#cw csam

[merr-murr]

CW : L0l1, CSA, CSAM, Harassment

Apparently there's a hate brigade running after me because some people cannot separate fiction from fantasy. I've had to say it on my Twitter and despite my lack of adult content on this account, people have made it their prerogative to harass me on multiple platforms.

if you genuinely think that drawings of fictional characters is equal to the suffering of real children put in abusive situations, get the FUCK off of my blog. I dealt with CSA my entire childhood and all of my teens years, including being groomed. I tried not to let this whole thing get to me, but people calling me a child predator because I made a fucking DRAWING that they found icky is one of the most insane things they could have possibly done. ESPECIALLY to someone who was a victim and would never wish that pain on anyone else.

My ASSAULT is not equal to demon children in a cartoon. Real people are not equal to fictional characters. You can say it's gross, you can say you don't like, hell, you can even be a fascist and say we should censor art you don't agree with! But don't ever compare me to an abuser because I drew naughty art of cartoon characters without sentience.

I will not apologize for having tastes that don't align with some online fascists who save art that THEY think is CSAM to their own hard drives to "call people out." You're a freak if you are saving material that you think is genuinely CSAM. You're a freak if you are encouraging people to go interact with someone who you think is a predator. You're a freak if you think human children are as worthless as cartoon drawings. You're a freak if you equate the real abuse and suffering of real people in any capacity to a factitious scenario created for kicks.

If you actually give a fuck about protecting children, stop wasting your time on a random artist (a CSAA victim) who drew a singular piece of l0l1 art and maybe volunteer your services to charities that help REAL CHILDREN.

Get over yourself and go touch some damn grass.

TLDR; If you think real children being abused is even remotely equal (legally OR morally) to cartoon drawings of fake demon characters, I do not want you following me or interacting with me as a CSA survivor.

[llitchilitchi]

an AU where Dream's prison stay does not go quite according to the plan, and everyone is haunted by a living ghost

all dsmp rp

Dream suffered through everything in prison to protect Punz, to hide their partnership, their collaboration, the fact that Punz has the revive book.

but things never went quite the way Dream hoped, did they? so when he dies in prison during torture, Sam pays Punz to help him drag the body out and bury it with a promise to keep his mouth shut for a high enough pay.

the grave is nondescript, far away from the mainland SMP - there is no one to come visit, no one to come mourn. there is no need to do much except dump the body in the hole and put dirt on top. he's met with no eulogy.

Sam departs soon, leaving Punz staring at the fresh patch of dirt. it's maybe an hour after that Punz takes the shovel again and digs the body out, a book and a flint and steel ready in his pocket when he drags the ruined body back to the surface and brings Dream back. they can continue their work, now, in hiding, far from the rest of the server despite their plan diverging with this sudden turn of events.

no one knows that Dream has been revived. no one but Punz.

so Sam and Quackity feel their throats close the next time they get a ping "Dream joined the server"

they just hope his ghost will have forgotten like Wilbur's did

[txttletale]

did you hear about the LAION stuff?

yeah i mean it is obviously really fucking bad but i think a lot of the reporting on it is disingenous in presenting this as a specific problem or failure of LAION / the AI sector when it is really just indicative of a much wider problem with the prevalence of CSAM on the internet. like, ending up with CSAM in your dataset is kind of a natural consequence of scraping the public facing internet, because places like facebook and twitter are fucking rife with it. facebook removed more than 70 million posts last year for violating its CSAM policy -- if we give them the extremely generous benefit of the doubt and say that their moderation is capable of catching 99% of it, that's still 700,000 CSAM images/videos left up in 2022 alone. like a lot of things with AI, it's just showcasing a much wider problem that's unfortunatley much more difficult to resolve.

[lemmaeof]

So it turns out that every single major image generator - Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, DALL-E, all of them - was trained on a dataset that includes thousands of images of literal child porn

[chrysalizzm]

[wip] inspo from this post by @kiuda im drawing smth for all of them i prommy but uhhh heres the lineart for cawesamdream

warnings: mild nudity, implied abuse

[salora-rainriver]

the lily orchard thing is weird because the primary callout for her that i've seen comes from a youtube channel with absolutely no sense of proportion, putting "wrote a shock fic years ago" and "featured as a character in feral furry porn" right next to "actually groomed minors" as though these are all equally bad and worthy of scorn. it makes me realize that even when we're right that someone is a bad person, we can still fall into transphobic ways of framing it

Okay full disclosure: i don’t know what youtube vid you’re talking about. I did watch A Videos on Orchard.

