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One of the admins at lemmy.blahaj.zone asked us to purge a community and all of
its users because they thought it was full of child sexual abuse material, aka
CSAM, fka kiddy porn. We assured them that we had checked this comm thoroughly
and we were satisfied that all of the models on it were of age. The admin then
demanded we purge the comm because they mistook it for CSAM, and claimed that
the entire point of the community was to make people think it was CSAM. We
vehemently disagreed that that was in fact the point of the community, but they
decided to defederate from us anyway. That is of course their choice, but we
will not purge our communities or users because someone else makes a mistake of
fact, and then lays the responsibility for their mistake at our feet. If someone
made a community intended to fool people into thinking it was kiddy porn, that
would be a real problem. If someone of age goes online and pretends – not
roleplays, but pretends with intent to deceive – to be a child and makes porn,
that is a real problem. Nobody here is doing that. One of the reasons we run our
instance the way that we do is that we want it to be inclusive. We don’t body
shame, and we believe that all adults have a right to sexual expression. That
means no adult on our instance is too thin, fat, bald, masculine, old, young,
cis, gay, etc., to be sexy, and that includes adults that look younger than some
people think they should. Everyone has a right to lust and to be lusted after.
There’s no way to draw a line that says “you can’t like adult people that look
like X” without crossing a line that we will not cross.
I mean, I guess you could be ok with it if you’re a pedo. Shit like this caused massive controversy for Reddit in the beginning, and it only leads to others with worse outlooks feeling safe here. I don’t know if you were around on Reddit during the r/thedonald period but that sub bred nothing but hate that quickly found a home to radicalize on the platform. Same went with Jailbait. It spawned spacedicks and other horrendous subs.
Also, as an instance dedicated to LGBT+ what if another instance was dedicated to hatred towards LGBT+? Should Blahaj continue to federate with them? What if I open a community dedicated to “communicating about how to kill a certain group?” It’s not illegal. Freedom of speech is important after all, but maybe at some point people stop just talking about something and start acting.
While the slippery slope argument can be applied to anything at the end of the day it’s really down to something super simple. This is one instance choosing to defederate from another. That’s their choice.