where does CSAM or revenge porn fit in with anti-censorship?
/gen
Freedom of Expression does NOT cover things that cause tangible harm to specific people.
Think of it this way:
Everyone has innate human rights. Freedom of Expression is one of them, but it is not the only one. People also have rights to bodily autonomy, privacy, dignity, safety, and to not be sexually exploited.
Child Sexual Abuse Material ("CSAM" - this is now the preferred term for "child pornography") may technically be a form of "expression" in the most literal sense - but it is a form that is the documented product of the sexual abuse of a real child, and its circulation continues that abuse.
Likewise, Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery ("NCII" - this is now the preferred term for "revenge porn") is the non-consensual distribution of intimate material in a way that directly violates a specific person’s privacy, dignity, and safety.
So I really don't think this is a case of making some prudish exception to anti-censorship principles. It's a case of recognizing that one person’s claimed "expression" cannot include the right to violate another person’s human rights.
And, as a side note, that is also why FICTIONAL depictions of abuse, or even ugly works that seem to romanticize or encourage abuse, fall into a very different category.
Those works may be highly disturbing, exploitative, disgusting, or morally rotten, but they are NOT actually abusing a specific real person in the way CSAM and NCII are - the harm there is direct, concrete, and inseparable from the material itself.
With fiction, the argument is usually vague and indirect: some third party might consume it, be influenced by it, and then do something harmful later. That kind of causal chain is speculative, hard to prove, based on the actions of another person with their own free will, and potentially limitless once you start to expand on it. If you make that the standard for censorship, then practically any book, film, fantasy, or artwork could potentially end up suppressed on the theory that it might negatively affect someone somewhere.
Freedom of expression does protect idiotic ideas, disgusting art, fantasies, and highly offensive speech. But it does not include a right to sexually exploit, expose, or abuse a real person and then call the evidence "speech."
It’s still censorship (even if it doesn’t violate the First Amendment)
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
One of the dumbest, shrewdest tricks corporate America ever pulled was teaching us all to reflexively say, "If a corporation blocks your speech, that doesn't violate the First Amendment and therefore it's not censorship":
Censorship isn't limited to government action: it's the act of preventing a message from a willing speaker from reaching a willing listener. The fact that it's censorship doesn't (necessarily) mean that it's illegitimate or bad: there may be times when it's totally reasonable to prevent a willing speaker from reaching a willing listener. If you own a speech forum (say, a restaurant), and a patron stands on a table and starts declaiming about "illegals ruining America" and you 86 that racist fuck, that's totally OK with me – even if there a few other racists in the booths are shouting, "Right on, brother!"
But don't pretend it's not censorship. You are managing a speech forum by preventing certain consensual communications from taking place because of your views. Which is fine. It's even fine if you support doing this only in some cases, for example, if you support the right of protesters to disrupt a Klan rally without being removed, but not the right of a racist to ruin everyone's dinner by shouting racist garbage in a restaurant.
That doesn't make you a hypocrite, it just makes you someone who rejects the legitimacy of some viewpoints and believes that it's tactically sound to prevent those viewpoints from being aired. That's a common perspective, and it's a rare "free speech defender" who won't grudgingly admit that there are some protesters whose right to disrupt others' speech they will defend; and some whose disruptions they'll condemn.
State censorship – the kind that violates the First Amendment – is also censorship, and it's a particularly pernicious form of censorship, so much so that the First Amendment to the US Constitution broadly prohibits it, and most other countries put some limits on it (for example, Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms prohibits the government from interfering with "freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication").
First Amendment protections for speech seek to prevent the government from limiting speech because when the state interferes with a speaker, they can potentially snuff out that person's message altogether. The racist who gets 86ed from a restaurant can find a Trump rally (or a Klan rally) to mouth off at – but if the state bans their speech altogether, they have to leave the country to find somewhere safe to speak.
The argument goes that even if you don't want racist speech to have a home anywhere, a ban on government censorship protects your views, too. Rather than letting states choose winners in the "marketplace of ideas," we ask them to act as the speech forum of last resort, and we preserve the right of anyone to speak in any public place, with (almost) no limits on what they can say (in theory, at least).
Let's stipulate to this – that doesn't mean we must also stipulate that all private censorship is justified. Nor do we have to agree that it is harmless. Private actors can amass enormous power, and use that power to suppress speech that would weaken their power. In other words, they can turn the marketplace of idea into a command economy where arguments about their unfitness to govern our speech choices are stifled.
