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That's nuance that I hadn't considered and I appreciate you pointing it out. I'm not on any of these sharing platforms so I have no idea what they're like and that made it easy to overlook this detail which is probably pretty relevant.

They're also trying to claim screen shots are a major security issue, even though everyone knows they can just do that and the real benefit of deleted messages is that no corpo, cop, or cracker can snoop on them later.

They are completely incompetent and tech illiterate, is what I'm saying

How the fuck do you get even more explicit than that

I mean, that part isn't really at issue here. It's fundamentally the same technique that's been used since the 90's, famously on To Catch a Predator. Seemingly, the "entrapment" angle has been settled.

That's not what this article is about though.

They're not saying "this user looked at our image so they're a pedo and must go to jail".

They're saying snapchat is full of pedos, and using the proliferation of this account as evidence supporting that claim.

IANAL, but my understanding is entrapment is when they convince you to do something you might not otherwise have done. So if the cops create an account of a minor and message an adult asking if they want to fuck, and the answer is like "uh no, absolutely not," and then the cops follow up by repeatedly sexting, and the adult blocks their account, but the cops relentlessly keep sexting from burner accounts, and plant people in the adult's work and social environments who keep talking about how normal it is to fuck minors who sext you out of the blue, and then the adult is finally like "oh whatever, fine" - that's entrapment.

Now, most people still are literally never going to take the minor up on the offer, no matter how relentless they are or how normalized it is in their environment. That's true about most crimes. The question is how many people wouldn't have committed that crime unless this very specific police-created situation came up, and that difference is what falls into entrapment.

I'd argue this isn't even close to entrapment, because all they did was set up an account much like all the others that exist, and waited for others to find them. It's no different from leaving a bike unlocked, then catching somebody who steals it. There are unlocked bikes everywhere, and people don't suddenly decide to steal the only bike of their life because they happened to find that unlocked bike.

Of course, they could also be spending this time and money getting to the root of societal issues and fixing the core problems instead of catching a small percentage of active pedophiles and letting the rest of them continue to cause irreparable harm.

If we're talking about it from a harm reduction or public health view point then it is the circulation of the content, not the personal generation that poses the greatest risk. Once the material gets circulated, it becomes harder to know it's origins and it might look like someone IRL and expose them to risks.

The article didn't say the cops generated AI CSAM. It said they created a profile pic, which was shown in the article.

Federal law is creating fictional CSAM at home without transmitting it is legal.

The few AI arrests I've seen they transmitted them.