One of the admins at lemmy.blahaj.zone asked us to purge a community and all of its users because they thought it was full of child sexual abuse material, aka CSAM, fka kiddy porn. We assured them that we had checked this comm thoroughly and we were satisfied that all of the models on it were of age.
The admin then demanded we purge the comm because they mistook it for CSAM, and claimed that the entire point of the community was to make people think it was CSAM. We vehemently disagreed that that was in fact the point of the community, but they decided to defederate from us anyway. That is of course their choice, but we will not purge our communities or users because someone else makes a mistake of fact, and then lays the responsibility for their mistake at our feet.
If someone made a community intended to fool people into thinking it was kiddy porn, that would be a real problem. If someone of age goes online and pretends – not roleplays, but pretends with intent to deceive – to be a child and makes porn, that is a real problem. Nobody here is doing that.
One of the reasons we run our instance the way that we do is that we want it to be inclusive. We don’t body shame, and we believe that all adults have a right to sexual expression. That means no adult on our instance is too thin, fat, bald, masculine, old, young, cis, gay, etc., to be sexy, and that includes adults that look younger than some people think they should. Everyone has a right to lust and to be lusted after. There’s no way to draw a line that says “you can’t like adult people that look like X” without crossing a line that we will not cross.
EDIT: OK, closing this post to new comments. Everything that needs saying has been said. Link to my convo with the blahaj admin here.
So much drama about something so silly. If their concerns were valid about the subject models being under age, or trying to appear under age, then that’s one thing, but this is starting it boil down to a difference of opinion on what looks like CSAM…
They say yes, you say no, it’s a whole thing of everyone having an opinion.
That’s fine. Can’t control what others decide to do with their servers. They’re free to defed if they feel that’s the only way to handle it.
IMO, it sucks to see this splintering of the federation over something like this, but it is what it is.
Yeah, like I’m 20 but based on my face some people think I’m 16, and other people don’t. Does that magically make my partner a pedo?
It can make pedos attracted to you even though they know you are 20. How. to react to that is of course up to you. But it is something to be aware of.
Apparently, according to some, yes.
It’s dumb. But, they have an opinion, so…
💀 honestly, it feels like sometimes they are so strict on it because they want to prove they aren’t
Honestly, while there was a lot of progress on calling out abuse and exploitation, everything around teenagers has gotten so charged that not vocally decrying anything that is even in the neighborhood is enough to get piled on. Pornhub now pretends the teen category doesn’t exist in their research analytics, most search engines block porn searches for teen, even though it’s always referred to legal 18/19 year olds (or late twenties depending on how petite they are).
Like, I don’t miss “creepy uncles” being a thing that everyone brushed off, but this hair trigger response is way too much.
I believe their argument is that the community is a gathering place for stuff that looks like CSAM as opposed to any of the content looking like CSAM or not. I’m not agreeing or disagreeing, but it’s important to represent people’s arguments correctly.
I appreciate this; I don’t disagree with you.
Some would counter with “if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck”; which is a reasonable argument in and of itself. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to suspect that if things are being said that is CSAM affirmative, then it’s possible or even likely, that the individuals in question are probably participating in the viewing, distribution, or even production, of such material.
One of the good things about the internet is that it becomes harder to have a group or community so isolated that it’s not able to be inspected at a moments notice by anyone with an internet connection; Especially if the content is of a questionable or illegal nature, and the perpetrators of that content’s production and distribution are not very intelligent (and bluntly, most don’t seem to be). It becomes harder to “hide in plain sight” as it used to be, especially when trying to further your questionable or illegal goals. At some point those individuals need to poke their head into the public spaces to try to recruit more people who are sympathetic to their goals, and by doing so, they can readily be found, investigated and hopefully charged and imprisoned for their activities.
If there is any CSAM on any lemmy instance, or people perpetrating CSAM via lemmy, I hope the individuals who are engaged in any related activity are caught, charged and imprisoned for their actions.