A good example here is Facebook. Earlier this year, the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams published Careless People, a tell-all memoir recounting the callous, vicious acts of Facebook's top executives, especially Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Joel Kaplan:
Facebook doesn't allege that Wynn-Williams's book is factually inaccurate. Rather, they say that her employment contract prohibits her from warning the company's billions of users about its defects so that they can make better choices about whether to trust it to manage their main speech forum.
One interesting (terrible) wrinkle here: Facebook didn't even have to go to court to bring Wynn-Williams to the precipice of financial ruin. They were able to get a private arbitrator (a random dude in Facebook's pay) to hand down a "judgment" fining her $50,000 every time she criticizes Facebook. That's because Wynn-Williams's employment contract contains a "binding arbitration" clause that says that she can't ever have her case heard by a judge:
Binding arbitration clauses were once a rarity, their use legally restricted to resolving contractual disputes between giant companies of equal power. Then, Antonin Scalia changed the law and opened the floodgates, so that today, everyone from your physiotherapist to your solar installer to your boss requires you to give up the right to a hearing in order to transact normal, everyday activities:
Wynn-Williams isn't the only person to face private censorship that limits the ability of the public to hear multiple points of view and make up their own minds about the issues of the day. A host of media figures have been forced out of their jobs for republishing Charlie Kirk's own views on issues like gun control, race, and the acceptable nature of public, lethal violence.
Some of this censorship comes directly from government sources. Take Louisiana Congressman Clay Higgins, who has pledged to "use Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk":
But even if lawmakers like Higgins stopped bellowing the quiet part out loud, that wouldn't be the end of the government's involvement in censorship. As we see in Sarah Wynn-Williams's case, government changes to contract law can have far-reaching implications for free expression.
Government action also plays an important role in the wave of neo-McCarthyite deplatformings over Charlie Kirk's killing. There's nothing natural about the collapse of the media ecosystem into an inbred collection of hyperscaled giga-conglomerates. The transformation of the internet into "five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four" wasn't inevitable.
After the Trump I election, progressives were aghast over the photos of the leaders of all of the major tech companies seated around a table atop Trump Tower:
The outrage was over the fact that these titans of industry were willing to normalize Trump. Boy, did that ever miss the point. The real issue was that all the leaders of the tech industry fit around a single table. Eight years later, the industry had grown so consolidated that the tech industry's top bosses could all fit in a semicircle of folding chairs on Trump's inaugural dais:
It's a terrible mistake to think that the societal risk of these terrible billionaires comes from their individual moral failings. The danger to society comes from the existence of billionaires – from the transfer of power (to decide who may speak and who may be heard) into the hands of a few very rich men whose collective cowardice can erase whole swathes of public discourse.
The power of those billionaires didn't come from the billionaires themselves. They weren't born billionaires – the government made them billionaires. These oligarchs owe their existence to presidents like Ronald Reagan, but also (especially) to Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Take Facebook. In 2012, the company faced a serious threat from Instagram, a tiny company that had grown at unheard-of speed, primarily by luring Facebook users to quit the platform and join Instagram instead. Zuckerberg bought the company for $1b. It's not necessarily illegal for a large company to acquire a new competitor, but if the acquisition is an attempt to reduce competition, then it is radioactively illegal and the government is legally required to halt the transaction.
When the Obama administration considered Facebook's Instagram acquisition, it had to decide whether Facebook was motivated by the desire to reduce competition. Lucky for Obama's enforcers, Mark Zuckerberg sent his CFO a memo explicitly stating that he was buying Instagram to neutralize a competitor. For antitrust regulators, this is the equivalent of a signed confession: "This killing was definitely a murder, and I totally premeditated it." That wasn't exactly a surprise – after all, Zuck's motto (also committed to writing), is "It is better to buy than to compete." Despite this, the Obama administration waved the merger through:
Obama served as Enshittifier-in-Chief, presiding over an orgy of illegal, anticompetitive mergers that transformed the internet as a handful of manifestly terrible men seized near-total authority over who could speak and what we could hear.
We know how the internet collapsed into strangled Habsburg gargling. But how did we end up in a place where a handful of media bosses get to decide who we hear on the radio and see on cable, broadcast and satellite TV?
Thank Bill Clinton, whose 1996 Telecommunications Act eliminated New Deal-era restrictions on media consolidation, paving the way for media companies to corner regional markets, for example, by buying your town's newspaper, radio station and TV station (or to buy the major radio stations in every city, as Clearchannel did).
