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This is an interesting saga I didn't hear anything about when it was happening. I recall seeing that Pixiv had launched an instance, but I'm honestly shocked th

This is an interesting saga I didn't hear anything about when it was happening. I recall seeing that Pixiv had launched an instance, but I'm honestly shocked that it took off like it did. It makes sense that it was appealing to artists in part due to a more lax policy regarding sensitive images. The author would've done themselves a significant favor by not wasting a bunch of space on an attempt to neutrally and imprecisely classify 'red' and 'blue' groups before dispensing with the neutrality halfway through. The neutrality wasn't especially helpful in the first place, but his "free speech" and "safe speech" labels later on are (from my interpretation of everything he describes in the series of events) both clearer and more neutral than any attempt to group sides together as 'SJWs' or 'aGG' or 'MRAs' or whatever because it describes the general point of view underlying their behavior. It may not describe those groups as entire individuals but it seems to accurately classify most of the split here - people seeking mastodon instances that are a Safe Environment (hence the incredible threat posed by federated instances not honoring privacy settings) vs people seeking mastodon instances that are moderation-light and rules-light where they can do whatever they like. The legal threat posed to server operators by caching is an interesting side angle that puts the operators in a nasty spot. It sucks that issues with fair treatment of French and Japanese speakers on Mastodon have to get sidelined by getting pulled into right-vs-left US culture wars - what Japanese artists choose to post on social media really shouldn't have anything to do with how Americans feel about concentration camps or no-platforming. In a sense, even this attempt to depict the way Japanese users were impacted by this whole saga falls flat because it centers the western parties ('red' and 'blue') in the story despite the fact that the Japanese users featured in it outnumber them. On a final note, it's interesting to see Twitter described as Blue here, as at the present time Twitter's company leadership is actively and openly courting the right wing in business meetings and online discussions (including "alt-right" leaders), presumably for business reasons but perhaps for others. I guess the political winds shift quickly.

