Let's Talk

Title: Let's talk

So... you want to know why YOU should care about the ToS change... Understandable, let's begin.

First, let me preface this by saying that I do not blame Lore (the site's owner, for those of you who don't know), not one bit. He was put in a difficult position and threatened with going to jail if he did not comply. He has fought tooth and nail to avoid having to do this, from the removal of NSFW images involving minors to the geofencing, they were all attempts at avoiding the blanket ban. All I can really blame him for is that he could have done a better job at the whole communicating what's going on thing, but that's an extremely minor issue. Just know that my complaints are about the laws and the lawmakers, not Lore.

Now, I've seen a lot of you who don't care because the ban doesn't affect them, or maybe even wanted the ban to happen in the first place. That's understandable, CSAM, even fictional, is a very touchy and controversial subject, and even I personally find that kind of content nausea-inducing (although I don't think my personal feelings on it are grounds for a ban). But here's the thing, only one of the arguments I'm going to give even touches on the content itself, and it's a very minor argument at that. The rest focus on everything around it, and should show you why you should oppose this regardless of if you are in favor of the immediate outcome of that specific content being banned.

1. Government Overreach Without Borders

As it has been stated in the Discord several times, the laws in question don't come from Lore's own country, but he has to comply because the website is accessible in those countries (and presumably they have extradition agreements and other treaties with Lore's country). This was what the aforementioned geofencing was about: removing the ability of those countries to access the offending content. But, apparently, it wasn't enough, because the citizens of those countries could still access it through VPNs, and that's apparently the website's fault, for some reason, making it impossible to escape the jurisdiction.

If this doesn't scare the bejesus out of you, I don't know what will. The idea that any country has jurisdiction over any web content they can access by any means is nightmare fuel, it's the death of the Internet. Are you telling me Lore is compelled to take action by laws of countries he never visited, made by lawmakers he never voted for? There's a huge difference between "comply with this or we block your site in our region," and "comply with this or we'll take you from your country and throw you in jail." Imagine if China were one of the countries in those agreements: instead of blocking outside information about Tiananmen Square, they could prosecute YOU in THEIR legal system for posting it. So what happens when one of the countries that are part of it elects a new government that's equally restrictive? What if they decide LGBT stuff should be banned? What happens when they remove bots that "infringe copyright?" What happens when they want to ban porn, or AI? What happens when they compel Lore to provide them our email addresses, our IPs, or our payment info? You might counter that it might never happen, that it's a "slippery slope" fallacy, but there's a difference between a "slippery slope" and a "legal and social precedent." why open that door by just quietly accepting the concept that their jurisdiction is legitimate?

2. Rules for us, not for them

Let's not forget that the people pushing these laws are the same people actively protecting known predators. After the Epstein list was released, hell should have broken loose, yet the release seemed to come and go with little to no consequence, despite the amount and prominence of names uncovered. No investigations launched, no resignations, no arrests. Nothing. These people are out there, free to do it all over again, yet the governments are concerned with a few drawings. This is nothing more than a virtue signal, a smoke screen designed to shift the focus and allow the elites to keep doing what they were doing. They never cared about the victims, they only care that you think they do.

3. The implementation

But even if we ignore, for a moment, the source of the law, let's now take a look to what's required from compliance. The announcement says: "Beginning on May 15th, 2026, characters, lorebooks, presets, and stages involving individuals that are or appear to be under the age of 18 are strictly prohibited." Of course, there's the issue of the short two-day window from the time of the announcement, leaving eveyrone scrambling to back up their bots. But the reason everyone is scrambling to back up their bots is the scope. There's throwing the baby out with the bathwater (accidentally accurate idiom FTW), and then there's THIS.

A- SFW is not safe. You want to play a wholesome dad? BANNED! You want to play in your favorite fictional world and the card happens to describe a character in that world that's not yet 18? BANNED! Any bot that describes any minor for any reason, no matter the context, is BANNED!

B-That little "or appear to be" seems to be reasonable to account for the 1000 year old dragon that looks and acts like a child trope. But with the drawing styles of most images here and no clear guidelines on what would be affected, who knows what they might actually ban? It's so arbitrary it's forcing authors to err on the side of caution and back up anything that could maybe be interpreted as appearing to be underage, even if the card states they are human adults. This applies to future uploads as well, meaning you will never know what might trigger the filter.

4. The "Acceptable Sacrifices"

Even after all of this, you might be thinking that the risk of the alternative is too big, that the ban is worth it in order to save children. If you think banning fictional material could save children, you likely subscribe to the "Gateway Theory", the idea that the fiction normalizes an act and desensitivizes against it, making it more likely for someone to take the leap from fiction to reality. This feels very intuitive and common sense, which is why it has been applied to many types of fiction or media over the years. The issue is, every single time it has, it has been proven false, most of the time even being strong evidence that the opposite is the truth. Let's review a few examples:

• During the 1980s "Satanic Panic," groups like the PMRC claimed that heavy metal's aggressive sonic structures and violent lyrics were a bridge to Satanism, delinquency, and uncontrolled anger. However, Studies show that metalheads are generally less aggressive than the broader public and use the music for emotional regulation. A 2015 study by Sharman and Dingle published in "Frontiers in Human Neuroscience" tested listeners of extreme metal. They found that when angry participants listened to heavy metal, it did not increase their anger. Instead, the music matched their physiological arousal, acting as a healthy coping mechanism that left the listeners feeling calmer, more active, and deeply inspired.