The effects of the Telecommunications Act on public discourse became evident almost immediately. As Matt Stoller writes, after 9/11, Republicans got the media barons (that Clinton created) to fire popular media figures for opposing George Bush's catastrophic, illegal, blood-soaked invasion of Iraq:
The reason the First Amendment singles out government restrictions on speech, rather than private speech restrictions, is that governments have monolithic power to shut down speakers in ways that private actors (supposedly) can't. But when governments allow a handful of firms to seize control over our speech forums, they vest state-like power in these unaccountable private actors.
If you care about free expression, you have to take notice of private censorship, and not confine your scrutiny to state action. That is especially true when the government is allied with a class of media oligarchs who have sewn up our communications channels.
But even when the government isn't in bed with the media barons, the mere existence of media barons are an existential threat to communications, and not just because the owners of media conglomerates routinely abuse their power over our speech. Once the communications industry has been crushed into to a handful of bros who fit comfortably on Trump's dais, they become the proverbial "one throat to choke" – a tractably small group of people who can be arm-twisted into serving as off-the-books agents of state censorship:
If you care about free expression, it's not enough to ask yourself whether the government is violating the First Amendment. Any law that lets powerful people enlist the state to silence their enemies, from Scalia's changes to contract law to Clinton's changes to media ownership law, have a profound, detrimental effect on our free speech.
The pandemic shortages forcefully reminded us that any industry with a single point of failure is liable to fail. Billionaires are a single point of failure in our speech regime. What's the point of defending the First Amendment to prevent elected officials from silencing their political opponents if you're willing to let the government give a handful of unaccountable oligarchs that power?
Kids Online Safety Act remains a threat to privacy and freedom as it is being pushed into office, click to protest
Contact your Reps (U.S. Only)
Contact your Senators (U.S. Only)
Copy of update 95:
The UK will be going forward in giving Ofcom access to encrypted chat logs under the Online Safety Act
Update:
Steam has confirmed the bans and Collective Shout has claimed (partial) responsiblity.
Update 2:
Some good news!
Update 3:
Better news!!
Update 4:
WORSE NEWS
We have “deindexed” all adult NSFW content from our browse and search pages. We understand this action is sudden and disruptive, and we are
Update 5:
Japanese coverage and UK's Online Safety Act
Update 6:
UK Online Safety Act (which is currently being used to censor Wikipedia and protest videos) now has a US version in the introductory stage, introduced in May. Call your senators and reps to stand against it.
Summary of S.1748 - 119th Congress (2025-2026): Kids Online Safety Act
Update 7:
The censors are proud enough to say the quiet part out loud.
Update 8:
Censorship comes for Youtube
Update 9:
Youtube doubles down but so does Japan
Update 10:
Itch.io has re-indexed NSFW games, but you will NOT be able to financially support the developers. The payment processors are STILL restricting them. This is appeasement. This is not good enough.
Update 11:
The UN is at it again...
Update 12:
Payment processors could be getting sued for censoring Steam and Itch.io
Update 13:
Australia has mandated ID Verification
Update 14:
Youtube bans VPNs to "protect children"
Update 15:
More Senators are supporting the censorship of anime, manga, and the internet at large
Update 16:
The UN supports Collective Shout
Update 17:
Adobe has banned Japanese artists
Update 18:
More censorship on Change.com, Reddit, Paypal, and Patreon
Update 19:
Executive Order issued in favor of anti-censorship/anti-debanking. This is a band-aid at best, continue calling the processors and your senators.
Update 20:
Riot Games accused of censoring Visa/Mastercard discussions in gamers' chats, on Mastercard's demand
Update 21:
Paypal blocks payments made to Steam
Update 22:
Steam has been successfully pressured into censoring "brand-risk games"
Update 23:
The Roblox Investigation will be used by politicians as a tool to push Kids Online Safety and SCREEN Acts. Don't let them conflate this with that.
Update 24:
Visa and Mastercard are Roblox partners
Update 25:
Gelbooru, DEG Mods, Niconico, and Danbooru forced to censor by Cloudflare
Update 26:
Kadokawa has gotten involved, calling out Visa and Mastercard over loss in profits
Update 27:
Steam silently changes it's Review Score System
Update 28:
Visa and Mastercard partner with Honkai 3rd Impact amid their censorship of similar fiction
Update 29:
Patreon is killing careers without warning
Update 30:
Collective Shout is reaping what they've sown
Update 31:
Paypal is freezing Steam Developer accounts
Update 32:
Mangaka are fighting for artistic freedom!