akavel 8y ago
He notes later in the article, that at some point in more distant past the "free speech" and "safe speech" claims were used in reverse by the Blue and Red "factions": "However, I think it's significant that when we had the same fight on Livejournal ten years earlier, it was the opposite way: fictional "child pornography" in the form of explicit Harry Potter fan art and therefore "free speech" was a Blue/Left/aGG/SJW thing, with the Red/Right/Gamergate/MRA side taking what we'd now call the "safe speech" position. For that reason I'm inclined to think that the link between Culture War sides and free/safe speech is more a matter of historical accident than anything naturally flowing from whatever defines these sides." Interestingly, I remember reading somewhere some time ago (I think on some kind of "rationality" website, but not 100% sure, and probably via HN; but maybe actually in a paper book), that particular concrete views associated with some distinct political "sides"/"factions" (like "rightist vs. leftist") are often surprisingly accidental and "just" of random historical origin. Though usually explained as "rationally/logically founded on basic principles [of the faction]", in reality it seems to often be rather kind of "we say so because we say so". Unfortunately I cannot recall particular concrete examples from the article, I only remember the general idea, as it was quite shocking and surprising to me, as you can see it left a lasting impression. However, in case of the OP story, the "safe speech" vs. "free speech" swap seems a nice example of such mechanism.
makomk 8y ago
I don't think they can really avoid touching on this, because a lot of this really is more about those tribes than about any particular underlying principle. For instance, a while back there was a controversy over a US Nintendo employee who worked with kids calling for it to be legal to own photos and videos of actual kids being raped. She was blue tribe and the people who discovered this red tribe, so the entire blue tribe insisted that anyone who was with them must side with her. There was even this narrative that she wasn't really calling for this, just defending Japanese culture, and anyone who claimed otherwise was lying. (Which didn't hold up - she'd used this as one flimsy justification as to why this should be legal, but hadn't even backed this with any evidence that any Japanese people supported this, and she was calling for it to be legal in the US and everywhere else too.) The idea that Japanese works shouldn't be policed by Western cultural standards is, in general, very strongly rejected by blue tribe folks, but that changed the moment an American of the right tribe needed defending.
- kevingadd 8y ago
  I was around during the controversy you refer to, and it was largely manufactured. You're generally right about the issues in question but it's a classic case of someone being accused of being a pedophile (regardless of their position on the political spectrum - this is done frequently to right wingers and left wingers as a smear tactic) and then repeated for years without verification.
kevingadd 8y ago
After some thought, I'll give some context and depth here that the original article lacks. To begin with, I'm just going to use romanized versions of some terms from the article: ロリコン and 児童ポルノ to be specific, the former of which people tend to romanize as 'lolicon' (you may recognize that this is a shorthand for 'lolita complex') and the latter which I've never seen used, but we can call 'child pornography' as the author notes. The concerns of operators regarding federation and explicit content are actually quite significant in regards to lolicon content. If you live in Canada you don't want to be anywhere near it. There are (likely apocryphal) stories that bounce around between colleagues and friends of mine about people who were unfortunate enough to import a sex toy or anime product that had a risque piece of lolicon art on the packaging. Customs and law enforcement in Canada happen not to be particularly interested in the fine details of what is or isn't obscene, so you can end up doing some jail time or (if you're lucky) deported. This applies to other sorts of content as well. Canada is hardly the only country where you could get in trouble, it just seems to surprise people to find out that they have an aggressive stance on this compared to (for example) the United States. I mentioned "other sorts of content". Like what? Well, for example, there is a directly related concept referred to as 'shotacon', and it will also appear frequently on pixiv and other websites - not to mention on anime-focused websites like 4chan and reddit. You can treat this term as a direct equivalent to lolicon, except instead of girls it features boys. Oh, right. So since the author originally neglected to explain this, a brief summary of these two terms: Lolicon roughly describes a genre of works depicting prepubescent girls, or girls who appear to be prepubescent. Typically it is not explicitly sexual but it often has very sexual undertones, framing, or at the very least the subtext is sexual. It typically involves older men (say, high schoolers or college students) if not extremely older men. Sometimes it involves older women instead (this is basically a subgenre, with terms for it like 'oneeloli'). All of this is extremely complicated, especially if your only interest is in figuring out what the heck is going on. If presented with some of this content it can be difficult to figure out why someone might find it obscene, or why someone might NOT find it obscene. Content that is inoffensive if viewed without context can become very distressing if you learn that it's placed in a highly sexualized context. If you are a translator, or animator, or moderator, or any other sort of creative working in comics, animation or video games, you will probably run across all of this. It tends to create a fuss any time this content shows up in storefronts - Valve's Steam storefront has had lots of issues with explicit lolicon content appearing in games for sale. To return to what I brought up above, so there's a related genre called shotacon. All of the above description for lolicon applies - people draw art and animated content and make video games for these genres and subgenres. The distinction is that shotacon is about prepubescent boys, not girls, and this distinction is surprisingly important when it comes to people's determinations about whether content is obscene. It's even important in Japan, to an extent that you might not expect from reading the original article here. Some of this is because societies are used to seeing very young women married off to older men, and some of it is due to the ongoing scandals and fear regarding younger boys being exploited by older men and women. The reality is that in some parts of the United States it's legal and accepted for a 14 year old girl to marry a much older man, but if you swap the genders many people would suddenly be upset - and the same holds here. There was an incident a few years ago where a magazine in Japan publishing relatively uncontroversial shotacon comics shut down permanently, reportedly due to government threats to enforce obscenity laws against it. Now that we've gone down the rabbit hole a bit, it might be easier to understand why the mess with pixiv and the 'safe speech' vs 'free speech' types was so complicated. On the one hand you have the 'free speech' advocates who really just want to be able to say what they want and post what they want. Some of them want to post death threats, harassment, or lolicon content - but let's be honest, it's not THAT many of them. For some of them it is also not targeted at any one individual, so harm is harder to argue even if it's content (like death threats) that would normally be considered harmful and even get you a visit from the police. On the other hand you have the 'safe speech' group the article talks about, generally classifying them as people who are overly sensitive and want to police speech. This is true for at least a subset of that audience. Some people in that audience have come away from years of internet harassment and just decided they want a space where those people don't show up, so if it means hanging out with people who are really upset about anorexia, not much of a price to pay. The problem is that lolicon and shotacon content conveniently blur the lines between these groups due to the intense legal threat they pose and the cultural controversy they present. At least for a western viewer, the moral and ethical implications of this stuff are VERY complicated and they might turn your stomach. That alone would make a server operator wary of letting this stuff get federated onto their servers - but the reality that it could get you tossed in jail is very real and it would make any sensible small business owner or individual run for the hills. Are the feds really going to care about the distinction between federation, caching or distributed cloud services when they show up to your door with a photo of some Clearly Not Appropriate lolicon content appearing in a social media timeline on YOUR website? Probably not. I hope you have a good lawyer. The end result is that many server operators will end up fleeing directly into the "safe speech" territory, even if their personal preferences lie towards "free speech". This will naturally make the free speech group feel very oppressed or threatened when in reality the people making things hard for them are lawmakers and law enforcement. Naturally, in these sorts of disputes people tend to swipe at the target in front of them so you end up with trans women and proud boys shouting at each other on the internet.

