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Comment by Jigsy | Hacker News Reader

The problem with "child abuse" is that some countries classify drawing things as "child abuse," or "rape," or "animal abuse." (Something I don't agree with.)

I mentioned in another thread a few weeks back that I got raided by the British police last February for "uploading/downloading "illegal" anime artwork on one of the (anime) artwork websites we're criminally investigating." (Yes, the British police are criminally investigating artwork websites, and I'm still under investigation at the time of writing this.)

Even if somehow the government were able to catch everybody who abuse children, take photos and upload them to sites on Tor, they can classify anything they like as "child abuse" in order to justify survillancing people and restricting further freedoms.

What's even sadder is that people don't care about safety. They care about the illusion of safety. As long as people have the illusion that they're being kept safe - the farce known as the Online Safety Bill being a great example - they'll tolerate any injustice.

Honestly, I'd recommend downloading software like Signal, Session, VeraCrypt, etc. as well as making a Linux USB stick now (especially since countries like the UK wants Red Star OS levels of snooping) because this is honestly going to get much, much worse...

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I'd be curious what would happen if you pointed the relevant authorities at any decently sized store selling manga. There's got to be at least one stereotypical sexualised 4000 year old loli vampire or whatever in there.

The sad truth is probably that they'd just shrug their arms and do nothing, since the surveillance and harassment is the point, and not even upholding the letter of the law, and much less its spirit.

The people in the system have to do something to justify the existence of such a system and bump their metrics. Whether someone did something bad or not is irrelevant. It is the job of the prosecution lawyers to figure out the grounds. Legality and culpability is a paperwork.

Of course, if someone is rich and powerful (ehm, epsty, ehm) then the whole system will look the other way around. At least until it's impossible to do so. Then such a person and his footprint will just disappear in the same big bureaucracy that is doing this.

Is that why the fact that getting essentially every LLM to produce sexualized stereotypes is trivially easy, yet getting zero attention from these guys?

Or, much more long-running than the LLM "loophole": there's entire "channels" on Social Media, like Tiktok and Facebook Instagram Reels and Signal and Whatsapp and Telegram and ... that post essentially nothing but that, and no reaction.

https://www.tiktok.com/@modelagencyai/video/7225020868131294...

But what I find most criminal about these systems is that they're all about catching. These people never touch what happens when they "catch" someone. What happens, of course, is that they usually can't do anything about people actually spreading these images, but they can arrest the minors involved and lock them up long term in a terrible system. Of course, that system is horrible and is getting further defunded every year, including 2025. But that is where these children they "help" end up. And they don't care at all.

You care about children and victims of child abuse? How about we start with improving the living conditions of the actual known victims? Instead we see regular scandals about the child services system itself abusing children. Rotherham, Romania, child services involvement in Ukraine, Hungary, "toeslagenaffaire", the Netherland's youth services approving foster parents who literally only wanted to torture a young girl (and ignoring her pleas for help), ...

Frankly, if that isn't done first, I refuse to believe there is any real intent to help these children.

What's the point of criminalising hand-made pictures? I just don't understand it. I could understand the point of criminalising child porn photos, as producing these photos obviously requires violating other laws (actually not obviously, as you can dress adult actors to look like children, but whatever). But things that are obviously drawn without any involvement of real children, what's wrong with them? Just keep them away from general public (honestly any moderation will do that just fine) and weirdos who wants this stuff will find it and discharge their libido in a peaceful way.

To me, it looks counter-productive to actual child safety... It's like criminalising porn pictures to protect women? Makes no sense.

I'd say it makes a lot of sense. It likely encourages pedophilia, meaning people that consume such things will often adopt a wrong idea of what's okay. It's similar to the way that regular porn affects the brain. I understand where you're coming from, though and I get your point, but I feel if someone consumes a lot of media of a certain type, they begin to 'embody' that media.

Just don't goon.

Ah, yes, the gateway drug trope. Always a good one for asserting control indirectly. Inevitably results in increased profits for the purveyors of the gateway drug and no reduction in demand or consumption. Prosecutors and jailors get richer too. Follow the money.

