I was keeping tabs on the drama going on these past few months and after reading many, many pages of wild ranting from the latest rule change I really feel like I need to give a PSA pointing this out. especially considering some ya are talking about moving to Canada or sending the servers to the lawless Behuma triangle, or straight ups attacking the mods.

You, as an citizen of your country have a constitutional right to vote, amend and abolish the rules of the land your forefathers has fought for, & peacefully demonstrate yourself against ones you disagree with.

If you really like your shota/loli stuff, sibling shipping, frisky ferals, vore gore, then perhaps you should at least try to make a voice for yourself then just getting kink shamed into oblivion from people using it as a power move in politics. Unionize, boycotts the businesses that censoring you out, show people why the things you like aren't as bad as they think it is. the LGBT community itself started off from a group of stigmatized people and now where are we in 2024?

- edited to be more global friendly, kudo to spe pointing that out

I highly doubt any of that is going to have an effect on things like what a webpage like e621 allows.

They can't even specify which supposed laws or political aspects are influencing this change in the first place.

No point redirecting energy in a direction that won't do any good.

qwazzy said:
I highly doubt any of that is going to have an effect on things like what a webpage like e621 allows.

They can't even specify which supposed laws or political aspects are influencing this change in the first place.

No point redirecting energy in a direction that won't do any good.

Well it's pretty easy to google it and figure out for yourself which countries have laws against this kind of content. It is legal in the US, but we don't serve only the US.

spe said:
Well it's pretty easy to google it and figure out for yourself which countries have laws against this kind of content. It is legal in the US, but we don't serve only the US.

depending on what being features which considering recent events it unfortunately it a gray area, at least in the sense of what the courts pursue or not. it still falls under the obscenity laws specifically 1466A. it would be determine by a jury of your peer or the judge on whether it "obscene" meaning whenever Enforcement feel like it, they can just confisicate your Computer and give you a ultimatums of showing your friend & neighbors what you do in private or just accept a plea deal for charges just as bad as real CSAM per 2252A(b)(1). so uh yes, that 1000 year old anime vampire, you'll get 5 years if you land on the radar, if Uncle Sam really wants you.

The paradigm that the least powerful in society should have to individually struggle against the most powerful(governments, corporations, banks etc) to elicit change or uphold human rights has never produced results, ever.

alphamule said:
Are we using ChatGPT to write our essays? Some sarcasm but it feels formulaic.

I'm probably taking this a little harder than I should.
No, but the only reason I don't think it's the other way around is I just simply never produced enough material to train from.

letforeverdieslow said:
The problem is ultimately not the state in any traditional sense we've been taught.
No, there's no conspiracy, no organized, cohesive effort, get that out of your head, I'm not talking about that, I am not speaking of anything that is either immoral nor moral.

Business is amoral.
We have been taught, then conditioned, to only consider the state, to consider something that fundementally represents the democratic process - while also destroying it - as a singular cohesive object to ridicule and attack, alongside business, but it's ultimately a financial interest that undermines democracy at it's core.

Edward Bernays & Uncle Siggie saw the masses as something that could not be trusted the power of representation. That their thoughts and feelings had to be controlled and purposely directed.
Transformed into, as I believe President Hoover called the american citizenry in 1929, on the eve of the crash, "Happiness Machines".

From Bernays' adaptation of Sigmund's theorys to produce Public Relations, to "Torches of Freedom", the idea that became implanted in our minds that you must fulfill who you really are Inside with purchasable goods Outside, to the idea of Identity As A Product, the transformation of individualism's politics into raw material for marketing, and everything from Tech Industry Barons telling themselves "If everyone falls for it, they deserve it, and we are simply better than them" and the rest,
what everyone is facing in the world (This one dumb little website's mild mannered debacle is just one example) is something that is beyond governance, beyond dignity, beyond politics.
I'm not saying it can't yet be regulated, controlled, and kept polite and decent by democracy, but I'm also not quite saying it's the most plausible or viable route to take, with any current understanding of what the world currently is.

Yannis Varroufakis has come to start calling the economic system we live in as Techno-Feudalism, rather than Neo-Liberal Capitalism.
I would sooner call it Neo-Feudalism instead because tech companies already get enough handjobs to think everything is all about them.

The point is that whatever you want to call it, it was always bound to seperate from democracy and as far back as when it was just regular old Capitalism in the 20s. We can either have it, or we can have democracy, we can have the state or corporate factions, but they are completely opposed to each other.

