Pixiv Blocks Adult Content, but Only for US and UK Users
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there seems to be a really simple workaround unless I'm missing something.
By the way if a website asks me for my date / year of birth it's always 1969 because why the fuck not?
specifically 1969-12-31
In terms of geographies - one thing I read about recently is how various “online safety czars” from countries are coordinating in groups that may soon have the power to implement global content restrictions (censorship) that respect each other’s local requests on a global scale. See this article:
https://public.substack.com/p/cia-recruit-is-pursuing-global...
> At the World Economic Forum, Inman Grant said she had launched a global censorship body called “the Global Online Safety Regulators Network” to unify governments around censorship “So that we could have a form to help us coordinate, build capacity and do just that.
Thankfully, this dystopian wet dream is unlikely to go far. Censorship "Czars" cannot legally disregard the laws and constitutions of their respective countries. In the US, we have the First Amendment, and no politician or bureaucrat has the authority to censor speech generally.
But businesses do.
You're about fifty years out of date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Mountain_Mandate
Christian nationalists long ago figured out they were losing the censorship battle with the postal service and governmnt...they long ago shifted to influencing every aspect of society, and one of those is business - and by that they mean financial systems.
That's why people in the porn industry keep losing their bank accounts.
It's also why the app stores and a number of websites are so strict about adult content; pressure from credit card companies.
> there are seven aspects of society that believers seek to influence: family, religion, education, media, arts & entertainment, business, and government.
There is a common misunderstanding that the government can simply ask businesses to do stuff and it's still strictly business. It's not.
>Christian nationalists long ago figured out they were losing the censorship battle with the postal service and governmnt...they long ago shifted to influencing every aspect of society, and one of those is business - and by that they mean financial systems.
Blaming the overwhelming push for censorship in the 2020s on Christians is at best misguided. They are likely to be censored themselves.
>> there are seven aspects of society that believers seek to influence: family, religion, education, media, arts & entertainment, business, and government.
This describes a lot of groups. You're quoting it like the Christians are some kind of menace, but they are the least concerning of all current threats to freedom in my book. I'm an atheist, as well.
1941-12-07 could be suitable for a Japanese site.
The side effects of prohibitions are about as predictable as these moral crusades.
But I notice (maybe especially on this day of the TikTok ban) that lots of people at least sometimes sympathize with the idea that the governments have good reasons to restrict information. And not that many people anywhere have ever used censorship circumvention technologies.
So you might say "the more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers" or something, but the cultural will and momentum to work around Internet-balkanizing measures is ... not that massive and not that universal.
I don't mean to say that people working around geographic blocking doesn't happen ... it does to some noticeable extent at least for licensed streaming, for gambling, and for porn. But I guess significant majorities typically say "oh well!" and accept restrictions as the new normal.
Sometimes, we have to remind ourselves that our government is not the bad guy. The bad guys are the bad guys; and those bad guys aren't often bad to their own kind.
(You might still be right, I just don't think it's "pretty obvious".)
This should not be a surprise, but you folks are idiots who think only The Big Bad United States are (somehow) the only ones interested in spying.
I'd posit that indoor smoking bans wouldn't have been effective whatsoever if they were implemented in the 1970's rather than the 2000s, just for the simple fact that 40% of the population were smokers compared to around 20% when those bans came into effect. Additionally, the impact to smokers was that you needed to go outside to smoke, which is a pretty reasonable behavioral modification.
There's probably some really solid sociology based studies around where this prohibition effectiveness essentially falls apart.
Citation needed.
Most Japanese illustrators do not care about the US/EU, and many of them even hate gaijins. If you haven't noticed, anti-Americanism is very strong on the Japanese internet.
But sure, if you want examples of this trend try searching Pixiv by title for stuff like "twitterまとめ" [1], " or "Xまとめ" [2], meaning a usually monthly compilation of illustrations that were posted to Twitter first. And that doesn't even get into the artists that stopped using Pixiv completely because they got bored of it or their account was banned.
[1] https://www.pixiv.net/en/tags/twitterまとめ/artworks?mode=safe&... (apparently these links don't capture the fact that it's a title search and not a tag search, you have to be logged in and set it manually)
[2] https://www.pixiv.net/en/tags/Xまとめ/artworks?mode=safe&s_mode...
By "anti-Americanism", I'm insisting that a good number of Japanese anime artists see the ban as a beneficial feature, not a disadvantage. They would see this as an automated "Sorry, Japanese Only" filter.
