These news sites are almost like how signature campaigns back in the days were allowing people to shit post in order to get paid. The more articles these site release, the more income they get.
In times where there isn't anything new or exciting, they'll have to be creative in order to still release content, and rehashing old articles is something they revert to quite often, especially in the last 12 or so months.
That's sort of the problem with almost the entire content industry now, not just with crypto. Journalists are a dying breed. You've just got writers now monetising content. Clickbait works because... clickbait works. Now that I'm thinking back, the familiar themes surrounding Bitcoin have all been headlined before, and will all be headlined again.
I believe this is a legitimate concern. Not just for child porn people. It's for anything.
Suddenly you have a tool anyone can use to upload any kind of sensitive material that no court in the whole world can take down.
You can't censor this either because that would be against bitcoin's decentralization policy. You can't have some kidn of central police that checks files uploaded to the blockchain.
So let's say some dude wants to have revenge on his ex, he can just upload nudes of her onto the bitcoin blockchain, and suddenly no one can take it down.
I think we should just hard fork or soft fork to disallow any kind of extraneous data on the blockchain, it should just be transactions.
Have you not heard of the internet? People could do all that long before Bitcoin's blockchain came online. I guarantee you people are not using the blockchain for the purpose of porn, when there's a much better medium to that sort of thing.
Whether or not they decide to enforce it is another question but the analogies posted in this thread are faulty because none of those comparisons involve immutable media like the blockchain is.
To answer your original question I do believe it is a true cause for concern and if some particular SJW group decides to target bitcoin they have a very valid reason right there. It also doesn't help btc's reputation any considering the fact that it's been associated with the scum of the earth from the very beginning.
Fair enough, but I think you underestimate anyone's ability to remove anything from the internet... which actually started out with the same open access and censorship free ideals of Bitcoin. Any tool can be misused and abused. That does not make its foundational aspect flawed. It just defines humans.
BTC's reputation? I think censoring data on Bitcoin would do far more tremendous and irreparable harm to its reputation.
Throw back to 1980s and 1990s. The media were heavily critical on the internet, and it started out with the same evil reputations. It was a hangout for porn lovers, pervs, hackers, extortionists. Ring familiar bells? That is a cause for concern, but there is all the exact same thing in a public library. There's child porn on the Internet. My browser probably stores cookies from porn websites and terrorist links that I get from trawling www. I could go on.