Spouse/partner, close family & friends, immediate community connection.
Work, business, professional responsibilities and relationships.
Distant family & friends, distributed community and periphery professional connections.
Interfaces with the state through taxation, service provision and consumption, and the law. Corporate interfaces as a consumer within society.
Within all of the above, you are a watcher and you are being watched.
Then the LORD said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" He said, "I do not know; am I my brother's keeper?"
Genesis 4:9
Looking and seeing are not the same thing. Ask anyone who was surprised by their partner’s affair, their business partner’s shenanigans or their child’s risible behaviour. For whatever reason, we often fail to look for something and what we see is often far, far more subjective than we are conscious of. In this way, our ability to be effective watchers of or for anything is not to be assumed. Above all else, one must choose to watch, to look at, to look for. One must also know how to see.
Trouble is, none of us have been trained to be a watcher unless somehow, some way, we ended up in positions or circumstances that placed that overt burden on us. No one trains for parenthood and that is the biggest watcher role of all. Relatively few jobs or professions have serious human welfare, behavioural and legal oversight responsibilities that require specialist training and skills development. When we factor in our social, professional and legal boundaries as citizens and communities, the idea that we can somehow aspire to be high grade curtain twitchers who police each other is both impractical and largely undesirable given myriad societal and governance experiences throughout just the 20th century.
In the late nineties there was a kind of UK “watcher” of note whose work in hindsight helps to tell a tale of cultural shift.
Roger Cook, a New Zealand born investigative journalist, beavered away for 25 years exposing all manner of criminality, corruption, and scandal. Between 1987 and 1999 his show, The Cook Report, was a staple of British TV and won 11 national and international awards including a BAFTA. In 2000, the now defunct shitrag, News of the World, accused the programme of employing fakery. Cook won his libel case against the paper, which was forced to admit in open court that their allegations had been false. In only the second episode, aired in July 1987, Cook’s team exposed the problem of child pornography and all that it encapsulated. Over the course of just 26 minutes, Cook clearly illustrated the end-to-end nature of and international network involved in child pornography and the inherent abuse and worse that united abusers, distributers and consumers. He also highlighted, through first and second hand testimony, the escalatory pathways of the dark pathology. In the US he spoke to a public prosecutor and law enforcement about the problem from their perspective and highlighted a convicted distributor, “Black Cathy Wilson”, whose mail order network spanned the US, Australia and Europe, had 30,000 clients and filled a Los Angeles warehouse with material. Even in 1987 the USA was cited as being the biggest market. In true Roger Cook style, he took a beating when he confronted child porn merchants in Amsterdam during a sting. He also stung a British man who was a consumer and dealer by setting up a false trade then door stepping him. The man’s immediate response was remarkable. He denied wrongdoing, said he loved children, denied the material involved and depicted rape, claimed that “the girls were willing” but then apologised and burned some of his material in the presence of the camera.
Watching the programme today proves Cook and his team deserved every one of their accolades; they dealt seriously and sensitively with the darkest of matters, gave voice to victims in both first person and via its script, featured offenders at every stage - a convicted paedophile and producer of child pornography, distributers and consumers - as well as a counsellor and one of his paedophile clients, and an adult who had suffered and been victimised by childhood abuse. The programme adeptly presented a succinct and accurate overview of the problem and educated its audience about it without pulling punches or being exploitative.
Cook’s team were so far ahead of the curve that they embarrassed the British police twice in one interview and introduced the audience to the very beginning of the internet and how it was being used, back then, by paedophiles. During his interview of Sgt Iain Donaldson of Scotland Yard, Donaldson claimed that co-operative policing across the Atlantic was highest in child pornography because of how seriously it was viewed by authorities on both sides of the pond. Cook asked whether critical intelligence about paedophile activity sent to British police by the FBI had made it through to him. Donaldson admitted it had not, thereby contradicting his claim about co-operation. Donaldson also admitted to being behind the curve when it came to finding the paedophile computer bulletin board services for lack of “the right telephone number”; Cook’s team had found a number and offered it and the US intelligence to Donaldson. Think about what that meant back then. Even if Donaldson was speaking in good faith, critical US intel about UK paedophiles was being diverted and the UK police weren’t competent enough to do a run down of computer bulletin boards, even though getting the numbers could have been as simple as ringing up the FBI or any other police force and asking for their numbers.
Cook’s programme was TV of the highest order not just because of what it showed back then but also because 40 years later, it stands the test of time and remains deeply affecting. Everything in it remains relevant today. The modus operandi and pathology of those involved in the spectrum of offences is largely the same. The internet as it stands today is only an evolution of bulletin boards, magazines and postal communications. Even the scale of the problem as a ratio of known offenders to possible offenders is of similar order. Cook was highlighting back then, via first hand testimony, that for every known paedophile there were likely 1000 unknown others. That was thirty five years ago when people still had film cameras, VHS and Betamax VCRs and used the postal system.
