What alarms me about this is that Reddit has to worry about hazily-defined legal gray areas. One of the big goals of common law legal systems is to make the law and its interpretation as predictable as possible, so that people can go about their business without fear of arbitrary legal penalties. The common law may not always be just, but it should at least be consistent.
Child porn is not really a hazily defined legal gray area. The law is pretty concise on what constitutes child porn.
Possessing may be a bit murkier but only in the edge cases where the pictures were put there without the persons knowledge.
Reddit finally got shamed into taking the ultimately correct stance. Anything that vaguely smells of child porn is no longer allowed. There's no slippery slope here.
Not a gray area? The Reddit admins say otherwise, and presumably they would know what they've been dealing with:
> Beyond these clear cut cases, there is a huge area of legally grey content, and our previous policy to deal with it on a case by case basis has become unsustainable. We have changed our policy because interpreting the vague and debated legal guidelines on a case by case basis has become a massive distraction and risks reddit being pulled in to legal quagmire.
While we're at it, Neil Gaiman points out examples of several of those gray areas:
I think it's been pretty well demonstrated that the Reddit admins have their heads up their asses, at least when it comes to this issue. Just stating that the law has grey areas is not evidence that the law has grey areas. It has more to do with their deliberate obtuseness toward what the law actually says.
As far as I can tell, Neil Gaiman is a really talented writer. There's nothing in his background that indicates expertise in law. Beyond that, upon reading his post, he is clearly talking about government censorship in the context of literature and graphic novels depicting sex involving minors, not the distribution of actual pornography. At one point he even concedes that he has not even looked at the site in question and cannot make a judgement on it's contents.
Really, if you're going to post a link as support for your argument, read it first and make sure it supports your argument.
You went from "Child porn is not really a hazily defined legal gray area."
to
"Anything that vaguely smells of child porn is no longer allowed."
Do you see that "anything that vaguely smells of X" is the very definition of a grey area? For example, is this a problem? http://www.reddit.com/r/toddlersandtiaras
The first is a statement of fact about the state of what constitutes child porn. Look up the statutes yourself. The link to the relevant wiki has been peppered throughout this thread.
The second is a statement on the policy reddit has introduced.
Reddit has not always banned legally defined child pornography. They've banned obvious child pornography. The kind with naked kids and actual sex. Their refusal to remove other images that, at best passed the test in the same way a D- is not a failing grade, has far more to do with their ignorance of what the law actually says and no one holding them accountable for a long time.
As far as the non-child-porn content, I'm in no way upset by these particular degenerates no longer having that avenue of access to their fap material.
> "I'm in no way upset by these particular degenerates no longer having that avenue of access to their fap material."
The banning of today's subreddits didn't bother me very much.
The proliferation of comments like these, on the other hand, have. "Degenerates" is a favourite word of, well, just about every bigot out there. It also bothers me that we've made lepers out of pedophiles, and makes me wonder if we've done more harm than good in the long run.
I'm against child porn and child exploitation, I am however adamantly against the marginalization and dehumanization of pedophiles.
> " Look up the statutes yourself."
The defining line is the Dost test, which is far from concrete. If I educated 100 randomly selected people in the US on the Dost test, and then gave them each 100 images to classify, sourced from the abovementioned subreddits, what sort of agreement do you think we'd get? Would it even come close to a consensus?
Something that is codified doesn't mean it's not in a legal grey area.
As a photography enthusiast this issue has come up more than once. You may or may not know this - but there are groups on Flickr that cater to just about every fetish and kink out there, and group moderations can "invite" an image to be added to the group's galleries. Yes, some of these involve children.
I've gotten requests in the past for perfectly innocent (in my mind) images to be added to these groups. A woman sitting casually wearing hosiery is suddenly fap material to a whole boatload of people. A child playing in the park is suddenly wildly arousing for someone else. I don't think it's at all a stretch to say that child porn, like any other fetish, is more in the eye of the beholder than anything else.
There are also substantial slippery slope concerns. It bothers me that so many have chosen to sweep these under the rug because the word "slipper slope fallacy" exists, and saying it will somehow make these concerns null and void.
After all, we are seeing calls to shut down (IMO equally reprehensible) subreddits like /r/deadbabies and /r/beatingwomen - of course, sheer legality won't help us here, as these are legally even more poorly defined than child porn. There are also complaints that /r/gayteens (not sure if I have the name correct) got shut down despite holding themselves to a strict 18+ moderation... the responses to which simply derided people for being attracted to teenaged gays.
In any case, this is anything but a clear-cut issue.
This is quite simply false. Reddit has always banned child pornography. The post we're discussing is quite clear on this point. There would be absolutely no outage if this was about banning child pornography.
Your statements here seem to come from a place of rage and hate moreso than rational analysis, so let's not continue this.
The law is concise but absolutely subjective. How do you objectively determine "whether the visual depiction is intended or designed to elicit a sexual response in the viewer" or "whether the child is depicted (...) in inappropriate attire, considering the age of the child" ?
