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CW:Child abuse. Vast pedophile network shut down in Europol’s largest CSAM operation
(arstechnica.com)
USAID gets cut
Largest pedophile network shuts down
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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Beat me to it.
Nearly 1,400 suspected consumers of CSAM have been identified among 1.8 million [!!!] global KidFlix users, and 79 have been arrested so far.
I wanna barf.
Trying not to come to the realization that there's a lot more pedophiles than i ever imagined is getting harder every day. It's just media bias is just recency bias l... Right?
Hollywood is full of pedos and half of french movies are about the forbidden love between a 15 year and her 64 year old father's best friend - the other half are "what if men had to wear a hijab"
In the US, CP was only outlawed within living memory, 50ish years ago. It feels like something that's been illegal since cameras were invented but the notion of protecting children from sexual exploitation is distressingly recent.
I still remember that the "13 & 27 is an acceptable dating range" attitude by a lot of people. Like tween Justin Bieber was considered a sex icon (and not just by young girls). Its only been very recent since we value children being protected from predatory dynamics.
Surprised you didn't mention animanga
True, but the proliferation of “she is a 80000 year old dragon but looks 10” is a result of japan’s lost decades and a bit out of my age range.
a result of japan's lost decades
Would you like to elaborate on that?
Oh yeah in like older anime from the 80-90s most women looked more like adults and the environments tended to be post-childhood. With the economic depression and whole bubble burst, japanese men tended to romanticize their days as students and their freer youth so the ideal women became their classmates. It might also have been a subconsciously caused by the increasing emancipation of Japanese women. So young girls might seem more approachable and less demanding of them, unlike Japanese women who expect careers, a house and a car as well as their “own space”.
There is also something about how economic slumps tends to foster women/girls being considered more desirable at young ages, but I don’t remember the source!
Oh yeah, that figures, I think I might've heard that idea somewhere.
I feel like this story sort of confirms my view that cops and pedos are, how to put this, "Tom and Jerry": 1.8 million KidFlix users to 79 arrests at present, means that a pedo could directly participate in the sexual exploitation of children, and end up literally having a 99.996% chance of getting off scot-free — even if all 1,400 suspects do get arrested eventually, then that's still a 99.92% chance that a given pedo who created a KidFlix account, won't face any punishment for their actions. God is more likely to take the matter into His own hands by way of a freak accident, than cops are to even knock on a pedo's door with a warrant.
In that sense, one could say that there's a commonality between stealing someone's childhood and stealing someone's wages, in that the bourgeois state has to pretend to be opposed to both these criminalities, and might accordingly dispatch its police to "make an example of" a handful of the crime's offenders — but in reality the crimes are As Good As Legal™, because they still ultimately serve the same system as the cops do. So it's all a cartoon! It's pure spectacle! You'd have to be a damned fool to think Tom's ever gonna catch and eat Jerry once and for all!
Even apart from dedicated CSAM sites, it's mind-blowing how many adult men creep on minors on regular ass corporate social media, openly and publicly, with their full names and faces right fuckin there alongside their creepy messages. And it seems like the worst that ever happens to them is an account ban, maybe, if mods actually give half a shit.
I swear I heard (but I don't know where I might source this claim) that most CSAM on the Internet is distributed through regular ass corporate social media, in e.g. private groups named after obscure euphemisms.
How can they not get more than 1400 suspects? Don't they have payment information, IP addresses, and more PII on some of these people? Surely 99.9% of pedos don't have flawless opsec
How can they not get more than 1400 suspects?
The reality is that even if we go full idealistic true believers that think that the system works as it's described and intended (assuming the US justice system), the whole justice system really doesn't have the resources to go after every single person, and would rather go after those that they can be sure the charges would actually stick.
It's kinda the same way with where if every single person accused of any crime refused to take a plea deal, and went to trial, the entire system would be bogged down to the point of being non-functional.
Don't they have payment information, IP addresses
Payment info could easily be stolen cards. As for IP addresses, those can easily get semi regularly rotated around, and I highly doubt ISPs are in the business of keeping a history of who had what IP at certain dates.
Hopefully this is just the tip of the spear, and there are plans for a long-term operation to match account names to perpetrators using the info they now have access to.
it's 1400 after they've removed all the porkies and politicians from the list
Think of it this way: if they are 1% of the population that's 3.4 million in the US, 4.9 million in the EU. So easily several tens of millions globally assuming that and the internet is global and this site we can assume didn't have but a fraction of all pedophiles as users.
(As a depressing aside I would guess the number of people but especially adult men who are not interested in pre-pubescent children but would absolutely have sex with a 15 year old if given the opportunity is much, much higher than 1% of the population.)
The idea of protecting children in of itself is a recent idea (in capitalism, pre-capitalist societies being a bit different) brought about by labor rights movements. After all 125 years ago children were commonly found in work-houses and factories doing dangerous jobs for long brutal hours and in that situation well if you think that's okay or have accepted it you're not likely to raise a fuss about sexual exploitation involving them either. Even as short a time ago as immediately post WW2 tons of children worked very long hours on farms.
anecdotal but i'd say 1% is probably a pretty stark underestimate. i've known dozens of victims in my lifetime alone, and those are just the ones willing to talk (to me) about it. if you include the ones who were over 13 when they were abused it might well crack 100. even if you account for how trauma survivors sometimes seem to have a knack for finding one another it's still fucking bleak beyond measure.
I have to agree from my own anecdotal experiences as well. I think it's not something we can solve by -just- trying to catch/lock them all up because there are so many. I think it's something we really only solve with socialism with doing away with the capitalist family dynamic, with community, with healthcare (including identifying early those pre-disposed and medicating and monitoring), with changing the culture, the superstructure. Not to say it'll solve it of course but I think that's the only way we begin to really put a major dent in it which is again just another example of how only liberation from capitalism can bring about other kinds of liberation and lessening/abolition of forms of exploitation.
My own view, perhaps controversial, is that pedophilia is not a "real" mental condition, but is in fact entirely produced by the norms of cisheteropatriarchy. Thus as Earth enters socialism and progresses towards communism, and more and more vestiges of patriarchy are dismantled, the whole phenomenon of pedophilia will eventually quite literally be driven to extinction as a sort of "habitat destruction" leaves the phenomenon with no chance to reproduce.
Having worked with kids for over a decade, it's such a terrifying thing to think about
It's less than a single percentage point of the world population, but it's still too many
Its pretty common I fear. Most just don't get caught. Or get caught and it gets swept under the rug
It likely helped that most suspects were already known offenders, Europol noted
They mostly only caught people they already knew about. Sickening
Is it odd that I'm also extra disgusted at the fact that the name is so marketing-department? Like it sounds like something Netflix would name their shows for kids section and that just makes me even more nauseous somehow.
It's not odd at all, I'm also grossed out by the name. But frankly I don't know what a CSAM website could call itself that wouldn't just make the whole ordeal more nauseating.
Fair, I guess that was inevitable
Awful how few of them are facing any punishment. Absolutely disgusting. I have read stories of open child exploitation occurring in Hungary and its allowance by authorities but it seems like this is a whole of Europe issue.
That's weird, I could have sworn the CIA and Mossad were still operational
And the Catholic Church
The Catholic Church wishes they had the kind of media and narrative control those groups have.
The Catholic Church has worked directly with the CIA
And the nazis too!
For, rather. Operation Gladio had the Vatican full of CIA operatives up to the highest seat.
And those LDSaints
And the Evangelicals and the Southern Baptists and the Seventh Day Adventists and
I think there might be a pattern here
to be fair the atheists too
True, though atheists tend to form fewer and smaller organizations so less incentive to infiltrate them