I think the line for most people is children. In a school library paid for by the community, the community has a legit say in what goes in there…it’s their kids and their money. You won’t please everyone but there are likely topics that will get a consensus. This isn’t banning a book in the general sense. The book can be published and can be sold. But that doesn’t mean everyone has to offer it. Freedom goes both ways.
We do make legit child porn illegal because you can’t make it without committing a crime. That is different from a story that would have such a written scene. While many would find it distasteful, it’s not illegal because no child was harmed. The messier area would be images not based on anything real. I tend to fall on the side that they are legal unless they can be shown to be based directly on an actual abuse image. But if it is literally just drawn out of someone’s (albeit twisted) imagination, then it’s legal. Not something for me, but that’s hardly a standard for anything. I understand that others will sincerely disagree with that and that’s fine. My default position typically is for freedom. That’s a big part of why I set up an instance here, left FB and never had a presence on Twitter. I want to choose for myself. I’m not even on someone else’s instance here. I’m entirely self hosted and my instance consists of me and a few bots that I run (forked an open source project and hacked it to my liking)
Online censorship is a hopeless cause. The internet is global. So whose laws and customs apply? How much time and effort was spent trying to shutdown Pirate Bay? Stuff like that needs to be handled privately. Anyone can filter at their house and it’s perfectly fine for an ISP to offer a censored service for people who want that. Governments can say what content is allowed in their jurisdiction but anyone who cares to know can figure out how to get around that.
I think the line for most people is children. In a school library paid for by the community, the community has a legit say in what goes in there…it’s their kids and their money. You won’t please everyone but there are likely topics that will get a consensus. This isn’t banning a book in the general sense. The book can be published and can be sold. But that doesn’t mean everyone has to offer it. Freedom goes both ways.
We do make legit child porn illegal because you can’t make it without committing a crime. That is different from a story that would have such a written scene. While many would find it distasteful, it’s not illegal because no child was harmed. The messier area would be images not based on anything real. I tend to fall on the side that they are legal unless they can be shown to be based directly on an actual abuse image. But if it is literally just drawn out of someone’s (albeit twisted) imagination, then it’s legal. Not something for me, but that’s hardly a standard for anything. I understand that others will sincerely disagree with that and that’s fine. My default position typically is for freedom. That’s a big part of why I set up an instance here, left FB and never had a presence on Twitter. I want to choose for myself. I’m not even on someone else’s instance here. I’m entirely self hosted and my instance consists of me and a few bots that I run (forked an open source project and hacked it to my liking)
Online censorship is a hopeless cause. The internet is global. So whose laws and customs apply? How much time and effort was spent trying to shutdown Pirate Bay? Stuff like that needs to be handled privately. Anyone can filter at their house and it’s perfectly fine for an ISP to offer a censored service for people who want that. Governments can say what content is allowed in their jurisdiction but anyone who cares to know can figure out how to get around that.