So first off I get the point about proportionality, theres absolutely a difference between writing stockholm and that whole stint where she encouraged a teen and an adult to “breed”, and I do agree that any callout should make the difference in severity clear,

But im not sure that, in this case, someone failing to make that distinction clear is A Transphobia. And that’s because… I’m not convinced Stockholm was intended to be a shock fic. I can definitely see where one may draw such a conclusion, I just personally feel otherwise, I feel like Stockholm is itself morally wrong. I feel the same way about it that I feel about “lolicon” art, and asking me to not mark the fic as a slight against Orchard feels odd to me, because I would be uncomfortable with Butch Hartman writing material like that. I would want to know that he wrote this, feels no remorse for writing it, intends to make media for children while having written that.

People draw their personal lines in the sand in different places, particularly when it comes to fictional depictions of That Shit. Someone’s Lolita (a harsh and uncomfortable work thats clearly not glorifying the act once you sit down and engage with it fairly) is going to be another’s [idk insert literal fucking CP here], and the wide diversity of art makes it nigh-impossible to be able to draw a line between Acceptable and Unacceptable.

And for what it’s worth, the above ^^^ is why Im frustrated with the binary framing of the pro-ship and anti-ship discourse. It just doesn’t work, even the most ardently pro-ship person is going to draw their line somewhere, and even the most ardently anti-ship is going to look at someone else’s judgement and go “but theres nothing wrong with this”. And ultimately, the two camps of pro and anti… don’t actually exist. Ask me honestly which camp I fall in and I genuinely wouldn’t be able to tell you, and if you interrogate your personal moral values and feelings about various dubious media honestly, you’ll realize that you can’t, either.

Sorry. This is a ramble. I’ll summarize:

- I think it’s important to know that Orchard wrote Stockholm, and to allow people to judge her for writing that, because many believe that works like these are morally wrong, period end of, and it’s not transmisogyny for one to judge this fic the same way they judge similar works from cishet writers.

- despite having that opinion, I do agree that the real grooming is much worse than the fic, and agree that making this distinction clear is important.

- I also think its dangerous to discuss the morality of fictional media from an all-or nothing binary framing, because the truth is we do not genuinely hold such extreme positions in real life, we all have a limit somewhere on the spectrum in either direction, which is my main frustration with pro-ship and anti-ship discourse, because you can never fully belong to either camp. Your position on the issue will be a mix of both. Pro some ships, anti other ships.

I hope thats clear? Thanks for the thoughtful ask. Also, mandatory “pls be gentle I’m the birthday girl”

[the-bar-sinister]

Why are people mad about ao3 now?

Do I wanna know?

The founder of dreamwidth and a former OTW volunteer are stirring shit about the organization's alleged mishandling of the situation wherein malicious actors were terrorizing OTW with CSAM, and the ongoing situation where malicious actors attempt to upload CSAM to the archive.

The short version is that people are mad that the OTW "forces" volunteers to deal with CSAM, ignoring the fact that all of OTW is volunteers, in favor of smearing OTW as malicious oppressors.

[candyrushsweetest]

People Don’t Understand...

AI art has most definitely used children in those inappropriate artworks.

It doesn’t matter how much that an AI “art” program wants to deny it. Millions of photos exist within those tags and photos. You don’t know where the AI is GETTING those images.

You just think you’re getting free p0rn, don’t you?

I understand that some people can’t always afford to commission an artist, but why go to a program that is exploiting children since it analyzes photos and art from the Internet?

Who is to say that you didn’t exploit and harm a kid by just generating it?

I know for a FACT that it exploits children. There are some art programs that don’t even block out the word CHILD from their generator.

They are purposefully ignoring it so they can’t claim liability when this type of “art” can exploit children to unknowing individuals without any knowledge of how AI works.