Update 33:
Collective Shout cannot tell fiction from reality
Update 34:
Valve folds under pressure to disallow adult-only games.
Update 35:
The UK Police make 30 arrests per day over social media posts after Digital ID enactment
Update 36:
Paypal is closing accounts of adults who buy adult-only books and games, hoarding the profits of players and developers alike
Update 37:
Canadian Petition to stop Visa and Mastercard from interfering with the Free Market has opened for signatures. Sign here!
Update 38:
Visa opens a new job listing for “Director, Global Gaming Partnerships,” with intent to censor at the source
Update 39:
Texas bans Dragon Ball
Update 40:
Japan's view on Payment Processor crackdowns
Update 41:
Visa and Mastercard call for bans on Fairies and Catgirl content
Update 42:
Age Verification Bill passes in the US, implementation starts in Ohio for September 30th
Update 43:
Payment Processor censorship hurts game preservation
Update 44:
The pro-censorship activists in Japan face major backlash from anime fans and creators alike
Update 45:
Collective Shout goes on false-flagging campaign to censor critics
Update 46:
Even more Japan-to-America merch stores face Payment Processor censorship
Update 47:
Steam can no longer update games with adult-only content
Update 48:
Visa celebrates ongoing """brand protection""" efforts
Update 49:
Michigan introduces House Bill No 4938, which proposes to ban Adult-Only Content - including fiction, VPNs, and 24-hour internet survallence with up to 25 years in prison for all Bill offenders
Update 50:
Payment Processor Stripe cuts ties with MangaPlanet due to Visa, leading to the closure of MangaPlanet's digital platform
DLsite creates brand new payment method to combat Visa and Mastercard debanking efforts
Update 54:
Canada introduces new bill to restrict internet access for hackers and ransomware creators, supposedly
Update 55:
Anti-censorship sentiment is rising in Japan
Update 56:
Google and Apple forcably enact Age Verification policy in Texas, to be implemented in 2026
Update 57:
Governments are being sued over Age Verification
Update 58:
UK's Online Safety Act to enforce preemptive censorship on "priority" offenses
Update 59:
Visa and Mastercard pressure Valve to remove more Japanese games, while STILL being partnered with Roblox
Update 60:
More Japanese games have been banned from Steam
Update 61:
Japanese art website Pixiv has R-18 art banned in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, the European Union, and New Zealand by Payment Processors
Update 62:
Steam is now banning Non-Adult games based on cover art
Update 63:
Japan's Government bans censorship of anime and manga
Update 64:
Steam restores Aftermath: Red Pine Lake, a Non-Adult game they once banned over the cover art
Update 65:
Australia will be banning Kick and Reddit for Under-16-year-olds, effective December 10th
Update 66:
US Taxpayer money is allegedly being used to fund international censorship efforts
Update 67:
Pro-Censorship localization team leader goes mask-off about how much they hate Japanese fiction, and got layed off
Update 68:
Steam makes final decision to cancel the release of Non-Adult Horror game "Horses" for fear of payment processor backlash
Update 69:
Age Verification is has passed in Missouri and is now being proposed nationwide
Update 70:
Mass manga censorship by Western Company incoming
Update 71:
European Union passes Age Verification Bill: The Digital Services Act, mandating monthly updates for the entire internet.
Update 72:
Germany and Saudi Arabia are banning access to Steam's release of Brave x Junction - a Japanese RPG - for "bikini armor crimes"
Update 73:
Australia's social media teenager ban has passed
Update 74:
Apple stands against Age Verification applying to their app stores
Update 75:
Australia's internet ban on teenagers faces lawsuits
Update 76:
The Executive Order against Visa and Mastercard's pro-censorship debanking efforts are bearing fruit
Update 77:
KOSA and all Age Verification bills have passed the subcommittee, days are left before they move to full committee
Update 78:
Age Verification could scan your private messages
Update 79:
Paypal has filed to become a bank
Update 80:
Louisiana blocks social media Age Verification bill
Update 81:
Age Verification could disallow VPN usage
Update 82:
Japanese otaku website DLSite sets up it's own credit card system to bypass Visa and Mastercard debanking efforts
Update 83:
Sony to censor video games in real-time with AI
Update 84:
China's largest comic convention bans Japanese anime and manga
Update 85:
Texas, Louisiana, and Ohio have reversed and/or blocked their Age Verification Laws
Update 86:
Virginia proposes to implement AI Age Verification to limit 16-year-olds and younger to 1 hour of internet usage per day.