Ah yes, the gateway drug straw man. Poster didn't say it causes that consequence, just that it normalises it. Just like video games normalise violence, gay porn normalises being gay etc. Doesn't mean it should be banned, but it does shift the winds about what is acceptable. And that is a worthy discussion when it comes to images of child exploitation.

Normalizes vs causes is a vacuous distinction here, and both of your examples deserve some proof that there's any difference

What's to explain? Seeing gay porn doesn't increase the number of gay people but can let gay people feel less abnormal. If cause equaled normalisation they would be synonymous.

> meaning people that consume such things will often adopt a wrong idea of what's okay.

I've been reading "illegal" manga for 20 years. I've never once thought that these acts would be okay to do in real life.

Same when I read the 1906 novel Josephine Mutzenbacher.

> It likely encourages pedophilia

It's like saying that pictures of gay people encourages homosexuality

Or saying playing violent video games makes you violent, which sounds familiar...

Of course pictures of gay people doesn't encourage being gay, but being gay is fine. Being a pedophile is not fine. If there is even a small chance that something will cause someone to be a pedophile, it's best to minimize it. We aren't talking about pictures of pedophiles, we are talking about what is, in essence, child pornography. Maybe 'encourages pedophilia' is not a thorough enough way to phrase it, but a 'dormant' pedophile is much more likely to become an 'active' one if they are consuming excessive amounts of media related to their interests.

> Being a pedophile is not fine.

You're not equating pedophilia with child abuse, are you? Because having an attraction to children (pedophilia) isn't in itself a crime.

> If there is even a small chance that something will cause someone to be a pedophile, it's best to minimize it.

I have this great idea. It involves clothes that completely cover up the people that could cause temptation, creating separate spaces for them, and so.

I like this parallel. No joke intended.

I am not sure there is evidence that this is the case. The argument sounds a lot like those made by conservatives against gay people. Somehow, in their view, homosexuality is also just a first step towards “anything goes”, including incest, pedophilia, even bestiality. Porn, in this view, should increase rape, right? But that’s absolutely not the case. People seem to calm down if they can satisfy themselves with just watching it on a screen, even if it’s not real, as in cartoons or AI generated content. Would you change your opinion if evidence pointed to this being the case, or so you have other motives for still thinking even cartoons should be made illegal if depicting such content?

> Porn, in this view, should increase rape, right? But that’s absolutely not the case.

What evidence do you have that it absolutely doesn't? How would you even scientifically prove this? There are a whole lot of factors that contribute to rape or rape prevention.

Does modern sexual objectification and gratification increase the likelyhood that men will seek to actualize their fantasies? I believe it does.

From my own experience growing up watching porn from around 11-12 years of age and being an incel, when I was 21 I finally took things into my own hands and went to prostitutes to try and recreate those porn movies I was watching. I did not rape anyone but because of porn I learned that sex should be aggresive, that women respond "positively" to aggresive sex. I was sexually aggresive with the escorts I frequented, because of porn.

Over the span of 10+ years of doing this I even noticed shifts in sensibilities of escorts. Like young escorts these days by default gag when doing oral because this is what the market required in the past how many years but wasn't so common 10+ years ago.

For the record, in my experience, not even most escorts actually ENJOY aggressive sex. You would think they get used to it but trust me they don't. Aggressive sex is a perversion and I say this from experience not dogma.

> What evidence do you have that it absolutely doesn't?

I think it’s very obvious when looking at the last 20 years. Porn availability increased ridiculously since around 2000 due to internet becoming widespread. But look at statistics on rape in most countries and you see its decreasing in the large majority. Does that not convince you that at least there seems to be no causation??

Surveillance has also increased, fear of not getting away with it is higher. Also society has been militant about this issue more with "believe all women" etc. Maybe men invest more in video games and relieve their aggression that way without risking prison. I don't know, I am no sociologist but again, there are too many variables to prove any sort of causation.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/283100/recorded-rape-off...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/191137/reported-forcible...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1464272/reported-sexual-...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1418831/sexual-offences-...

I realise I respond to a stupid argument. I'm just annoyed.

You cherry picked a few outliers. Here’s a chart showing many countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rape_in_the_Unite...

It’s clearly going down in most places, including the USA.

I googled my country, the USA, and the two European countries I have most experience of. I didn't cherry pick anything, I just stopped.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/191137/reported-forcible...

