Comment on "Censorship" ☠️
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week agoAre you Australian?
I’d recommend checking out the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund when it comes to the dangers of restricting certain topics in fiction (including child abuse or child sexual abuse), and the dangers of censorship in general.
The US went over this before in the Aughts with Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition and the PROTECT act passed in 2003 (with certain parts of it later declared unconstitutional), and later with SESTA and FOSTA, which had a chilling effect, forcing closed online resources that sex workers used to protect themselves. The more recent bills like KOSA and the KIDS act are modeled similarly to close the internet as a vector of free speech under the premise of protecting kids from porn, with the intention to also silence subjects that are ideologically controversial, such as LGBT+ content, ( trans ideology ), sexual education material, women’s health information and political speech that criticizes the Trump administration.
I still submit that media should be restricted as little as possible. Yes, we should restrict CSAM that creates actual child victims (such as filmed CSA and deepfakes of real kids), in order to protect the victims. And yet, when we criminalize fictional depictions of CSA, it not only starts cutting into legitimate artistic content (such as A Game of Thrones, or The Sandman comic series, Superman 1978 is an edge case), but it then becomes very easy for conservative moral guardians to creep the mission and expand the list of restricted content.
EliteCloneMike@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Finally a sane comment with a reasonable argument and sources. I think people forget how slippery of a slope it is. There was another comment about where do we draw the line on works of art from over 100 years ago, should they all be destroyed to save children just because the current mindset of the day is different. It’s like destroying old statues from the American Civil War because they don’t align with today’s ideology. I could go on. That doesn’t even touch the fact that many of the people probably have old family photos that would meet the definition of CSAM. For example Google closed a persons account and reported him due to a twenty or thirty year old photo of his grandmother bathing him when he was a newborn. Meta also closed an account and reported a person for posting that famous photo of an unclothed girl running towards the camera that was shot during the Vietnam War. Just going to reiterate that it is still currently a messy situation that needs to be reevaluated. Over reporting makes it harder to find children in need and real bad actors. I blame the NCMEC for this, they have long since failed their mission to protect children.