They look through databases and try to “de-fuse” the image from all those random things they found via the prompt provided.

Children might have used some of the words you put in those prompts, so you may come across something you didn’t want to.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So, what’s your opinion on this?

[llitchilitchi]

i love your creeper csam design so much!!! i've been wondering, is there a specific real-life creature you were inspired by? the way you draw him feels very spider-like to me except spiders arent quadrupeds

thank you!

there wasn't really any conscious real-life inspiration going into the design as far as I remember, I just wanted to do a creeper design that wasn't a cat centaur cause those were becoming popular at the time and I thought to myself "hey, the warden is fucking terrifying, let's make him even more so"

the main influence on the design were some old concept sketches I did back before I even got into dsmp (back in 2020) when I was messing around with some creepy "biblically accurate" angel designs. this is one I was able to find

[untitledgoosegay]

The dataset included known CSAM scraped from a wide array of sources, including mainstream social media websites and popular adult video sites. [ ... ] There are methods to minimize CSAM in datasets used to train AI models, but it is challenging to clean or stop the distribution of open datasets with no central authority that hosts the actual data.

Other people in the replies have pointed out cases of AI being trained to recognize CSAM in order to automate detection and reporting -- or, in the case of image generation AI, so that the AI won't produce CSAM.

It's still a real bad look for Google, but I'm seeing people in the tags approaching QAnon-tier conspiracy shit, and it just isn't.

Hey Google what the fuck was that

[f-list-questionable]

Interesting, I sure hope this person isn't yet another shonen fan pretending their objects of lust aren't undera--

Just kidding! of course it is.

I am so tired.

[guiltywisdom]

Hi, it's the anon from before with the whole, um, CSEM art situation, I guess you could call it. I thought you might appreciate an update.

The police have launched an investigation into this. The consistency of the art makes it clear that there was another victim, but trying to pinpoint who she is will take time. At first they thought maybe it was referenced off of me, but then they found posts of the art on another site where my abuser had spoken to someone in the comments and indicated that she and I were different people (he called us "both of his girls", which is so creepy, like he thought he owned us). So they do believe me and they are looking for the other victim, because even if she doesn't want to press charges she and her family need to know that they can and know the art is still circulating.

My foster parents are pretty exasperated with me. I promised for years that I wasn't seeking out and having art of me taken down and that I wouldn't keep obsessing over it. Instead I did. My foster dad figured out the password to my laptop, looked at my internet history and was just horrified by how much time I'd been spending on this. He asked how long I was spending per day looking into things and when I said, honestly, about two hours a day, he put his head in his hands and just looked tired. He's not angry. My foster mom thinks she's to blame for not getting me more involved in more hobbies and helping me have a better social life that would keep me from doing this. We're all probably going to have to sit down and have a talk with my therapist about this.

My therapist is really disappointed that I've been lying to her about not digging into this stuff regularly, but she forgives me. She says a common trauma response is a need to please people that results in lying about your failings to them. It's more grace and kindness than I deserve, for sure.

I have actually stopped spending anxious nights curled up digging up every single image hosting site I can find looking for things, now. Now that I know there were two of us he hurt and the police are looking for the other girl, I can breathe. It's like... you know how in video games, you'll get a little message saying a quest is complete? It feels like that. Like I did what I needed to do. I still want to look things up, but then I think, well, it'll be there later when I'm less freaked out. And I know the other girl is having the crimes against her taken seriously. When I'm feeling awful and hateful about myself, I remember that and I feel like maybe I'm not useless after all. Maybe I can do good things, even if I made mistakes along the way. And no one thought I was a pervert or a freak for being on those sites and no one was angry with me. People heard me out.

If you can pray for the other girl, I think she needs it right now more than me. She was hurt for years and never got justice and I don't even know if she knows about the art or that it's circulating. And some of it makes it look like he started hurting her when she was in diapers. I can't imagine what that's like. God has put people in my life who will be there for me even when I make mistakes and do things I promised not to, who will offer up grace and understanding. I don't know if this other girl has that. I hope she does. I hope God brings nothing but blessings and justice into her life.