I don't know what to tell you, except to say the messiness of the data goes to underline how poorly sourced your claim is.

Exactly, people will watch porn videos of girls being choked or whatever, will be with a girl and assume she will like being choked. Not okay at all.

> It likely encourages pedophilia

Throught the same mechanism that violent games encourage violence, I presume?

Porn became abundant over last two decades and somehow people are having less sex than ever. There are many clues that those kinds of things work in the completely opposite way than you imagine.

I hate that it exists. I hate that there are people who are seeking this. But I also hate when people state confidently things that might be completely wrong and write laws accordingly.

> Porn became abundant over last two decades and somehow people are having less sex than ever.

That sounds like an actual negative effect, if there is actually causation. But I'd argue social media has overall a much more general influence by putting our whole lives into a panopticon. It is very hard to escape its reach even if one is not a social media user.

I know what you mean, but do you not agree that if someone is, let's say, on the point of becoming a pedophile, discovers such media, it will become more and more of what they think about, and what one thinks about determines their actions.

I don’t think there is any evidence that there is a state meaningfully denoted by “on the point of becoming a pedophile” which can be tipped by exposure to media in that way, no.

To be fair, understanding of the etiology of pedophilia is not super strong, but what there is doesn't, AFAIK, seem to support the kind of naive media-driven modelling that people like to apply to all kinds of behavior (Satanic Panic approach to D&D, Columbine and violent video games, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum, ad infinitum.)

That's easily concievable scenario. Which doesn't make it true or overwhelmingly significant to the bottom line. Many untrue things are equally easy to imagine.

What about a scenario where a person that could be satisfied by such materials in absence of them discovers actual children and hurts them?

Many men, who don't have luck with women, lust for women, but very few actually go out and hurt them. For each one that develops violent tendencies through pornography there are probably many that have their violent tendencies kept in the realms of fantasy thanks to pornography (and awareness of laws that punish actual violence).

My point is that it's too important subject to rely on just guesswork. There should be research into this because there's a huge potential for eyeballed solutions to actually hurt the vulnerable more than they help.

> will often adopt a wrong idea of what's okay

I wonder who gets to decide what's okay.

Basic morality and human rights

How is it moral to claim "Murdering people (in fiction) is fine," then?

From a universal perspective, there is no such thing as "basic morality". Only what the most recent cultural norms of the largest (or strongest) group of people say.

It normalises a market for abuse imagery and pornographic escalation is a known phenomenon.

In addition to “drawing”, it’s also the loosely interpreted age that concerns me. Any drawing “deemed under 18” is just as criminalized as the actual crime. While there are many Instagram users who pretend to be above 18, many drawings of lewd acts, adding that the age is freely interpreted by judges… it’s a free field for general oppression.

> While there are many Instagram users who pretend to be above 18

Do you support robust and mandatory age verification to enforce existing rules on social media websites, like Instagram?

What? What’s the relation between your question and being safe while consuming ok-content?

I said “deemed”. The judge can decide anything even if the user really is above 18.

Not even to ask how you enforce age verification of characters in a drawing?

If those countries have laws against making and consuming pedophile pictures and drawings (or "artwork"), I feel it's perfectly fine for people making and consuming those to be raided, even if they disagree with the law (if people could opt out of all laws they don't agree with, I'mnot sure what would be the point of making laws).

What is not ok is to watch the activities of everyone who is not a pedophile in order to catch those, otherwise when does it stop? Should they have cameras in every room of your home just in case?

> Should they have cameras in every room of your home just in case?

Given that most children are abused by some one they know that might actually be a more effective way to prevent it than whatever they're doing here. I'm sure they'll get to that eventually.

I read this as "It's perfectly fine to persecute people for their art". And boy, you're on the wrong side of history.

There are all kinds of things you might qualify as "art" which are forbidden in my country (France) - for example if your "art" is about drawing nazi symbols you hopefully are going to have troubles - and I don't have a problem with having pedophile content in that list.

Does france really prosecute people for only showing nazi symbols, independent of context? So for example, documentary series are forbidden?