Update 87:
Efforts for Japan to censor anime are ongoing
Update 88:
The European Union promises to replace Visa for debanking efforts with their own digital payment processor... that definitely won't also debank it's citizens
Update 89:
Pro-Censorship laws gain traction in Ireland as Age Verification Law is discussed in the European Union
Update 90:
Kids Online Safety Act remains a threat to privacy and freedom as it is being pushed into office, click to protest
Update 91:
Nebraska's Age Verification and Under-18 Social Media Ban went into effect on Janurary 1st
Update 92:
Japanese politicians are becoming aware of Western censorship through localization
Update 93:
France to ban under-15-year-olds from social media on September 2026
Update 94:
ID Age Verification is not working as intended
Update 95:
The UK will be going forward in giving Ofcom access to encrypted chat logs under the Online Safety Act
Update 96:
The developers of BrownDust2 have been threatened into a censor all or shut down ultimatum by payment processors
The way a lot of anti-censorship advocates talk makes it sound like they wouldn't care about artistic censorship if it only affected straight people and it's incredibly embarrassing and pathetic. If you have to couch your concern about the censorship of erotic and/or NSFW artistic material as being something that's important for a minority group that's convenient for you to fight for, you don't actually give a shit about censorship. Even if censorship only went after art that isn't considered sufficiently transgressive or subversive or rebellious in any way by this dumbass website, it would still be wrong and stupid.
Banning how someone creates is as much censorship as banning ships and other subject matter.
"Write whatever you want" To me means allowing pro ai content.
When I ask a clarifying policy question for a potential new site, its frustrating to have the comment immediately removed rather than answered.
Forget 'saying it to my face'
People can't even tell me I'm not welcome to MY AVATAR!
Like...
Ya'll call us the monsters, but all I've ever asked since I began incorporating the new tech is literally two things:
1. Pattern recognition of other artistic backlash.
I guarantee you your preferred medium had to go through this. Especially if you use anything other than a pencil, brush, or ink pen.
If you're photographer. If you use a stylus. Honestly, even a computer over typewriter or a typewriter over a notebook...... you're a hypocrite to be shutting people like me out.
2. Inclusion. The ability to share.
How is ruining contests I make when I construct my own space in the midst of being shunned by flooding them with anti content anything other than hateful? Why should I follow rules you break?
That's without the nasty DMs.
You're the ones who literally run us off sites and otherwise make sure we can't post.
You'd rather scream thievery with no proof of victim name while being perpetrators of something you refuse to analyze than accept that our work is as worth preserving as yours.
This is stolen from a post trying to correlate pride month with Satan.
Firstly.
Don’t make it so fkn cool! I mean. That sh*t is fkn metal AF!! If you’re trying to scare kids away from the pride festivities, you’re not doing a good job because that is psychedelic as sh*t, and looks bad ass!!
Secondly. 
Imagine following a religion. A religion that says to love thy neighbor as you do thyself. A religion who speaks of being kind to the stranger (immigrant) because you too were once a stranger in this land. A religion that says it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. A religion whose messiah washed the feet of beggars, bedded with lepers, took care of the sick and homeless, exuded humility, said, judge not lest ye be judged thyself, and what you took from that is gay people are satanic….
Jesus was a liberal. He cared and loved all gods children. Whether Jewish, Muslim, black, white, prostitute, beggar, gay or straight. Yet far too many so called Christians say so much about what god said so little about, and so little about what had said so much about.
There is passage after passage about talking care of the stranger, the traveler, the immigrant, yet the heretic Christians shun them.
There is passage after passage about how only god can judge for it is only god who is without sin. Yet the blasphemy from church congregations judges bodily autonomy of strangers they no nothing about.
There is passage after passage about taking care of each other, loving thy neighbor, sacrificing for the good of others without a personal connection to them or gain from them. Yet our veterans go homeless and hungry, mental health crises go untreated, the sick get denied healthcare.
The hypocrisy is so unchristlike, the teachings obviously ignored.
This pride let’s be louder, brighter, kinder, happier, friendlier, and yes, gayer than ever!!
Love overcomes hate! Kindness is greater than cruelty! And being true to oneself, is better than living a hypocritical existence.