Sorry for such a long update. I just wanted to update you so you didn't think anything bad happened. Things went well, more or less. Now we just need to trust in God for justice for the other victim of this awful pedophile.

I'm glad things are working out my sibling in Christ, I'm happy that you have these people in your life who care about you; you do deserve kindness and grace, everyone does. Hopefully this can be taken care of and you can move past this all and direct your energy towards something you truly enjoy. I'll pray for everyone involved. Christ is Risen.

[veetyuh]

CW: non-graphic mentions of CSAM, graphic descriptions of the mental health effects of viewing it, and rambling about antis in relation to it. If you've heard my shpiel on this, sorry in advance.

I used to do content moderation so I have seen way too much actually vile shit. CSAM included. And it is difficult to describe the gravity of what seeing that does to a normal person. But here's my best shot at what it did to me, anyway.

Imagine you're given a video from some nondescript, totally blank (firstname_numbers) account, and when you open it, you can't quite process what's happening on screen. It's not blurry or dark or otherwise obscured. It's very clear, but your brain won't allow you to accept it for a solid 30 seconds. Then, there's horror that sinks into your bones and makes your stomach turn. There's some sort of primal, lizard-brain fury mixed in — and perhaps you even fantasize over retaliating with things you didn't fancy yourself capable of. There's soul-crushing sorrow as you recall there's nothing you can do to help stop this, and all you can do is bear witness to this atrocity, then pathetically report it after the fact. The video automatically unmutes. The sounds are the worst part. If you've ever seen the brick video, this audio is similar in that it haunts you forever. It's overwhelming. You cycle between these emotions so quickly that they blend into each other, and become greater than the sum of their parts. It's a nuclear bomb set off inside your skull. You want to cry, punch a wall, and throw up. You do none of those things because you are too stunned to function. And then suddenly, there's numbness. Like a switch has turned off all the feelings in your brain. All of the unspeakable things you were feeling are gone in an instant.

Maybe you're a tougher nut to crack. Maybe the switch doesn't flip for you on the first video. So you let those emotions ride out until they've physically exhausted you. You pace and you marinate in the aftermath, feeling like you need to vent but knowing you can't. You can't even summarize what you saw without painting a picture so disturbing that it'll fuck up whoever is kind enough to listen to you. All you can do is turn to a loved one, explain that you saw something earth-shatteringly upsetting, and hope they can distract you. Maybe they express sympathy and give their best effort. Maybe you give your own best effort. Maybe you drink or use substances to get away from it, but it still festers in the back of your mind the entire time.

But that switch will flip for you, eventually. And when it does, it'll have you shitting bricks. It's like a hurricane stopping, only for you to realize you're in the eye. One moment you're feeling physically ill from the strength of your own negative emotions — the next, you can't feel anything. Your head feels different. Clearer, more room for thought. But then you move on to the next video, and the fresh horrors do nothing to you. And that's when the gravity of emotional dissociation sinks in. You can't feel anything. You could cut a man's throat and it would feel the same as tying your shoe. You have tapped into something that feels ancient. It's like you've regressed into a lower evolutionary life form incapable of emotion. Below cavemen. Humans aren't meant to experience something like this. It's the cold, unthinking indifference of a creature which could eat its own young without blinking.

But you use it for good. You use it to function when you otherwise can't, and overcome the task at hand. And it helps you tremendously as a content moderator. Eventually, you get so good at it that you can turn your emotions off at will, and do it before you even view your first video of the day.

It does not help you once you're done. While the metaphorical emotion switch can be turned off at will, turning it back on is a chore. It usually takes a while to wear off. Maybe an hour or two once you're done. But the more you do it, the harder it is to break out of it.

Imagine going back to your normal life while you're stuck in that mindset. You try to watch TV or play video games and none of it brings you any joy — like the worst, most suffocating depression. Except it isn't depression, and you have the will, the energy, and the definite need for something to take your mind off what you've seen, but nothing changes that listless straightjacket your brain is stuck in. There should be dread and panic taking root, because the accompanying thoughts are there. Is this your new normal? Will you ever feel anything again? But there is neither dread nor panic, because your body won't allow you to feel them. Not even chemical alteration gets it back on track, and it's only after you've nursed away the hangover the next morning that you can kindle a tiny spark of emotion, again. And through the searing headache, you wonder if fighting the good fight is truly worth the possibility of being stuck without feelings forever.