Cook’s work is an important cultural reference point that actually betrays the hypocrisy of the national and international criminal justice system when it comes to child protection and everything that entails.
Make no mistake. The real situation is self evident. Ask yourself which crimes you think are worst: crimes against an adult or the equivalent crimes against a child? Why doesn’t society prioritise (in effort, expenditure, punishment and prevention) the eradication of crimes against the child?
Literally nothing exposed in Cook’s episode has changed and yet we are in a worse place when it comes to getting a handle on these matters than we were 40 years ago. The only question that must be asked but never is, is “Why?”
Roger Cook - a bloody legend of investigative journalism.
At the end of the series on Nov 11, 1997 an episode entitled “Flesh and Blood” was aired that covered forced prostitution and what would come to be referred to as human trafficking and modern slavery. It featured a British woman, Sarah Forsyth, who as a vulnerable teenager was lured, kidnapped and coerced into a life of forced and drugged prostitution in Amsterdam. Forsyth suffered the worst degradation, inhumanity and torture for years at the hands of her British captors and pimp, foreign criminals and the Dutch police. While forced to work in the windows of Amsterdam’s red light district, her hopes of being saved by the authorities were brutally decimated when a gang of police officers gang raped her in the booth. This ordeal is by no means the worst of what happened to her.
I never saw this episode but more than a decade ago I randomly read Forsyth’s book, Slave Girl, which is an incredibly harrowing, heart-breaking account of her ordeal. I consider it to be essential reading because of what it means for mankind.
The Cook Report’s work began and ended by revealing two views of the abyss within human nature.
If nothing else, Cook and his team had a prescient eye for issues that plague society.
In the time of the Cook Report, child pornography (and by implication, human trafficking) was still seen by mainstream society as net bad even though the British establishment through PIE, NCCL, MI5 & MI6, the police, the judiciary and parliament, was trying to make use of child porn and sexual abuse, and normalise it, as we demonstrated in Trafficking 01: A very British bunch of nonces.
Throughout the twentieth century, the BBC enabled and protected multiple paedophiles. The state and the BBC kept paedophiles they knew of secret while dominant public perception was that sexual abuse was wrong. At the same time, the state was actively involved in trying to change that perception by normalising and legalising child sexual abuse and even incest.
We are told that the BBC is now fully modernised. It cleaned up its act post Saville/Cyril Smith MP/Harris/Hall. It knows all sexual abuse is wrong, has procedures and practises in place and knows how to protect those to whom it has a duty of care.
“Lessons,” the state and its organs assured us, “have been learned.”
Well, at least the BBC can be considered a “safe haven” these days.
But exactly what lessons have been learned and by whom?
Fast forward twenty five years since the last Cook Report. The internet is now overloaded with all forms of freely accessible pornography including child pornography hosted directly on Twitter and Pornhub, both of whom profit from it and refuse to take it down.
Let’s state this clearly: now mainstream social media and the world’s most popular pornography website(s) all host, profit and help drive the generation of child pornography.
What’s actually been going on since Roger Cook door stepped a nonce and got punched in a Dutch nonce shop?
Culturally, sex abuse is considered wrong, more so now than in the past. There was and still is a perception that such wrongdoing can be and is found and punished, more so now than in the past.
There is a perception that sex abuse is punished more seriously now than in the past, but there are also clear perceptions that the volume of sex abuse is increasing globally. The perceptions around:
who commits abuse, how and why;
how abuse products are made available, where, by whom and to what ends;
are varied.
The provable reality throughout the twentieth century was that sexual abuse was not uncommon but hard to identify in many cases, hard to prosecute and fundamentally integrated into sociopolitical and financial circles that engulfed the state, its organs, media sphere and overlapping private interests.
The reality today is the same in many ways except that there is more sexual abuse and downstream consumption occurring, and it is more legitimised, tolerated, sought out (as a spectator activity) and integrated into the very fabric of the state and society.
That change in reality is profound because it means that there has been both cultural and perception shifts around sexual abuse from the twentieth to the twenty first century, but in the net opposite direction to what you are led to believe by the state, its organs and its stenographers.
In short, we say sexual abuse is more wrong than we used to, but now we tolerate more of it and it’s become even more of a spectator sport than it ever was.
Twitter was moderated by liars who promulgated child porn
Twitter hosts freely accessible, hardcore porn. It also hosts freely accessible child porn and does what has been previously considered illegal in acting as a gateway or portal to other child porn hosts.