I'm still saying to be politically active, just in a different, harder, more informed way (Stop allowing yourself to be used against yourself).
You can either be for or against what happened here, probably already recognize it's one aspect of a bigger series of events, but you need to know how you've been used so that, as you go forward, you can stop yourself from being continuously redirected and funneled into more profitable routes. Like the one where we either vote republican or democrat. Or we buy merchandise to express our political views instead.

The only other thing I can add, is that when the Patriot Act as signed, everyone was only worried about what the state could do.
We didn't stop to imagine that the real power it gave went to corporations. Like Google.
That and this whole thing clearly (for the most part) happened because a credit card company or two made a decision with no pre-existing law or regulation that said it couldn't just simply affect it's peasantry on a whim without any review or recourse or due process since "Companies are people, too."

But is a company still a person if you don't have an immediately presentable ass to kick, though?

Are we using ChatGPT to write our essays? Some sarcasm but it feels formulaic.

That's all well and good, but what are you supposed to say to them?

"Dear Sir
I am a man that is sexually aroused by centaurs' severed heads being penetrated in their neck holes and I am concerned as horsefuckercentral was blacklisted by advertisers rendering it unable to function

Please look into this

Your constituent
Mr. Hands

That's how you look to them, so what can we do?

kaizo_kitto said:

"we're the Virtual Canvas Coalitions representing artists and their supporters, and we wish to express xyz laws violate their freedom of expression which are victimless activities that Justice are making victims out of them. we have over 10,000 petition of advocates who agree mere digital pixels shouldn't be a reason someone lose actual years from their real life, or to have these harmless communities be descriminated against."

that seem pretty reasonable, all of this have in common of being expressions at the end of the day, so why not defend that? you first need change the narrative if you don't want Godaddy, advertisers, vigilants etc to keep treating you as they want.

Voting isn't going to stop Big Corpo from doing whatever they want. No amount of voting will beat money. We can't vote visa, Mastercard, GoDaddy, Paypal, etc. into not being shit faces.

supermarcopolo said:
"we're the Virtual Canvas Coalitions representing artists and their supporters, and we wish to express xyz laws violate their freedom of expression which are victimless activities that Justice are making victims out of them. we have over 10,000 petition of advocates who agree mere digital pixels shouldn't be a reason someone lose actual years from their real life, or to have these harmless communities be descriminated against."

that seem pretty reasonable, all of this have in common of being expressions at the end of the day, so why not defend that? you first need change the narrative if you don't want Godaddy, advertisers, vigilants etc to keep treating you as they want.

Great, now we just have to make that organization and 10,000 petitioners real.

purelyforablacklist said:
Voting isn't going to stop Big Corpo from doing whatever they want. No amount of voting will beat money. We can't vote visa, Mastercard, GoDaddy, Paypal, etc. into not being shit faces.

That was essentially the point I was getting at before.

We're dealing with a state that effectively does not exist beyond a managerial, PR role, and with private interests having effectively replaced it, one needs to base their political activity around that fact.

We can’t even get things we NEED as a society on the ballot, we aren’t ever going to fix the problems that affect the majority of people living here, and now people wanna talk about trying to get something we simply desire from a political class that doesn’t even care about anything important, much less something as relatively unimportant but still shitty as this? Personally I think it’s hilarious and absurd on its face but if people wanna cling to that I’m not gonna stop ‘em. lol

kaizo_kitto said:
Great, now we just have to make that organization and 10,000 petitioners real.

There is no shortage of people who would like to be part of something like that, you just have to know where to look into.

purelyforablacklist said:
Voting isn't going to stop Big Corpo from doing whatever they want. No amount of voting will beat money. We can't vote visa, Mastercard, GoDaddy, Paypal, etc. into not being shit faces.

No amount of voting will beat their money, but the money of all of us together could beat their money.

supermarcopolo said:
depending on what being features which considering recent events it unfortunately it a gray area, at least in the sense of what the courts pursue or not. it still falls under the obscenity laws specifically 1466A. it would be determine by a jury of your peer or the judge on whether it "obscene" meaning whenever Enforcement feel like it, they can just confisicate your Computer and give you a ultimatums of showing your friend & neighbors what you do in private or just accept a plea deal for charges just as bad as real CSAM per 2252A(b)(1). so uh yes, that 1000 year old anime vampire, you'll get 5 years if you land on the radar, if Uncle Sam really wants you.