To be clear, I still stand by what I said, but I don't think it's fair to equate "pedophile art" with nazi symbology. What I said is meant to be taken as a powerful but general rule that cautions against restricting art (and thus, restricting thought and expression) on the basis of fuzzy logic, hatred towards the content, racism, or any other sort of bias not supported by reality. In this regard, I don't think the logic behind restricting "pedophile art" has the same weight as the logic behind restricting nazi symbology (not even close).

It is concerning to me that there are now international (Western ?) guidelines[1] (2016) and conventions that don't seem to realise the consequences of taking a hard stance on the combination of three of their points :

- a child is any person under the age of 18 years

- including non-explicit sexual activities

- any material that visually depicts a child [engaged in those]

Am I missing something, or have they 'criminalised' a quite large chunk of art ?!?

[1] https://ecpat.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Terminology-gui...

Then we have these guidelines embedded in automated systems (sometimes with people as 'cogs'), add a pinch of pressure by puritans in power of various stripes, and a decade later we end up with payment networks forcing platforms to kick out artists even when what they are doing is not illegal in their respective jurisdictions !

For clarification, you got raided despite using tor? You mention tor but dont say so directly so I'm not sure.

I've don't use Tor. I've never had a reason to.

All the artwork websites I access are publically accessible artwork websites.

Publically accessible doesn't necessarily mean legal.

They're all long established websites. The oldest one I have an account on (and use to get posters) is 2007.

Also doesn't mean they're legal.

Maybe no point beating up the guy. Maybe he's slightly naive.

Honestly I have been wondering more and more about it but what stops websites from having a bot on signal/(session? although I hate the crypto stuff/ may I recommend matrix/simplex)?

Like creating a bot on signal which has its own phone number (and sorry that you got raided) but I am pretty sure that the upload/download of anime artwork websites could be done through signal and the only thing I know about signal is that the one time US govt asked it to share something the only thing it gave was the ip address and when registered and literally nothing else.

Signal recently added the abilities of usernames which keep it private and with many other things I think this is a fascinating idea to build upon. I see a lot of telegram bots but honestly signal has a hard time making bots in general because they dont really surface an api itself so people go ahead and all signal's api you see on github use this project which actually has decompiled version of java

Signal and proton are two organizations that I trust a lot in our current privacy hostile world and I hope that people who have built bots or have any suggestions/opinion can discuss it in this discussion as parts of the worlds are going towards authoritarianism.

Although going further into the thread, my naivety made me realize what sort of anime pictures we are talking about and I don't really support it but still this is being a slippery slope too where as other commenter pointed out, it can be used to get more spying overall on the general public too

Manga used to be distributed on irc, you would message a bot and it woul initiate a file transfer.

IRC is such a simple protocol seeing its implementation in <1k loc in many languages and I assume bot building process must be simple too compared to signal.

I have built bare minimum hello world bots in simplex and session and I think both had a lot of troubles to go through but if someone's interested, they can look at simplex for bot creation but they started to have client side verification/alert of content which admittedly is a very honeypot-alike activity/slippery slope itself.

Signal has some of the least controversies even though its centralized, Matrix is another good one and personally I sort of prefer matrix because all these other protocols require apps whereas matrix can work on top of a browser thus having more widespread adoption imo.

XMPP is another good protocol and at this point pardon me for yapping but I once saw someone break a nat using XMPP and using it to create website endpoint creation which was good too but personally I feel like signal is the most trustworthy overall. I wish someone can make signal's bot genuinely simple as telegram bot creation as there is a lot of potential

> this is honestly going to get much worse

Just like with Brexit, the majority of UK's population voted (and will keep voting) for this.

"God save the queen, the fascist regime"

I was curious and searched to find more context and ... uh, no offense but what on earth have you been doing that you've been tangling with the law over CSAM for at least four years?

Watching anime, looking at anime artwork, reading manga since 2006.

Why else would you criminally investigate artwork websites if your aim is not to arrest artists and those who look at their artwork? (And eventually use them as an excuse to show why encryption is evil, and how "evil artists" could be caught more easily if it was backdoored.)

If you're looking for news, there won't be any yet as, as I said, I'm still under investigation.

I think it really depends on what kind of anime you’re talking about. Like if you’re watching one piece fan art and the British police raided you, absolutely ridiculous. If you’re looking at naked artistic depictions of minors then it’s clearly not just “anime artwork”. BTW I’m not saying that someone who looks at that should be treated the same way as someone who harms a child but I’m just saying the cultural acceptance in the uk between those two extremes is vast.