They're very likely perfectly fine with Americans and foreigners in general seeing and sharing work without trying to change the culture of the site (which is fair and something more communities need to start expecting, there's an increasingly popular idea that various hobbies have been ruined by uninvested "tourists" that come into the community, force it to change to accomodate them, then leave after the original audience has been alienated).
The social divide is getting really worrying these days.
Compared to what? Line, or do you have something else in mind?
Besides, LINE is extremely unpopular among otaku in Japan (yes, racism).
In the recent happenings I saw plenty of illustrators get bounced back to X by moderators of fledgling platforms.
One interesting part of this article is where it mentions the Miller Test, and it links to this page about US laws on obscenity - which to me mostly seem to be violations of constitutional rights on free speech and expression:
https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-ceos/citizens-guid...
People who express themselves through the creation of panoramic material can find their efforts using crypto anyway.
Media effects broadly do not exist. The printing press did not cause any of its purported harms, nor did rock and roll, nor MTV. And whatever the next big thing is (VR?) will suffer the same baseless accusations supported by nothing but ideologically-driven cargo cult science.
However, you can certainly complain about the obscenity laws these countries have, which you know predates the internet.
Long ago, there was also a principled moralist influence among some board members but the financial world has become so large and purely capital-centric that principles have a hard time fighting the wind, no matter whose they are and what position they stand for.
Even ones that are just looking for a place to have easy hosting and sharing of images are being pushed off of more and more sites
Yes! Push the porn to the “dark web”. Make it a pain in the ass. Ask for ID. Go all out!!
…because… this is how we’ll get a free internet again. This is how we’ll get real encrypted networks. This is how we go back to the good internet - except - it’s going to be harder to remove the bad stuff.
But this is what they’re doing. Strangling themselves with faux-morality and New Puritan complaintism.
So I’ll take the good effect of an internet that isn’t controlled by 6 companies with the bad that some people may say or do things I don’t like.
And for the specific people who are trying to make a living through selling smut, payment providers are making their lives hell
When the power goes out for multiple weeks, it doesn't affect me at all, entertainment wise. in a "oops all censored" future dystopia, i'd make sure my neighbors could access entertainment, even if it's self-serving for mine own self.
To some this might not really feel like much of a loss, but since the payment processors are maliciously vague about where they draw the line, companies often overreact and also threaten artists whose most NSFW art might be a character in swimwear.
The only reason we had a free internet in the first place was because we had free computers. Many people no longer have free computers.
It's not just the App Stores that are at fault here, almost unbeatable screen time[1] protections, limited mobile APIs, battery usage optimizations and carrier-grade NATs also matter here.
Hosting video is extremely expensive. Either you fund it with ads, which is hard for porn, with subscriptions, which is impossible because of Visa/Mastercard rules, with cryptocurrencies, which are easy to ban as per above, or you offload the cost to P2P, but smartphones are effectively barred from participating in P2P networks due to the above reasons.
This is also a major driver behind the fall of piracy. Piracy is easy if everybody has an always-on device with a stable internet connection and a good power source. This is no longer the case.
[1] By "Screen Time" I mean Apple's comprehensive suite of tools for device access restrictions, both for owners and children. These restrictions don't just concern screen time, they may also prohibit certain apps (or categories of apps) entirely. The point is not restricted to Apple, similar solutions exist for Android, and they give even more power to the parents due to the system's open nature.
no, not accessible to a layperson. but increasingly accessible to anyone who's comfortable with desktop Linux.
X to doubt. You can do this now but it's limited to people with technical skills, and once you have figured out torrent trackers or TOR or whatever it is you're interested in, there isn't that much incentive to radically improve the tooling to make it more consumer friendly. If nothing else having it require some work insulates you from Eternal September. The less work it is, the easier it is for cops and politicians to whip up a moral panic about.
Do we treat the human body closer to that of animal? If so, why is cannibalism a crime? Animals rape, why should humans not, if we are just animals?
If we reject that and say that a human has dignity that an animal or a plant does not; why should a dignified creature act as a beast? Who is to say that this dignity cannot extend to the sexual sphere in dress and conduct?
We already accept this. Just because an animal rapes, does not preclude permanently imprisoning a human, solely for violating that dignity. It follows then, what is suitable for animals, is in no way a certain or relevant guide for how humans should behave.
This is not even necessarily a religious point. One of the most-banned pieces of material by the Chinese Firewall is not material that opposes the government - but porn, which is illegal there despite being an avowedly atheist society. Japan was never a Christian society, but their censorship practices for porn are well known.
> The restrictions include several kinds of content that are illegal in the US, including sexualized depictions of minors and bestiality, as well as non-consensual depictions and deepfakes.
This has nothing to do with being "more reasonable about the human body", as you euphemistically put it.