As far as I know, nobody in the US has actually been prosecuted for drawing or possessing 1000-year old anime loli drawings as, no matter what individual laws say, it will most likely still be protected as free expression under the first amendment. Much of Europe and many other countries have no such protections, and there have been arrests for that kind of artwork over there. Of course, this wouldn't be a problem for us if we were strictly limited to the US, but we are not.

spe said:
As far as I know, nobody in the US has actually been prosecuted for drawing or possessing 1000-year old anime loli drawings as, no matter what individual laws say, it will most likely still be protected as free expression under the first amendment. Much of Europe and many other countries have no such protections, and there have been arrests for that kind of artwork over there. Of course, this wouldn't be a problem for us if we were strictly limited to the US, but we are not.

One thing I think that more and more people don't realize is that employment has also been going global. More and more companies are employing or contracting with people from outside of the country in which they reside, and as companies do this, the process becomes cheaper and better known. I know you staff can't say, but it's very likely that at least part of what's going on here is that there's at least a few employees which fall into this group working for Dragonfruit, its subsidiaries, or its affiliates. The employers aren't huge, as NMNY indicated, and one's employer having a business relationship with a company that's actively breaking another country's laws can put the aforementioned employees at risk.

In regards to the topic on hand, even outside the USA, people need to contact their representatives (if they hopefully have any) and try to explain why freedom of expression is important, even for the porn industry. It'd also be good to explain that by outlawing speech, it doesn't cause that speech to change, it just pushes said speech towards the darker corners of the web.

kyureki said:
One thing I think that more and more people don't realize is that employment has also been going global. More and more companies are employing or contracting with people from outside of the country in which they reside, and as companies do this, the process becomes cheaper and better known. I know you staff can't say, but it's very likely that at least part of what's going on here is that there's at least a few employees which fall into this group working for Dragonfruit, its subsidiaries, or its affiliates. The employers aren't huge, as NMNY indicated, and one's employer having a business relationship with a company that's actively breaking another country's laws can put the aforementioned employees at risk.

In regards to the topic on hand, even outside the USA, people need to contact their representatives (if they hopefully have any) and try to explain why freedom of expression is important, even for the porn industry. It'd also be good to explain that by outlawing speech, it doesn't cause that speech to change, it just pushes said speech towards the darker corners of the web.

Yeah, this. OP's injunction to petition your representatives isn't necessarily wrong, it just doesn't really apply to the US right now. This site has a ton of European users who this applies to, though.

IMHO Petition for new/better site owners

Yes but please do not derail the convo I don’t want this one to get locked too

electricitywolf said:
There is no shortage of people who would like to be part of something like that, you just have to know where to look into.

No amount of voting will beat their money, but the money of all of us together could beat their money.

The top 1% of American earners control more wealth than the nation's entire middle class. So no, the money of all people enjoying weird drawn porn doesn't make a dent on their money and the billionaires would just fly to Epstein Island II.

dimoretpinel said:
Yes but please do not derail the convo I don’t want this one to get locked too

Guess they should reopen it? They didn't even warn people insulting others or equating them to every insult under the sun, but they sure were able to warn/perma people for being AGAINST changes made. If they don't allow people to comment on it, that's on them.

omniscient said:
Guess they should reopen it? They didn't even warn people insulting others or equating them to every insult under the sun, but they sure were able to warn/perma people for being AGAINST changes made. If they don't allow people to comment on it, that's on them.

TBH, almost everything possible was said there, and it was just repeating same things. "this thread has ran its course and will be locking it." IOW

Yeah, this one will likely get closed as well if it devolves into the same thing.

alphamule said:
TBH, almost everything possible was said there, and it was just repeating same things. "this thread has ran its course and will be locking it." IOW

Yeah, this one will likely get closed as well if it devolves into the same thing.

Not really they didn't answer half the questions about things and don't seem to care to respond to DMs or handle mods abusing stuff.

I don’t think they have the time/ressources to answer every DMail right now, especially if they recieved a lot of hate mail- remind me what does this have to do with lawmakers?

omniscient said:
Not really they didn't answer half the questions about things and don't seem to care to respond to DMs or handle mods abusing stuff.

To be fair "We can't/won't publicly answer that" IS an answer, which is what a lot of questions were receiving.