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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.
I saw the drama unfold when I was browsing All. My 2 cents:
In terms of the content in question, the lemmynsfw admin was right. I believe the community they were talking about was c/adorableporn, which AFAIK is just naked women acting cute, not acting or implying they are underage. The blahaj admin seemed to have misunderstood the premise of the community.
On the other hand, the lemmynsfw admin didn’t really explain it properly and some of the words they used didn’t exactly help their justification. At one point the admin said they do not discriminate against a poster’s gender, looks, age, etc. and used words akin to saying they do not discriminate against people who are “too young”. Obviously that didn’t come across well in the conversation with the blahaj admin. The community’s rules also had some questionable wording (“child-like” is the term I believe they used), which the mods changed when it was pointed out. So all these things didn’t really help their defense.
At the end of the day, it’s the blahaj admin’s lemmy instance, so they can do whatever they want and defederate if they wish. It’s up to the users on the instance to decide if it was justifiable and if they are ok with losing access to the entire lemmynsfw instance because of a misunderstanding.
EDIT for transparency purposes: As someone mentioned in the replies, I missed the word “adult” in recalling the statement that mentioned “too young”, so the admin did word it correctly. I stand corrected.
This is a misrepresentation of what was said. Was that intentional? It sounds like you are trying to inject your own opinion into what you are presenting as factual and unbiased.
The actual quote I think you are referring to is:
I’ve highlighted some key words I think you missed.
I was typing from memory. Now that you pasted the actual quote, I realize the word “adult” was there; so not intentional and I stand corrected. In any case, my point still stands that I think the conversation between the admins could’ve gone better. Maybe the lemmynsfw admin could’ve explained it another way; on the other hand, the blahaj admin seemed to just be looking for a reason to finally defederate and seemed like they already decided before the conversation even started.
You should edit your comment to remove the mischaracterization. The nsfw mod was WAY more clear than what you say.
I did. I added a note but didn’t want to edit what I originally said so readers have context on what I quoted wrong.
Ah, sorry about that. And thank you! I refreshed the comments before asking you to do that. I’m not sure if I missed your edit or it hadn’t shown up for me yet.
Thanks for clarifying your earlier comment.
Hard to know the true motives of the blahaj admin - could be they felt this was the only way to protect their community from a perceived evil, could be they were just offended that the LemmyNSFW admin had the audacity to stand their ground on principle, could be they personally objected to nsfw content and this was as plausible a reason as any to act on the desire to defederate. I see they are still federated with a few other much smaller porn/nsfw instances.
Someone else here mentioned that being an LGBTQ+ instance and allowing association with porn occasionally described as “childlike” isn’t something Blahaj can afford in this political climate.
They’re already being called child groomers. You don’t want something that can be twisted into ammunition by bad actors.
Since I don’t associate LGBTQ+ with child-grooming, that notion never occurred to me. But now that you mention it, and knowing the current sad state of the current political climate, that point sounds entirely plausible. Thank you for pointing that out.
As to point 2, I think as with the botched announcement about loli/etc on lemmynsfw one of the admins isn’t completely fluent in English
To be fair, I made that same mistake when I read the wording and saw “too… young,” I did a double-take and was like, waitaminute, what are we saying here, before I realized they were referring to adults looking too young. I get they’re trying to be inclusive, it just looks odd out of context.
I was told the community is actually fauxbait. But the same applies, no one in there is even remotely underage
Depending on the country, depictions of fauxbait can either be ay okay or borderline illegal. In places like Australia and Ireland, they have laws that are aimed at hentai, but because of the way they are worded, could also include fauxbait as well.
Personally, I don’t even want to toe that line.
Agreed. Legal or not, I wouldn’t even want to encourage that kind of sexualization.
It was primarily over fictional drawn content I believe. With characters where it is not clear to determine the characters age one way or another, which would’ve made moderation difficult. Other users then took this as “they’re allowing for child pornography!” and faked a bunch of outrage over it - successfully it seems.