• Following the Columbine massacre, politicians and activists claimed that violent video games (like DOOM or Grand Theft Auto) functioned as "murder simulators," acting as a bridge to mass shootings and physical aggression. But in the study "Understanding the Effects of Violent Video Games on Violent Crime", economists Cunningham, Engelstätter, and Ward tracked the sales of hyper-violent video games and compared them with local crime data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System. They found that in the weeks following the release of massively popular violent games, real-world violent crime and property crime actually dropped. The researchers identified the "Voluntary Incapacitation Effect." Video games are incredibly time-consuming. The demographic most likely to commit (and be victims of) violent street crime—young men—are drawn off the streets and into their living rooms to beat the game. By simply removing them from public spaces, violent games lower real-world crime. Furthermore, researchers like Dr. Christopher Ferguson have repeatedly dismantled older studies that linked games to aggression, proving that games do not bridge into real-world violence.

• In the 1950s, Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent triggered a massive government panic by claiming a direct bridge between reading horror/crime comics and juvenile delinquency. In 2012, researcher Carol Tilley audited Wertham's original clinical notes and proved he had entirely fabricated, manipulated, and cherry-picked his data to invent the "bridge" out of thin air.

• In the 1980s, Groups like B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons) claimed the game was a bridge to Satanic cults and youth suicide. In reality, multiple psychological evaluations in the late 80s and 90s proved that D&D players had a remarkably lower suicide rate than the national youth average, and the game heavily fostered cooperative problem-solving, empathy, and social stabilization.

• And finally, the most applicable to our situation: Porn. Anti-pornography crusaders of the 1970s and 1980s argued that pornography degraded societal morals and acted as a direct bridge to sexual assault (famously summarized by the slogan: "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice"). In reality, broad availability of pornography is statistically correlated with a decrease in sexual assault rates, a phenomenon criminologists refer to as the "Catharsis" or "Safety Valve" effect. The first studies were conducted by Berl Kutchinsky after Denmark became the first country to fully legalize hardcore pornography in 1969. Kutchinsky found that following the legalization and widespread availability of porn, rates of reported serious sex crimes—most notably child molestation—dropped dramatically. Similar findings were documented in the Czech Republic when pornography was heavily legalized after 1989. Furthermore, U.S. Department of Justice statistics show that between 1995 and the 2010s—the exact era where high-speed internet made pornography ubiquitous—the national sexual assault rate dropped by over 40%. Multiple psychological studies suggest that potential perpetrators use pornography as an outlet, removing their urges from the real world.

In short, it's not only not confirmed that the ban would have a possitive side effect to justify it, it might actually hurt the very people it claimed to try to protect in the first place.

5. The pattern

But you might still feel these are false equivalences. After all, you have already heard people defending "CSAM" saying it's just fiction and comparing it to video games, and you have already decided those are not the same at all. But, in reality, they have unknowingly spotted the same pattern sociologist Stanley Cohen wrote about in "Folk Devils and Moral Panics" in 1972: a 'Moral Panic.'

Cohen studied how the media and the state can take a relatively small group of 'deviants' (what he called 'Folk Devils') and amplify their actions until the public perceives them as a catastrophic threat to society. He described this as a 'Deviancy Amplification Spiral':

Step 1- A 'deviant' act is identified. Step 2- The media/state exaggerates the threat. Step 3- The public panics and demands a crackdown. Step 4- The crackdown creates more tension and resentment, which leads to more 'deviant' behavior. Step 5- The state points to this new behavior as proof that the original panic was justified.

If you haven't realized already, all the examples I listed before have all the ingredients of a moral panic, and they're not a new thing either, we can find them in literal ancient times: Around 399 BCE, Socrates's habit of questioning tradition was labeled as 'corrupting the youth,' triggering a public panic and his execution, which paradoxically turned him into a martyr and ensured his subversive ideas survived for millennia. Similarly, 2nd century BCE Rome saw Cato the Elder and Scipio Nasica Corculum frame 'oriental luxuries' and stone theater seating as a threat to virtus (Roman virility), later citing the 151 BCE enlistment crisis in the Celtiberian War as proof that these cultural influences had bred a generation of cowards.

Moral panics take an understandable, sometimes even valid concern, and turn it into an instrument of control and a justification for restrictive legislation. Do not fall for what is, quite literally, the oldest trick in the authoritarian book.

6. First they came for the proshippers

Do not take this post as a defense of real CSA, this is a defense against the mechanism of censorship in an adult space. This does not stop with this ban. If you give a government an inch, they'll take a mile, and then they'll demand you give them an inch. You might agree with it now because it's content that you find "icky." And so do I. But if we establish that as a valid reason for a censor, none of us are safe, because you can always find a group of people that finds what YOU do "icky." This is the reason why many creators who don't even make underage characters are leaving the platform, they see the writing on the wall. Me? I'm not really leaving, since I don't make underage bots either, but I will also upload to BotBooru at the same time, for the same reasons.

I said it in a comment before, but the famous quote describing Voltaire's stance, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," was not a position taken out of selflessness, but out of self-preservation. And I have to agree here. I personally find their content repulsive. But I will defend to the death their right to enjoy it, because I know others find my content repulsive, and if I don't defend there will be no one to defend mine.

Why should you care? Because if you let this slide, at some point, you will be next.

[https://www.youtube.c om/watch?v=FsRift9CRgk]

I want to argue against this person. What are some holes or weak points in their argument I could attack while remaining intellectually honest?