[dodedo]

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 reddit announcement was very clear: They have always banned child pornography. They even linked to the guidelines they use to do so: http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/PageServlet?P...

What happened today was not reddit banning child pornograpy -- it was reddit banning non-child-porn content which was overwhelmingly unpopular.

[Czarnian]

Those two statements are not contradictory.

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.

[potatolicious]

> "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.

[pjscott]

I regret that I have only one upvote to give you, because you just wrote the most insightful comment I've seen on this issue.

[dodedo]

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.