They just said "illegal" artwork, they didn't stipulate. (So this could be incest, bestiality, loli, etc, etc.)

Why would cultural acceptance matter? Classifying drawing something - regardless of what it is - as a "crime" is ridiculous.

Like, for example, I don't like rape (or strangulation, something else they'll start arresting people for now since they recently made it a crime), but I don't want to see people jailed for drawing it, or jailed for looking at anime/drawings/manga/visual novels of/containing it.

I'd rather see people who actually abuse, exploit or cause general suffering to another human being arrested and jailed.

> I think it really depends on what kind of anime you’re talking about

Does it? If I draw a naked stick figure with boobs and say it is 14, is that morally wrong? At what point should a person care? Their point is that a drawing doesn't hurt people right?

Just because it’s hard to spot the point where it becomes immoral doesn’t mean it’s not immoral. I can’t tell you at what point a person should care, and I wouldn’t want to be the judge of that. My point is that saying they’re looking at “anime” is really downplaying what’s happening. I don’t personally believe the drawings we’re referring to hurt anyone, but that had nothing to do with my argument anyway. Many people will be disgusted by it, and others will not, meanwhile most people seem to be okay with mainstream anime.

> If I draw a naked stick figure with boobs and say it is 14, is that morally wrong? At what point should a person care?

No and I'm sure every judge in Britain would throw that case out.

> Their point is that a drawing doesn't hurt people right?

It can in certain circumstances encourage a market or normalise abusive behaviour.

> It can in certain circumstances encourage a market or normalise abusive behaviour.

Just like the printed word. Books should be banned and burned. We should start with Orwell since his writing has been used as a manual for so much abusive behaviour.

Hate speech is also illegal in the UK, yes.

>"It can in certain circumstances encourage..."

Anything can be bad in "certain circumstances". They should go get busy with some real crime.

> Anything can be bad in "certain circumstances"

Can it? In the same way? It feels like your argument comes down to handwaving. Circumstantial law is hardly a novel thing.

> Can it? In the same way? It feels like your argument comes down to handwaving. Circumstantial law is hardly a novel thing.

I think that was their point: your argument seems handwavey, because anything can be bad "in certain circumstances".

Hold the door for someone? Seems nice. But you could be insulting them by doing so. Or letting a virus in by having the door open too long. Or wasting energy and contributing to climate change by letting the conditioned air out. Indeed, under certain circumstances, it's bad.

Sure, many things can be "bad" if you are happy to go with increasingly absurd reasoning, but I Think that's quite an unfair misrepresentation of both what I said above and of the arguments that were raised in parliament before this law was introduced. Insulting someone by holding a door open might be "bad" but could you really argue for legislating against it? Bringing in the word bad moves the goalposts quite a bit in order to frame the original position as equally limp and absurd.

How do you determine that though? Do you put the pictures in front of a jury? I am riding the metro daily in a big Asian city and I am pretty sure many of the "anime" ads will be unacceptable on the other side of the world.

I can't really connect what you're saying here. I understand that you think drawing loli (I imagine) shouldn't be classified as pedophelia, but what does the law say?

Part of living in a society is compromise. I don't believe that certain stretches of road close to my home should have a 50kph speed limit, but when I get a ticket I also accept that I'm in the wrong.

If you're of the opinion that drawing children having sex (assuming again) shouldn't be illegal, you should be lobbying/advocating for that position. Changing the compromise. Otherwise you're, like me driving too fast, at the mercy of the justice system.

Laws don't require your personal conviction to matter. Sometimes we don't get to do something, even though we personally believe it to be perfectly acceptable.

> If you're of the opinion that drawing children having sex (assuming again) shouldn't be illegal, you should be lobbying/advocating for that position. Changing the compromise. Otherwise you're, like me driving too fast, at the mercy of the justice system.

That only makes sense if your general stance to everything is "forbidden unless explicitly permitted". I hope I don't have to say why that sounds oppressive.

There is more than one way to achieve a compromise in society.

