This keeps coming up. We’ve discussed this issue at great length, both internally within the moderation team, and publicly in a variety of topics.
There are basically four areas of discussion here, and I’ll address them one by one.
The Loli Tag
This one has been largely settled - we require, as part of the site rules, for loli/shota content to be tagged as such, so that users who don’t want to see it can disable it. That doesn’t seem good enough for some users, so let’s consider the three ‘main’ areas of discussion:
1. Should EroScripts Ban Regionally Illegal Content
Different governments have different requirements of their citizens, and it’s those citizens’ responsibility to browse the web in accordance with the laws that bind them. Simple as that.
In the case of SadPanda, that was a situation where loli/shota content was made illegal by a change in the law of the country where the site’s content was hosted (The Netherlands). If the US made a similar law, then we would take down all loli/shota content on the site to comply (or have to move hosting to another country that allowed such content, I suppose).
In terms of risk to individual users, show me a single case worldwide of someone being charged with possession of child pornography simply from browsing the web and not actually consuming/downloading that content before you start being actually concerned. It’s not a thing, I’ve looked.
Many people are less concerned with legality than they are with the harmful nature of lolicon content, so:
2. Is Lolicon harmful?
Frankly, this is above my paygrade. Unless any of you are researchers in a relevant field (in which case I’d actually love to hear from you), it’s above yours too. I’ve done a fair amount of research into this because it keeps coming up, and of the studies linking pedophilia/pedosexuality and child pornography, some claim that child pornography reduces the rates of child sexual abuse, and others claim the opposite.
Of course, the creation of child pornography itself is sexual abuse, so I’ve always found those kinds of questions pretty silly, because child pornography shouldn’t exist at all. I haven’t found any good studies discussing this topic in the context of fictional/illustrated/animated child pornography (i.e. lolicon/shotacon), which I find frustrating.
For lack of any good body of research to fall back on, we’ve decided to fall back on US law when it comes to deciding whether lolicon content is actually harmful. It’s not ideal, but certainly the intuitive “I reckon” opinions of any of us aren’t adequate to answer such a complex question.
That said, there is one other method we could use to decide whether lolicon content should be banned aside from the law or academic consensus, and that is the broader community opinion. So…
3. Should EroScripts Ban Offputting Fetish Content
This is a freedom of expression question. Reframed (given that we can’t say anything conclusive about whether lolicon content is actually harmful), this question might be put ‘should EroScripts ban content that a majority of users find unpleasant’. Into this category would also fall other ‘extreme’ fetish content.
Our concern when setting rules is to create a community that is as welcoming and inclusive as possible, and it may well be that allowing offputting fetish content excludes more potential users than it includes. I’d be interested in hearing people’s (civil) thoughts on this in a separate topic.
Another solution might be to have certain tags hidden by default, which is almost a shadow-ban of such content, but not quite. (although I’m not sure whether this is possible within the forum software)
This thread has gone hopelessly off-topic, so I’m going to be closing it.
If someone wants to create a new topic in Site Feedback regarding a potential rule change based on the fact that lolicon makes many users uncomfortable, please go ahead and do so. Just be aware that:
- we’re not going to be changing the site rules based on regional law
- unless you can point me to some conclusive scientific studies showing that lolicon content harms real children, we’re not going to be considering stylized lolicon/shotacon content as harmful and ban it on those terms
- consider in that topic that banning lolicon because it’s offputting to a majority of users might mean banning other kinds of content that is similarly offputting