• mindbleach
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    1 year ago

    At what point does a drawing become illegal?

    Serious question, no easy answer. Identical to any debate about free speech. And it’s fine to approach a fuzzy boundary while still saying, ‘okay, this is definitely on the wrong side of it.’

    But you need to examine what your opinion is, and why, because both will be tested in the near future. The why matters most of all. If you’re cool with the state censoring some visual concepts simply because they’re too gross for you personally, alright sure, but good luck arguing against blasphemy laws. If your expectations hinge on eventual harm to actual children, that is a falsifiable hypothesis, and you need to care about some deeply unnerving research to not just be making things up.

    Even if you’re completely satisfied with your motivations - does My Little Pony count? Do Pokemon? I assure you, these are abundantly real images that people have to make decisions about, for their image-hosting websites. If your concern is for police investigations into dead ends, presumably they’ll notice when the children depicted are not human.

    If the central issue is what’s in the audience’s mind, does text count? Fanfiction or Romeo & Juliet, take your pick; this is a serious question with no easy answer. At what point does fiction become illegal? Does being satire shield it, like Nabokov? When is the idea too extreme to express?

    Consequences from drawing the line are a whole other issue. This is the topic authoritarians use to justify spying on everyone all the time. This is why three-letter agencies get to scan every file on your iPhone. This is the leading excuse to ban cryptography. That’s an alarmingly easy sell when we’re talking about actual children… but here, we aren’t. And yet the way people describe it sounds identical. Do you want Rule 34 sites treated the same as underground child-pornography rings, because someone uploaded a clip of The Simpsons Movie? Presumably that’s on the okay side, for most people. But it’s deeply important that you ask yourself why.