to reiterate my point here: the child porn example demonstrates that even if the "gut feeling" motivation to restrict something comes from an underlying disgust at the thing itself, the legal mechanisms used to restrict it are still gated by limitations on the use of power. In this case, the strength of the motivations pushed the restrictions further than they go in other cases, but not beyond the bounds of the strict limits, because those limits absolutely still hold, do matter, should exist, and should not be overridden. > Why not also in the social media case? The position you articulated here is valid in neither case.