All of this to say, repeated CSAM exposure is anthrax. It makes you sick in ways you didn't even know were possible, and if you survive it, the experience will follow you forever. You're also not going to talk about it in public. Even vague descriptions of it are enough to seriously traumatize those who encounter it. It feels like a public safety hazard to talk about. Trigger warnings are not enough. A proper description would warrant a fucking consent form. That's something your therapist has to coax out of you like you're a Vietnam vet with war trauma.

What you DON'T do is repost it. Even if it's to argue or express anger/disgust. You don't scroll the tags looking for it, either. No one in their right fucking mind treats actual CSAM the way antis treat "cp" and that's what infuriates me the most about them. They water down the term the same way kids water down "gaslighting."

Drawings of fictional characters are not CSAM. If you can describe it publicly, if you can repost or respond to it and use it for rage bait, then it isn't CSAM. The people who do this are, very obviously, not experiencing any of the trauma which is involved with viewing real CSAM. They are acting on disgust impulses, and then they have the audacity to imply that their discomfort is tantamount to experiencing some of the most traumatizing material a person can view.

It isn't CSAM. They know that it isn't CSAM. Every sane, socialized human adult knows that it isn't CSAM and I'm exhausted with acting like it isn't incredibly offensive to call it that.

[f-list-questionable]

So they're an adult baby --a person who sexualizes items and activities of infants-- but shames other adult babies for age regressing as if it's not even weirder that they want to chew pacifiers and piss in diapers in an unaltered, adult mental state.

Have a little self awareness, "Big Stinker".

[velvetvexations]

kind of a tangent but like. as someone with a kink that's relatively innocuous and still never talks about it to anyone at any time let alone in public. i do not understand how or why some of the people on this website are so brazen as to just come right out and say "yeah i'm attracted to minors and i'm proud of that" (and personally i would not consider that to be "just a kink" myself? like i see people argue "attraction =/= harm" about it but like. who is consuming CSEM material and why is it produced then.) like i've been spending my whole life processing all this shame over something that doesn't harm anyone and still can barely talk about it even in private with a partner and they can just. say shit like that. and continue just outright saying it with no hesitation even when they get removed from the site over and over again. i just don't understand it.

Ughhhhh. Okay, I'm going to talk about my trauma that I've occasionally hinted at before now.

CW for all the above under the cut.

So when I was fourteen or thereabouts, I started being social on the internet for the first time. I always browsed the internet practically 24/7 but that was the first time I actually said anything to anyone.

I'm autistic and I was didn't handle that environment well. It led to me being in a "relationship" with someone in their twenties who groomed the fuck out of me, including with real CSAM. That led to a few years where I was active on Tumblr and a few other places as someone who claimed to be proudly attracted to minors - at the age of fourteen. This led to me getting harassed non-stop by people who knew how young I was, including daily misgendering that really wore through me. At one point someone who was older than me accused me of "losing interest" in them when they turned eighteen. When I was sixteen someone catfished me pretending to be thirteen.

Eventually I broke free from my abuser and realized I wasn't a pedophile. That would have been either when I was sixteen or seventeen, I think. But the harassment didn't end even so, and I continued to get everything I did or said scrutinized to prove I was lying about having grown past the delusions forced pushed on me and enabled by my abuser. There's still a web page up with photos of me from that time and my birth name and the town I grew up, it's great, I have constant shaking nightmare terrors about it.

So when I see the conversation around this shit, man, I don't think it's helping anyone.

[end-otw-racism]

The OTW has made a statement: https://www.transformativeworks.org/an-update-from-the-otw-board-and-chairs/

We saw! We're delighted to see more than silence, but the true test of their sincerity is whether they follow through.

They mirror those posts, btw, so you can see one version here and one here. (CW for some pretty gnarly racism and discussion of CSAM content in the comments on the post at the first link though, fair warning.) We encourage folks to leave feedback for them in the comments on either post. :)