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pokemon do not look like children.
2 years ago
FA's whole argument of "protecting children" falls apart when they say they'll ban pokemon and other feral body type creatures.
what children are being protected? What real life human children are being protected?
how do fictional creatures that look like dogs, cats, or even geometric shapes have anything to do with child porn?
what children are being protected? What real life human children are being protected?
how do fictional creatures that look like dogs, cats, or even geometric shapes have anything to do with child porn?
Breeding kennels regularly engage in line-breeding, mating the offspring to the parent, and they do so as soon as the offspring can be mated. "Pure-bred" pets/animals are literally called that due to massive amounts of incest.
In human terms those animals would be majorly underage and massively inbred, as age of consent and the age someone can be sexually active are not the same.
People looking at this website won't care about the fine details of a art piece (as to them, it's just another version of the "1,000 year old loli" argument), if it looks underage to them they will treat it as such. People are not interested in finding out what was intended, only that if they don't like it, they want it gone.
Throw in a unhealthy dose of terrible sex education and politics, and we have this current situation.
Bear in mind the average FA user doesn't have to deal directly with politics or funding, both of which would be serious problems if some politician decides that FA is housing underage porn of some kind and wants to chop its head off for publicity points.
For fuck’s sake! Learn to read!
Somebody wanted to go on a banning spree, and "protecting children" was their excuse. But most of the artists s/he/they wanted to ban got wind of it and deleted their "offending" material first.
So whoever that was encouraged the team to expand the policy to include even more material.
But they overreached and pissed off everyone, so now they're doing damage control.
Outrage is a potent drug, everybody wants to feel like they're making a difference, lots of people these days are junkies scrambling for their next hit, and the internet can be used as the greatest outrage machine in history. It gives them a sense of purpose in their lives, it makes them feel like they're doing a good deed, and most importantly: it makes them feel like they're better than other people. As long as they stay hooked up to the machine, they will never be satisfied. They will always find something new to be angry about, because they do not want to give up that cocktail of validation, vindication, and righteous fury. They have to find new people to label degenerates or else the high will peter out, leaving them empty and aimless and having to confront the fact that they're powerless nobodies tearing down other powerless nobodies in this crab bucket of a civilization, not heroes storming the beaches of Epstein Island like they imagine themselves to be.
Ask for any sort of evidence that drawing a shortstack eevee thicc as a bowl of oatmeal has been used to harm a child, and they can provide none. Next will be quadrupeds because they'll claim it "promotes animal abuse," and before you know it they'll come after bondage because they'll claim it "promotes rape" like it's the 70s and 80s all over again. They won't have evidence for those claims either, because they aren't interested in evidence, they aren't interested in devising the best solutions to these very real problems, they just want to feel like they're doing something, the realities of the situation or the consequences of their crusades be damned. They are satisfying an emotional craving first, trying to make the world a better place second - and it is a distant, distant second, even though they don't realize it. That's the nature of the outrage machine, that's what it does: cloud your judgement and deaden your introspection until your psyche is all hair triggers and jagged edges, making you think you're doing the right thing even as you're picking fights, even as you're harassing strangers, even as you're spending hours screaming ineffectually into the goddamn void when you could be doing things you love with the people you love.
I should know. I used to be like that. I see others celebrating this decision, and it's like I'm talking to my younger self. It took me a long, long time to realize that I was dragging myself and everyone unfortunate enough to be around me down into a never-ending spiral of hateful misery. We can only hope they understand the same thing someday, but that day won't be any time soon. Buckle up.
I'm SO tempted to draw this.
D cup = woman, and nothing less will do
It's certainly not a legal issue or a legitimate political issue, at least under US (or California) law ... assuming FA's servers are in CA, since fictional depictions (drawn or rendered art or written text) of underaged characters involved in erotic or sexual acts isn't illegal or restricted in any way. Canada and parts of Europe have some restrictions on this, but the US doesn't. (meanwhile the age of consent is significantly lower in most of Europe)
So unless FA's trying to target the lowest common denominator internationally, there's not really a legal issue. (as far as I know, there's no reason to cater to laws outside the US in this regard either)
And given how pretty much anything is offensive to some people, that shouldn't ever be a reason to restrict or remove it. Hell, even if you limited things to what would offend a large portion of the population, that'd end up removing the vast majority of content on FA outright anyway for one reason or another.
I highly doubt it has anything to do with FA's owners, operators, or staff taking the moral high ground, so that only leaves the money side of things, implying this issue is relevant to their bottom line. I doubt the advertisers they use or other site sponsors of funding would be the cause for this either, though, so maybe it's a banking issue, or a pre-emptive reaction to a number of financial institutions going crazy over the perceived "child porn" issue, but there should be alternate, competitive options to divert to out there if that became an issue. I also doubt it has anything to do with cloudflare hosting the site.
There's the similar problem of some sites, utilities, or financial institutions refusing to allow anything sexual, erotic, or pornographic in general, and I don't mean the likes of paypal that have been that way for many years, but new ones that seem to primarily be doing it over fears of "child porn" and more specifically: the fact that any individual can interpret anything as child porn and make a stink about it regardless of intent or context. OTOH, even if you ban adult content, then you get into the issue of what constitutes adult content as there's tons of objectively non-explicitly sexual things that can be interpreted as sexual, especially in a fetish context ... and anything can be a fetish, so trying to bother with anything like this is just stupid and a waste of time.
