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

I know someone who developed schizophrenia in contact with rotten.com

I don't think that's quite true, either. Parent poster said it was amazing they were still sane. Other people might not be sane, depending on what they were exposed to at an early age. And watching something on video is different than seeing it happen in front of you, which is also different from having it happen to you ...and I understand the impulse to say that we're not a victim of anything just because we saw something horrible.

But lots of people seeing lots of horrible things, if it doesn't traumatize them, can desensitize them. There are plenty of freedoms that also cause harm. That doesn't mean the freedoms should be taken away, but it means that the "third party" is often correct. Society in a free country calls its own balls and strikes.

Some things should be hard to access. Accessing some things should also be taken as a red flag that you are not OK. The rest of the people around you have a right to their security as much as, or more than, you have a right to your freedom to view illicit information. And I say this as a person who would absolutely revolt against any system that based that decision on fiat, religion, or unfounded hysteria. We all personally have a right to do anything we want that doesn't hurt anyone else. But if the "third party" you're talking about are your neighbors, and if they have decided that you are a threat to them, then talk with them.

I think it's just different scale, like anything else. When I was growing up we also knew about rotten.com(in rural Poland!) but the only way to see it was to pay for some access at an internet caffee, we(like a group of kids) would huddle around a pc, look around for 5 minutes and then the dude running the place would kick us out. If you had internet access at home it was very limited and loading any kind of images took forever - way too risky.

Compare to now where kids literally have all the world's internet in their pockets, they can watch as much of it as they like with very little risk. Like if you speak with primary school teachers they say kids share naked pictures of their classmates, because there's lots of online services that just generate nudes from a few pictures.

Like, yeah, information should be free for everyone. But I think our experience from the 90s isn't really relevant to the world in 2026.

I think that gore is an easy scapegoat because this allows us to shy away from the difficult discussions. "We should ban porn" occupies the bandwidth of social discourse, and therefore we cannot discuss topics like "ok but really, what do we do about the demographic collapse". I honestly think that the kids growing up now are going to be much more traumatized by the fact that they'll find themselves in a world of insane wealth inequality while needing to support an army of retirees, rather than seeing a pic of a dead body.

BTW seeing death, disease, and misery was completely normal through entire human history. We live in abnormally safe times. Maybe there is some mechanism akin to allergies, where immune system cannot believe that everything is chill so it overreacts to tiniest threats.

But it can cause trauma, and harm. What this shows is that it’s not inevitable. It maybe even shows that it causes trauma and harm rarely.

Who should be protected from it, and by who is a different thing. I strongly against blanket restrictions, but one for sure they are easier. And they definitely protect people who wouldn’t get this protection in other scenarios, because for example their parents are shit. Another viewpoint is that probably this is the least important thing for people who wouldn’t get this protection otherwise, so maybe it doesn’t matter at that point. One for sure, there should be a better argument to restrict access than the currently provided ones.

the idea that information can't cause harm is obviously absurd. third parties should not restrict free speech, but that's an extremely simplistic/optimistic view. everything is about trade offs, there is no perfect solution. the truth is probably closer to: exposing young children to disturbing imagery at a young age is not optimal for healthy development, but free speech is important to a functioning democracy.

This kind of conflates two issues though.

I have no real interest in any shock video or shock image; but I reject any form of censorship even more so, such as is currently tried via age sniffing on everyone and killing off VPNs. The world wide web is currently privatized.

Yeah I disagree. We've normalized a lot of bad shit because it was pressed into the strata of our lives like road kill on asphalt.

My kids do not need to see beheadings and exploding people. I could have done without that exposure. It was certainly traumatic.

It sounds to me like you've already decided, sans facts, that your opinion is correct. Which is provably incorrect by decades of medical research. Or perhaps you are one of those "because it didn't bother you and your friends, the idea is a joke." It's impossible for me to present you an argument that would teach you to understand compassion, let alone trauma, because you probably think I'm some woke soyboy rando on the internet and you've got your bros to go chest-bump about how badass y'all are. But the reality is, prolonged exposure to graphic images can cause trauma, from social media moderators, to EMTs, to even everyday police that have to sort through graphic evidence as part of a report. I hope some day you learn compassion, for your sake as well as everyone else you harm.