> That only makes sense if your general stance to everything is "forbidden unless explicitly permitted"

Not at all. The UK, just as an example, explicitly bans images (as opposed to photographs, which are covered under different law) of children that are pornographic and obscene. That is, by legal professionals, interpreted as including manga, comics, and CGI.

You do not need some universal "default position" to understand the laws as they currently exist.

Whether such laws already exist or not was not my point. The problem is that such laws are overreaching in nature.

The problem lies on the wide margin of interpretation those laws give the police.

50kph is a number.

"Sexualized drawings of children" is certainly open to discussion.

I remember the scandal when an American Apparel ad depicted a young woman in a thong. People were outraged because she looked minor. In fact, she was 21 years old. I wonder if people think she shouldn’t get any jobs modeling lingerie just because she appears to be underage. To be clear, the ad had nothing to suggest underage girls, just a girl in a thong which I hope everyone agrees does not have any connection to being underage, quite the opposite.

The "height of consent" is a topic that's been circulating among petite women online lately. A lot of people (mostly in western countries) seem to be of the mind that if women don't exceed a certain stature and level of buxomness, they're not an adult (or at least, shouldn't be treated as one), which is directly at odds with the hundreds of millions of women who live out their entire lives never making it past 5'4"/1.63m and/or never developing a shapely figure.

In these online discussions, the affected women express frustration with constant infantilization, being treated as adolescents even well into their 40s, ranging from suspicious glares when in public with their partners to being told that they should never marry because by doing so they'd being enabling deleterious tendencies, which is pretty screwed up.

On the flip side, girls who develop unusually early have historically been treated as if they were adults, which is also extremely screwed up and has resulted in a lot of trauma that routinely gets swept under the rug.

The west has some really weird ideas and hangups that they need to work through. How about treating people their actual age instead of using their physical appearance as a proxy?

I know it's HN and we love her numbers but legislation that requires interpretation by judge or jury isn't at all unusual. There are also several layers of oversight and courts of appeal in the UK, which are separate from the government.

For a long time there was push to handle some of that under magistrate courts and other approaches so that to properly defend you have to appeal to actually get in front of proper court.

There was at least one case where prosecution never, ever, seen the evidence of supposed CSAM found on accused's computer, and if not for the lucky person having a slightly less overworked public defender, they had high chances of being found "guilty" if of minor offense for having what used to be staple of family photo albums - photo of the toddler grand-kids playing in kiddy pool, which was reported by computer tech at a laptop repair business.

50kph is a number, but that number is (in my jurisdiction) determined by the police. The laws describe a number of things they must consider when making the decision, and for every one of those aspects, reasonable people can disagree.

Then there's the fact that such a number is nearly impossible to assess in messy reality, so we usually have a bit of leeway. Who is to say I was going 52 and not 49kph? Reasonable minds can disagree, but if we do, the judge gets the final say.

> "Sexualized drawings of children" is certainly open to discussion.

I think you'll find that discussion to be very short if you show "average" people the kinds of things that are posted online. It's like Megan Kelly arguing that Epstein wasn't really a pedophile because they were 15 and not 8. That argument might work in certain circles of the internet, but nobody outside of those circles find that distinction interesting.

The problem as stated in the original comment isn't that child porn as drawings is forbidden, or even that the interpretation of such is ambiguous. Or to be precise, it is not the only problem. The argument made is that these laws do not exist for their apparent intent (safety of children), but only as an excuse to exercise otherwise unlawful oppression and suppression of freedoms.

I don't find this assertion very plausible honestly, especially if this would be an argument against the existence of these very laws, because its not really an argument against government backdoors and such.

You could make the same argument (of ambiguity) with almost any crime, because there are always cases where a crime is hard to prove completely without any risk of failure, especially in the realm of sexual assault.

I'm not taking a position here, honestly I'm unsure about it, but the reasoning is sloppy and the allegations of abuse seemingly pulled out of thin air. There is also no case for why the poster is being investigated other than the pornography. It would be more plausible if there was some kind of civil disobedience involved. As stated, I'm inclined to put this in the category conspiracy theory.

Wasn't his comment exactly "advocating for that position"?

I like this answer posted in the other leg of this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352710

I think an argument for the ambiguity of sexualized drawings of children must include specific examples. If he's not posting examples, I'm left assuming he probably knows they are indefensible.

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