Legally speaking, they should just stick to the letter of the law and nothing else, at least beyond the original intent and TOS of the platform in general (or any platform) rather than retconning things and forcing content to be removed after the fact.
From a community standpoint, the only issue should be requiring proper tags/warnings so people who don't want to see that stuff gets it filtered out. (and of course harrassment or threats, but that would normally not be within the content posted and instead be in comments, PMs, etc ... but obviously content explicitly targeting other members would constitute such as well, plus certain types of threats would be outright illegal under US law anyway and would be covered by that) TBH, flagging peoples work because "you don't like it" should be considered harassment ... flagging things for needing tags or mature/adult listing change is one thing, but just bitching about it being offensive because you don't like it personally is just stupid.
But then, realistically, any content that isn't harming anyone should be allowed in general ... and if the only "harm" is offense taken by someone seeing something they didn't want to see shouldn't be counted as harm anyway, unless you've gone and deliberately mis-tagged or click-baited people into seeing things they don't want and aren't expecting, then there's nothing wrong with it. That's what filters are for.
Granted, I've never bothered with filters as I don't mind seeing things I don't care for, I just skip past it, though even then there's the odd case where something intriguing or thought provoking enough to actually pay some attention, but I don't tend to take offense to such things. Overly politcal and/or religious themed things can be annoying, but even that depends on the tone, serious, satirical, a mix of both ... though even serious stuff is fine, it's really just content specifically aimed at shutting down conversation that tends to actually offend me, though political messages taking a stance I know (or at least have a very good idea) as being factually wrong (not morally, just technically and factually incorrect and/or based on misinformation) also tend to offend me, but then I've never called for such stuff to be taken down. At worst I've been tempted into giving my own thoughts on the matter in a comment, but that's it. (even more personally annoying would be political statements taking a stance or "side" I generally agree with, but managing to mix a ton of misinformation in with it as well, which just triggers me to play devil's advocate)
I know people sensitive about certain things that have their "day ruined" (or some equivalent) by stumbling on something they find offensive, but honestly, the only things that come close to upsetting me that much would be actual deaths of users IRL or accounts being deleted or nuked for one reason or another. (individual submissions or groups of submissions being deleted are up there, too though) I've gotten desensitized and jaded after years of experiencing that stuff, but honestly it's made me more bitter and neurotic over it than anything. The internet in general started being less fun when the trend became more common too. (people being censored, accounts being banned or removed for random/no reason, or people having drama attacks and deciding to delete their accounts themselves)
I know the early days of the internet ... or well, say early 2000s internet had entire forums and sites that eventually disappeared and didn't get archived, and a few of those cases were even personal drama driven, others not, and then you had the early days of youtube where TONS of stuff got content flagged and/or coopyright claimed ... but it seemed like stuff had generally gotten really good by the early 2010s ... then youtube started getting shitty again after 2016, then that Tublr Verison mess happened, and then covid happened and people got even stupider and crazier (in part) by having too much time on their hands and too easy access to social media, sometimes stuck in echo chambers, sometimes not, sometimes just mass peer pressure, sometimes pressure from within smaller groups, either way it's stupid.
And yeah, there are alternatives and competitors to FA still that are less restrictive, but for all its faults, FA's interface and front-end work a lot better than most of those (bloat/desktop performance, bandwidth use, stability, UI function, etc ... it just works well enough and hasn't gone full web 2.0) Plus some sites tend to host tons of viruses on top of being script-heavy. (DA used to have that problem, not sure if it still does since that was back when I ran windows)
Even if it's not an issue over FA being the most trafficked or the UI functionality, there's the file size and type limitations that are worse on some sites and then some really popular sites that are just fundamentally awful for using as art or story galleries (like Twitter ... hell, Tumblr wasn't even that good at it, but at least it was better than Twitter, especially with the archive view and page-by-page nagivation options).
Is it too much to ask for a website to have simple, limited, and few rules and content standards, and basic themes that a site just sticks to and doesn't fuck with so long as there's no genuine legal issue. That and actually make positive changes or get rid of rules that didn't make sense or were just kind of dumb. (like ... didn't FA have a "minimum furry content" requirement years ago for good reason, but dropped it?)
Well that, and don't censor people or delete shit unless it's A. actually illegal, or B. fundamentally against a site's core policies and themes that are clearly written in the TOS and have been from day 1 ... or at least since the site got popular enough to be notable (and work through early teething issues).
And given how most forms of harassment can lead to legal issues if things get extreme enough, having guidelines and rules on that in general is both common sense for legal concerns and for having any sort of functional community. (granted, you end up eventually getting into the nitty gritty of jokes, parody, satire vs credible threats or verbal/other forms of assault, or doxxing, or other forms of personal attack ... and I don't mean some form of criticism or expression of just not liking some content, but more like actual attacks on a creator/user or going out and trying to assassinate them via social media campaign: that's all harrassment and much of it is outright illegal in the US ... then again many cases of "cancelling" people would overlap with exactly that, and potentially be outright illegal under US or some state laws, too)