[beardog]

    Instead, users see a message saying the sites have been blocked because of anti-child-pornography laws.
 

Although this is likely done out of incompetence rather than malice, this is how they erode freedom. They pick one thing that the large majority of people are generally against, find one instance of it on a public website, and use that to justify censorship of the entire platform. This happened with reddit in Russia, and it almost became widespread with SOPA/PIPA in the US.

Edit: reddit is unblocked in Russia but it was blocked for a time: https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/3grpdf/tifu_by_gettin...

[d0mine]

Jacob Applebaum: "The Four Horsemen of the Info-pocalypse: child pornography, terrorism, money laundering, and The War on Some Drugs." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4848174

[paulddraper]

Those are pretty bad things.

If I had to make a list, I couldn't do much better.

[droithomme]

> This happened with reddit in Russia...

Is reddit really blocked in Russia? It seems there are many Russian posters there, particularly in t_d...

[beardog]

I was wrong, it got unblocked. It was blocked for a while though. see: https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/3grpdf/tifu_by_gettin...

[ue_]

In 2009 the UK made illegal drawings of fictional characters that "predominantly convey" the impression that they are younger than 18. I've heard no complaints about it, either people people seem to be fine with making things illegal so long as they're disgusting (i.e people who don't care about their freedom at all), or because people don't know about it.

Just as you said - they come after the 'disgusting' things first. However I think that it should be a serious consideration as to whether a government is going to toe the line to make illegal drawings.

[rm_-rf_slash]

It's illegal for the same reason it is illegal in many countries to grow cannabis and smoke it in one's own household: it is all about accumulating power and the incriminating evidence that can be planted on a dissident to imprison and silence them.

Edit: Apparently some evicence of these claims might be in order:

--

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/03/23/poli...

[beardog]

The CFAA does this very thing[1]. Violate a terms of service? You're now potentially a felon! But everyone violates TOS sometimes, especially with ridiculous rules like 'no rudeness', so prosecutors pick & choose their targets. (Though there has been some precedence set not to consider TOS violations alone to be breaking the CFAA)[2]

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/aaron...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/07/court-violating-terms-...

[srssays]

The bizarre thing about that law is that having sex with a real 16-year old is completely legal. But draw a picture of a fictional 16-year old having sex and you'll go to jail.

[abandonliberty]

The book 'Snow Crash', which popularized the term 'avatar', could be considered illegal in many jurisdictions because it includes a sex scene between a minor and an adult.

[kenshaw]

Netflix, Reddit, Vimeo, porn sites, and weird/inconsistent selection of other sites are "blocked" (only a simple DNS filter) here in Indonesia.

[beardog]

unfortunately, a simple DNS filter is enough to deter many.