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.
EDIT: OK, closing this post to new comments. Everything that needs saying has been said. Link to my convo with the blahaj admin here.
After reading both admin statements I’m not sure which side I fall on. Both raise legitimate concerns.
On one hand, it’s incredibly shitty to shame someone for how they look, regardless of what they’re doing.
On the other hand, fetishizing childlike appearances is also pretty skeevy, even if everyone is an adult.
However, my understanding is that this is how the fediverse is designed to operate.
Everyone has the ability to host whatever content they want and also choose which instances they want to see content from.
Blahaj.zone isn’t going anywhere and if you still want to see the stuff there, there are numerous instances that can let you do that. Accounts are free.
Looking through the alleged community ([email protected]) I’m really not seeing anything that looks inherently like it could be misinterpreted as CSAM.
A lot of people are taking it at face value that fetishizing childlike appearances even happened here, which it has not. This instance’s rules ban even fictive depictions of the underage. Drawings, anything.
No one disagrees that fetishizing children is bad. No one. What you have here is the blahaj mods flipping out and thinking that this occurred when it did not. They even falsely claimed that the admins here are okay with that happening, which they are not.
Let’s not dignify their position by accepting their false premise and then saying “you know they kinda have a point.”