Announcing the probe under the Digital Services Act on Tuesday, the European Commission said it would also look at the 'lack of transparency' of Shein's recommender systems.

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The EU on Tuesday, February 17, opened an investigation into the online retail giant Shein over the sale of childlike sex dolls and what it called the platform’s “addictive design.” Shein came under greater scrutiny in November after French authorities condemned the giant for featuring sex dolls resembling children.

The probe is the European Commission’s first into Shein under the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s mammoth law that aims to counter the spread of illegal content and goods online. The European Commission said it was investigating the sale of illegal products “including child sexual abuse material” and would look at the “lack of transparency” of Shein’s recommender systems.

Shein, founded in China in 2012 but now based in Singapore, said it would continue to cooperate with the commission. “We share the commission’s objective of ensuring a safe and trusted online environment and will continue to engage constructively on this procedure,” Shein said in a statement. Following the uproar in France, Shein said it immediately removed the products and banned sex dolls from its site globally, regardless of appearance.

  • Rioting Pacifist@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    4 hours ago

    the only thing seperating people from being pedophiles is wealth and power

    I think it’s a mistake to consider Epstein Island pedophilia the norm, the people with that level of power were sickos to begin with (see also the UK), Clinton, Trump, Musk, Gates, Bin Laden were all doing fucked up stuff long before they became palls with Epstein. If you’re willing to cause the deaths of 10s of thousands of people, it’s not suprising you don’t treat kids like humans, you don’t treat anyone like humans!

    I think overall it’s one of the many places where our de-facto carceral only approach fails hard.

    Like most rapes, pedophilia is largely between people that know eachother. Much like rape the per-existing relationship means that:

    • Victims are less likely to report attacks if they think it will get the person they know in trouble
    • Victims are even less likely to consider an attack rape if they aren’t willing to publicly talk about it
    • The focus the media/common conversation puts on a few horror stories leads to worse policies and more victims

    But also once the rape is done the harm has been caused, so we really need to work out how to prevent the rapes not just catch pedos.

    Focusing our policies on harm reduction, safe consumption & treatment of the underlying physiological issues is a much harder conversation to have, but ultimately will help protect kids far more than knee-jerk policies based on disgust of pedophiles, who I assume mostly never actually cause harm to kids themselves.

    In the age of AI porn, where no kid has to be harmed to make it, but also it can physiologically fuck up the consumer through unrealistic depictions, we should be exploring new approaches, as the old approach (finding CSAM distributors, and tracking down who accessed the images), isn’t really going to work anyway (and really never did, given that for decades powerful people kept dossiers of blackmail material on other powerful people rather than exposing them, Epstein is just the latest in a long trend).

    I think these sex dolls are another example of that, I don’t really know if they make owners more or less likely to offend, but I do suspect this policy is more based on China Ban + Pedophiles Evil, than actually reducing harm to children.