akavel 8y ago

He notes later in the article, that at some point in more distant past the "free speech" and "safe speech" claims were used in reverse by the Blue and Red "factions": "However, I think it's significant that when we had the same fight on Livejournal ten years earlier, it was the opposite way: fictional "child pornography" in the form of explicit Harry Potter fan art and therefore "free speech" was a Blue/Left/aGG/SJW thing, with the Red/Right/Gamergate/MRA side taking what we'd now call the "safe speech" position. For that reason I'm inclined to think that the link between Culture War sides and free/safe speech is more a matter of historical accident than anything naturally flowing from whatever defines these sides." Interestingly, I remember reading somewhere some time ago (I think on some kind of "rationality" website, but not 100% sure, and probably via HN; but maybe actually in a paper book), that particular concrete views associated with some distinct political "sides"/"factions" (like "rightist vs. leftist") are often surprisingly accidental and "just" of random historical origin. Though usually explained as "rationally/logically founded on basic principles [of the faction]", in reality it seems to often be rather kind of "we say so because we say so". Unfortunately I cannot recall particular concrete examples from the article, I only remember the general idea, as it was quite shocking and surprising to me, as you can see it left a lasting impression. However, in case of the OP story, the "safe speech" vs. "free speech" swap seems a nice example of such mechanism.

makomk 8y ago

I don't think they can really avoid touching on this, because a lot of this really is more about those tribes than about any particular underlying principle. For instance, a while back there was a controversy over a US Nintendo employee who worked with kids calling for it to be legal to own photos and videos of actual kids being raped. She was blue tribe and the people who discovered this red tribe, so the entire blue tribe insisted that anyone who was with them must side with her. There was even this narrative that she wasn't really calling for this, just defending Japanese culture, and anyone who claimed otherwise was lying. (Which didn't hold up - she'd used this as one flimsy justification as to why this should be legal, but hadn't even backed this with any evidence that any Japanese people supported this, and she was calling for it to be legal in the US and everywhere else too.) The idea that Japanese works shouldn't be policed by Western cultural standards is, in general, very strongly rejected by blue tribe folks, but that changed the moment an American of the right tribe needed defending.

kevingadd 8y ago
I was around during the controversy you refer to, and it was largely manufactured. You're generally right about the issues in question but it's a classic case of someone being accused of being a pedophile (regardless of their position on the political spectrum - this is done frequently to right wingers and left wingers as a smear tactic) and then repeated for years without verification.

