Some time ago, a friend confessed to me she'd had a period of her life where she'd been addicted to cub porn (furry lolicon and shotacon). She'd had these "fits" where she'd had unwanted sexual cub thoughts, looked up and masturbated to cub drawings compulsively, and then get repulsed at what she was doing and stopped; she'd try to resist the compulsion, and never made any content of her own or shared any content around. Outside those fits, she said she hadn't had any sexual interest in children and would've rather died than had sexual contact with one; she said she had other sexual interests that she was actually enjoying engaging with, and that she was disgusted with this uncontrollable mental problem. She said that last year, she finally overcame her shame and self-hatred and went to counseling; thanks to being able to unload her mental issues on a professional, the compulsion's hold began to fade on her. She said she's been free and healthy for a while, doing what makes her happy without the baggage of her old compulsive behaviour. I trust her; she'd confessed something so sick and shameful to me, so why would she lie now? As she confessed, my friend said she felt a sense that even though her counselor had reassured her she hadn't harmed anyone and deserved to be gentle with herself, she still felt some lingering sense that she'd harmed children. This was because, in her words, she'd added to the viewcounts of loli/shota artwork and possibly motivated the creation of more of that kind of content, and that content could then have gone on to either - be used to groom minors or - normalize and encourage the attitude that minors can consent to sex and therefore enable and encourage child sexual abuse. She said she'd tried to convince loli/shota artists not to make that content anymore and loli/shota host sites not to host that content anymore: when that didn't work, she'd done something I think she called "countersignalling": favouriting the non-loli/shota content of loli/shota makers and followed their pages to create the impression of there being more demand for their non-loli/shota content. She said she'd missed doing so on one site where she'd compulsively looked at loli/shota, but that she'd looked at much more non-loli/shota there than loli/shota and spread the viewcounts around that way. This all seemed trivial to me at the time; after all, she'd just looked at pictures, that was it. However, she was taking it seriously, so I tried to console her by saying that it was fine, that she'd harmed no one. I told her that all she'd done was look at this content and anonymously add a single view to the viewcounts of these works, and people using it for grooming or getting the wrong impression about child/adult relationships from it was out of her control, and so it wasn't her moral responsibility. She seemed really attached to her "reverse signalling", so I told her that it was enough to counteract the signal she'd sent by adding to loli/shota viewcounts. However, I've also been seeing people say that that's not the case, and that people like her have harmed children by consuming this content by motivating the creation of content that can have the harmful effects of grooming and normalization, and I can't seem to be able to dismiss them out of hand, either. I don't want to think of my friend as someone who's contributed to child sexual harm, but I don't know if that's just because she's my friend, who's been with me for longer than I can remember. I just don't know what to think.