from Hacker News

Are porn algorithms feeding a generation of paedophiles – or creating one?

by sandebert on 4/5/25, 10:35 AM with 64 comments

• by belorn on 4/5/25, 1:21 PM

  They are doing neither, and the article itself undermines its premise later when the "serious research" is being quoted. As it cites, most offender get exposed during early teens, back when there were no porn algorithms. However, the rate of child sexual abuse has steadily decreased since the 1990s, down by almost 50%. If the hypothesis of the article was correct then the rate of child sexual abuse should increase, not decrease.

  Other research studies, have looked at the rate of pedophilia in the general population, and the conclusions seems to be a fairly static rate of around 2% (like "Prevalence, situation, and perspectives of treatment" from 2020). However since the rate of child sexual abuse has decreased, such studies mostly rely on doing survey and those has for obvious reasons a major problem of sampling and accuracy.

  A common theme in the research, just from a very quick look, is that the researcher themselves cite that the is a huge lack of research in this area. They can see the trend, and see the numbers, but there is little to real understanding to what is behind the numbers. We currently has as good chance to blame the Catholic Church as to blame pornhub, and articles like this one are not helping the slightest. At best it just spreading fear in order to generate engagement, and at worst they are abusing their readers by pushing propaganda in order to sway popular opinion about oppressive laws.

• by viraptor on 4/5/25, 1:23 PM

  It's one thing when people actually seek it out. But the idea that someone may get charged for a video they didn't realise contains underage people is chilling. I know one tiny woman who in her 30s still could pass for a highschooler and will probably be carded for many years to come. On the other hand I went to high school with a couple of people who could pass for 25+ year olds easily. Without personally checking someone's id, you just can't know for sure. So even if you'd want to avoid illegal material - how sure are you you're safe?

• by MichaelRo on 4/5/25, 1:51 PM

  Well I don't know about the "porn algorithms", people are free to choose what they want. So if they continuously choose from the "teen" category, I'm guessing some sort of deviation must be at play.

  Like if you check the teen category on https://www.pornpics.com/ , many of the girls there seem awfully young with some, practically kids.

  For me the feeling is too uncomfortable to watch those. But I did notice a curious phenomenon, now that I'm approaching 50s. There were all kind of movies I watched as a kid, teenager or young adult and I completely ignored the beauty of the actresses in them, they were at best associated with "mom" if not "granny". But now, that their age in the movie is 10-20 years below my current age, suddenly I discover that they're pretty good looking. Like Elaine from Seinfeld for instance :)

  I heard somewhere this saying and I'm afraid it's true: "When a man is in his 20s, he finds beautiful maybe 5-10% of the women of his age. When they're in their 40s, they find about half the 20-somethings beautiful. When they reach 80s, they find all of the young women beautiful." :)

• by dtgm92 on 4/6/25, 1:59 PM

  Not even porn algos, regular algos provide a feast for those people. Tiktok, previously musically, youtube, it is all filled with questionable underage content. The worst part though is that if you are into such things, it recommends more to you, and other similar users history and activity gets recommended to you, thus distributing the content. It is no different from how these algos learn you like mountain biking or gardening.

• by jchw on 4/5/25, 1:45 PM

  I hate how when an article about how science has discredited the concept of porn addiction wound up getting bounced off the HN frontpage within minutes of appearing on it, then flagged and deaded:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43587448

  And yet, this absurd sensationalist dreck will probably stay up here for longer.

• by Hizonner on 4/5/25, 1:37 PM

  I'm going with "no".

• by Spivak on 4/5/25, 12:18 PM

  Betteridge's Law is strong with this one. The lede is buried at after all the sob stories about guys who discovered they were pedophiles because recommendation algorithms are really good as showing you what you want to see. This is all just pretext to the UK government's massive privacy overreach and censorship.

  > Along with other countries, the UK is bringing in tighter controls on the porn industry. Porn sites will be required to have age verification processes in place by July to stop children viewing their content, a process that will be monitored by Ofcom under the new Online Safety Act (OSA). But the OSA does not ban or control certain common practices in porn, such as strangulation, sexual fetishisation of incest or the abuse of children acted by adults. The government argues depiction of sexual strangulation is banned but a recent in-depth review of porn by Baroness Bertin, a Conservative peer, warned it is not, in reality, covered by case law. She called for tighter regulation of “legal but harmful pornography like choking, violent and degrading acts … even content that could encourage child sexual abuse”. While headlines picked out the call to ban strangulation, Bertin also demanded clearer rules around “incest, step-incest and ‘teen’ porn”.

  I think the people pushing these moral purity bills need a wake-up call about what women find hot. Because this worldview makes no sense once you know that these "violent and degrading acts" are extremely common fetishes among women who play the part of the "victim." It's not men who are reading gothic horror where incest one of the tamer depictions. The problem in the real world is that, despite the public perception otherwise, guys are generally deeply uncomfortable playing out the other side of these kinds of fantasies.