kevingadd 8y ago

After some thought, I'll give some context and depth here that the original article lacks. To begin with, I'm just going to use romanized versions of some terms from the article: ロリコン and 児童ポルノ to be specific, the former of which people tend to romanize as 'lolicon' (you may recognize that this is a shorthand for 'lolita complex') and the latter which I've never seen used, but we can call 'child pornography' as the author notes. The concerns of operators regarding federation and explicit content are actually quite significant in regards to lolicon content. If you live in Canada you don't want to be anywhere near it. There are (likely apocryphal) stories that bounce around between colleagues and friends of mine about people who were unfortunate enough to import a sex toy or anime product that had a risque piece of lolicon art on the packaging. Customs and law enforcement in Canada happen not to be particularly interested in the fine details of what is or isn't obscene, so you can end up doing some jail time or (if you're lucky) deported. This applies to other sorts of content as well. Canada is hardly the only country where you could get in trouble, it just seems to surprise people to find out that they have an aggressive stance on this compared to (for example) the United States. I mentioned "other sorts of content". Like what? Well, for example, there is a directly related concept referred to as 'shotacon', and it will also appear frequently on pixiv and other websites - not to mention on anime-focused websites like 4chan and reddit. You can treat this term as a direct equivalent to lolicon, except instead of girls it features boys. Oh, right. So since the author originally neglected to explain this, a brief summary of these two terms: Lolicon roughly describes a genre of works depicting prepubescent girls, or girls who appear to be prepubescent. Typically it is not explicitly sexual but it often has very sexual undertones, framing, or at the very least the subtext is sexual. It typically involves older men (say, high schoolers or college students) if not extremely older men. Sometimes it involves older women instead (this is basically a subgenre, with terms for it like 'oneeloli'). All of this is extremely complicated, especially if your only interest is in figuring out what the heck is going on. If presented with some of this content it can be difficult to figure out why someone might find it obscene, or why someone might NOT find it obscene. Content that is inoffensive if viewed without context can become very distressing if you learn that it's placed in a highly sexualized context. If you are a translator, or animator, or moderator, or any other sort of creative working in comics, animation or video games, you will probably run across all of this. It tends to create a fuss any time this content shows up in storefronts - Valve's Steam storefront has had lots of issues with explicit lolicon content appearing in games for sale. To return to what I brought up above, so there's a related genre called shotacon. All of the above description for lolicon applies - people draw art and animated content and make video games for these genres and subgenres. The distinction is that shotacon is about prepubescent boys, not girls, and this distinction is surprisingly important when it comes to people's determinations about whether content is obscene. It's even important in Japan, to an extent that you might not expect from reading the original article here. Some of this is because societies are used to seeing very young women married off to older men, and some of it is due to the ongoing scandals and fear regarding younger boys being exploited by older men and women. The reality is that in some parts of the United States it's legal and accepted for a 14 year old girl to marry a much older man, but if you swap the genders many people would suddenly be upset - and the same holds here. There was an incident a few years ago where a magazine in Japan publishing relatively uncontroversial shotacon comics shut down permanently, reportedly due to government threats to enforce obscenity laws against it. Now that we've gone down the rabbit hole a bit, it might be easier to understand why the mess with pixiv and the 'safe speech' vs 'free speech' types was so complicated. On the one hand you have the 'free speech' advocates who really just want to be able to say what they want and post what they want. Some of them want to post death threats, harassment, or lolicon content - but let's be honest, it's not THAT many of them. For some of them it is also not targeted at any one individual, so harm is harder to argue even if it's content (like death threats) that would normally be considered harmful and even get you a visit from the police. On the other hand you have the 'safe speech' group the article talks about, generally classifying them as people who are overly sensitive and want to police speech. This is true for at least a subset of that audience. Some people in that audience have come away from years of internet harassment and just decided they want a space where those people don't show up, so if it means hanging out with people who are really upset about anorexia, not much of a price to pay. The problem is that lolicon and shotacon content conveniently blur the lines between these groups due to the intense legal threat they pose and the cultural controversy they present. At least for a western viewer, the moral and ethical implications of this stuff are VERY complicated and they might turn your stomach. That alone would make a server operator wary of letting this stuff get federated onto their servers - but the reality that it could get you tossed in jail is very real and it would make any sensible small business owner or individual run for the hills. Are the feds really going to care about the distinction between federation, caching or distributed cloud services when they show up to your door with a photo of some Clearly Not Appropriate lolicon content appearing in a social media timeline on YOUR website? Probably not. I hope you have a good lawyer. The end result is that many server operators will end up fleeing directly into the "safe speech" territory, even if their personal preferences lie towards "free speech". This will naturally make the free speech group feel very oppressed or threatened when in reality the people making things hard for them are lawmakers and law enforcement. Naturally, in these sorts of disputes people tend to swipe at the target in front of them so you end up with trans women and proud boys shouting at each other on the internet.