Is Reddit a magnet for pedophiles?

So the question I have it this: Does Reddit have some sort of powerful magnetic attraction to the pedophiles and pedophile defenders of the world, or is pedophilia and/or pedophile defense simply endemic amongst the young male tech geek demographic that’s so heavily overrepresented on Reddit?

This is a question that naturally sprung to my mind after reading a couple of recent posts in ShitRedditSays, documenting Reddit’s strange sympathy with the child porn enthusiasts of the world. A woman stands up on Reddit and declares herself a feminist? She’s a “bad person,” a “female supremacist,” an “utter piece of shit.”  A man is jailed for possession of child porn? He’s being unjustly persecuted for a “victimless crime.”

Fxexular on ShitRedditSays has assembled a roundup of some the most disturbing comments in a thread devoted to the aforementioned man jailed for possession of CP. Amongst his finds:

Heavily upvoted comments comparing viewing of child porn to smoking weed and playing Grand Theft Auto.

A comment with 15 upvotes suggesting that the perp should only get “a stiff fine and a few weeks of community service … for a crime the judge himself probably committed half a dozen times on any given weekend.”

A comment with nearly two dozen upvotes lamenting that the child porn possessor is going to have his “life ruined over socially non-normative pictures. … this is a predictable outcome of a corrupt government which is obsessed with its own power.”

But these are just the tip of the pedo-defense iceberg. Take a look at the thread itself, where you will also find heavily upvoted comments from Redditors comparing the “persecution” of pedophiles to past persecution of gays and witches; an unintentionally ironic comment lamenting the cruel treatment of a perp who is “only 26” years old; and a comment making perhaps the strangest argument I think I may have ever seen anywhere about anything:

My core problem here, as a computer scientist, is that any photo he had is really a bunch of zeros and ones… which for anyone who is at all familiar with binary, is a number. Basically, by outlawing the storage of some form of data, we have said that it is illegal be in possession of certain numbers. Yes, these might be huge numbers that you don’t encounter in your daily life, but they are still simply numbers.

In a different thread on the same case, another Redditor gets 75 upvotes for comparing child-porn-possessing pedophiles with African-Americans in the era of the Civil Rights movement. Here’s the comment itself; here’s the ShitRedditSays thread discussing it. And here, for good measure, is the same commenter offering a Redditor who’s confessed to molesting his sister advice on how best to avoid prosecution.

Meanwhile, in an unrelated thread in Reddit’s Videos subreddit, pedophile (sorry, ephebophile) Redditors mount an all-out attack on a girl who had the temerity to complain about skeevy Redditors masturbating to pictures of herself she put in a private album on the internet when she was 14.

In ShitRedditSays, jamie11 collects together some of the creepiest comments, including these:

“Fuck yea she is developed AND judging by her smug smile, she is loving every second of this. Sure she says “OMG, so creepy herp derp” but in reality it is kind of a big EGO boost. EDIT: in b4 misogyny accusations!” [+7]

“She is an attention whore. She is really dumb. She will probably ultimately profit from this in the model/porn/coors girl industry.”[+10]

“Shes much hotter when shes quiet.” [+32]

The numbers in brackets indicate the numbers of upvotes.

Again, tip of the iceberg.

EDITED TO ADD: I hadn’t noticed before, but r/mensrights has  its own discussion of the child porn case. It’s pretty much what you’d expect: Possessing child porn is just a “thought crime” that doesn’t hurt anyone.

The creepiest fellow of the lot is probably logrusmage, who offers this defense of the child porn possessors of the world:

consider that a majority of “kiddy porn” are pictures of sexually mature females taken by said females for boyfriends that got leaked on the internet or via text, where the female happens to be under the age of consent.

When someone points out that, um, the fact that these pictures are “leaked” means that the subjects of said pictures didn’t consent to them being put online (and, also, they are below the age of consent), logrusmage offers this rebuttal:

Consent is not needed for something that does not directly effect someone. Like looking at them. … Looking at a picture of someone does not require their consent.

Presumably he’d be fine if someone secretly filmed him picking his nose while taking a crap and put it up on r/creepydudespickingnosesonthecrapper.