This means that Twitter users drive demand for child porn on Twitter, as well as commit viewing and creation offences on or via it, as well as commit offences of inciting the trafficking of child porn via the use of the site as a portal (this offence was key to a major international police operation in the 1990s).
The latter two of the above stories occurred at Twitter while Yoel Roth and Vijaya Gadde oversaw the content and moderation of Twitter. Musk has only controlled the site for less than a year so Twitter’s legacy of child pornography lies at the feet of Roth, Gadde, Agrawal and Dorsey. Where it goes from here is Musk’s problem.
Put simply, Twitter has been proven to host child porn and has refused to remove it even when the victims repeatedly requested it be taken down:
Finally on Jan. 28, Twitter replied to Doe and said they wouldn’t be taking down the material, which had already racked up over 167,000 views and 2,223 retweets, the suit states.
“Thanks for reaching out. We’ve reviewed the content, and didn’t find a violation of our policies, so no action will be taken at this time,” the response reads, according to the lawsuit.
Twitter sought to defend itself against legal action in the above case by claiming that, while it had been slow to respond correctly, it was not liable because it was simply a platform and it was impossible to remove all content violations rapidly. This does not fully address the fact that Twitter specifically told the victim that it had expressly viewed the material flagged and decided it was not in violation of Twitter’s TOS i.e. a human had viewed child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and determined it to be OK. (There’s actually a subtle issue about continuance of crimes in just the moderation process, but that’s out of scope here.)
This all took place under the watchful gaze of Roth and Gadde, who both claimed that Twitter did not shadow ban users and was not a tool of the state. Both claims are categorical lies that they seem to have walked away from, despite making them at congressional hearings.
Before these hearings, Jack Dorsey faced Congress and denied Twitter shadow banned and censored users. During the hearing, journalist Laura Loomer interrupted the meeting and was removed. Roth was present at the hearing (00:56).
What the Twitter Files proved was that those “running” social media were knowing liars who operated the platforms to agendas that were at odds with TOS and their public claims. Despite employing a phenomenal number of employees who were only responsible for some form of content “moderation”, Twitter under Agrapal, Roth, Gadde and formerly Dorsey, did not stop child porn being hosted and shared and did not invest in technologies that could have radically automated the work of preventing upload of known CSAM and hunting for potential CSAM across the site. That Musk has sacked nearly 6000 direct employees and Twitter has neither collapsed nor radically degraded in nature (or been subject to massive increases in content flags) suggests that all those employees were largely redundant, which has been admitted at not just Twitter but across big tech. Twitter may now still host child porn (VST isn’t looking to determine the answer, for obvious reasons) but as yet, no one has flagged that it is or that it is increasing. Given Musk is now an enemy of some sectors of the state, one would expect the platform to be attacked on this basis by now or soon (VST prediction: X will be fitted up on child porn charges via upload attacks).
Yoel Roth’s own personal public output leaves a hell of a lot to be desired, on top of the lies he told about what he did at Twitter and what Twitter was.
Pornhub is Trafficking Hub and it’s allowed by the state
Pornhub has adapted the youtube and subscription model to porn and pays “content” creators 65-80% of their viewing revenue based on Rate per Mille of ~0.65c per thousand views, provided that the creator is in the video i.e. it is the epitome of the modern American econosociety: for someone to get paid by Pornhub, someone needs to get fucked. You have the choice of fucking yourself, letting someone else fuck you, you doing the fucking or any combination thereof.
Pornhub is the embodiment of the merger of individual sexual empowerment, freedom of expression and choice, so what’s not to like?
According to Pornhub Trust & Safety, “We remain steadfast in our commitment to eliminating illegal content, including non-consensual intimate material and child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Every online platform shares this responsibility, and it requires collective action, cooperation, and constant vigilance.”
Tempted? Then join its Modelhub and you can hope that you’ll stand out somehow and grab a workable slice of the 3 billion monthly views. Join ModelHub today!
Pornhub’s equitable business model is charting new highs. Look at what it achieved in the following cases.
Beginning at age 7 Jane was raped and trafficked. The first recording of her being raped was made in a garage in Maryland when she was 10 years old. The abuse was then monetized and distributed on P*rnhub to 130 million daily users. Jane sued P*rnhub in 2021. She is aware of at least seven assault videos of her that have been distributed & monetized on P*rnhub. The seven videos were uploaded multiple times. In some instances, Jane’s traffickers forced her to upload and reupload videos of herself as a form of punishment. She later did unsuccessful takedown demands. We now have evidence from CEO/owner emails, employee text messages and depositions uncovered in legal discovery and published September 1, that P*rnhub owners & executives hid all child abuse videos they knew about from authorities for over 13 years and did not report any of it. This policy prevented law enforcement from finding and rescuing countless child victims for over a decade. They had policies in place to easily allow the criminal content to be uploaded and monetized again and again. The CEO admits in emails that as a policy they didn’t verify the age or consent of any of the individuals in millions of homemade, user-generated videos they were profiting from. The CEO emails with his executives and VPs confirmed they only had one person reviewing flagged videos 5 days a week with a backlog of 706,000 flagged videos. The company policies as confirmed in emails by the CEO, would not put flagged videos in line for review unless they were flagged over 15 times. Jane could have flagged her child rape 15 times and it wouldn’t have been put in a review queue. In text messages employees say that management made it clear they “didn’t want the rules [against criminal content] to be enforced.” The CEO acknowledged that they were “obviously hiding” these policies from the credit card companies.
Compare what Pornhub and Twitter are now to what Roger Cook was showing us in 1987.
Cook showed us that every stage of the CSAM lifecycle was illegal, illicit and therefore took effort to become a participant in (victims excluded).
Today, that is not the case. The efforts to normalise CSA have increased in the West through the overlap with aspects of the gender identity and Trans Rights Activist movements, which are dressed up as extreme and ultra-minority takes on equal rights. It is within the artifice of (gender) identity politics that we find the Minor Attracted Person and far darker embodiments of adult behaviour disturbingly directed towards child sexualisation. That these political movements have blurred and even ignored or erased the line between totally dependent children and independent adults is deliberate at the high level and grossly ignorant at the most unwitting, useful idiot levels. Deliberate child sexualisation in Western society through state institutions - most notably public schools, libraries and healthcare - is an undeniable fact and a radical departure from any norms in the last 115 years.
Twitter and Pornhub show us that accessing CSAM and SAM is easier and more legitimate than it has ever been via mainstream, unrestricted, unpoliced (self or external) websites that are now woven into the fabric of modern digital society (whatever that actually is). Also, CSAM is now a mainstream profit centre that the state takes a direct cut of through taxes. Many years ago, the UK included the revenues of the illegal drugs trade and sex work in its GDP figures. This is anathema to the eradication of either drug or human trafficking and sexual abuse, and makes the state complicit in all of them.
In Platforms in the Information Society, VST showed the monthly traffic to the top 25 sites. It’s mind numbing. We pointed out that platform power has literally run away from us and dwarfs any pre-existing concept of monopoly power. The content of these platforms literally plugs right into human brains and central nervous systems in numerous and deliberate ways, yet there is practically zero effective management, control, regulation or accountability applied to them at a level of sophistication that is commensurate with their nature, power and workings.
The Simplified Informational Past Wind the clock back 30 years. Most of the information that was released through any of media space outlets, including the content of libraries, was subject to some form of commissioning and editorial process that added cost, effort and some form of “potential value add” to the creation and dissemination of that informati…
The UK National Crime Agency said that UK citizens needed to take on the police’s burden regarding watching each other to prevent sexual abuse crimes, yet none of us have been trained or equipped in how to do this. At the same time the state and its corporate partners have taken massive amounts of concerted actions to radically increase the prevalence of CSAM and therefore the odds of getting away with involvement with any stage of its lifecycle.
Even in Roger Cook’s day, the UK police were either behind the curve or bullshitting us and itself about where on the curve it was. CSAM and paedophilia was the same in Cook’s day as it is now, in terms of modus operandi and the inter- and intrapersonal mechanics. The only real difference today is prevalence and means of access to material, if not victims and the activities themselves.
If we were to draw a parallel between CSAM in society and a junkie, we could consider the junkie of 1987 to have snorted speed when attending weekend illicit raves that were hard to get to without a lot of effort, but where the risks of being caught and prosecuted once there were really rather low. Nowadays, the junkie’s habit has progressed; his addiction to meth drives daily dependence and he’s able to openly buy it from a pharmacy, contribute to the taxed economy in the process and have equal or lower chances of being prosecuted than in 1987. If anyone pointed out the junkie and his activities to the police, they would still be obligated to act but it’s increasingly up to citizens to find and report the junkies, of whom there’s now huge amounts. The junkie’s activities have been almost decriminalised in practise but not on paper.
Society is being fed many lines of bullshit about the reality of sexual abuse in our societies by the fascist state and we as “watchers”, it would appear, can’t see the wood from the trees.
This is how it is meant to be. This is the cultural and perception shift that those who enable it truly intend. One should ask why and where it will lead us if this state of affairs is allowed to persist.
This is truly great post, thank you.