marshemillow:
Oh but anon, they do alert authorities. The cybertip line, which is supposed to be for alerting the FBI in the case of real cyber abuse (of which creating CSEM definitely qualifies) has been especially clogged up by false tips within the past few years, and it is almost certainly because of the rise of antis.
It was a bit ago by now, but I remember a post that was floating around where an anon claimed to have reported someone to the cybertip line for writing a sex scene between two fictional characters who were consenting adults. Of course, the user wasn’t in any danger, any competent agent would dismiss a tip like that as soon as they realized what it was actually about. Instead, assuming the anon wasn’t bluffing, the consequences of that false tip fell onto the abused children who may have been raped again in the time it took for agents to sift through the false tips in order to get to the real ones. Plenty of lawyers have even gone on record to say, “Stop reporting cartoon drawings as CSEM! They do not count! You’re just making it harder for us to help real children!”
Not only that, but antis have already gotten in trouble for spreading real CSEM, both to try and “own the nasty proshitters”, but also sometimes because when some of them see stuff like that, their first instinct is to put it in a public callout post, which further contributes to the exploitation of the child in said illegal content that they liken to that of an abused anime character.
But yes anon, Archive of Our Own is a very famous public website. The fact that it can be everywhere on the surface web in plain fucking view for this many years without the FBI so much as batting an eye should be proof enough that written fiction cannot be CSEM, but of course, antis don’t have fucking brains, so they can’t figure that out to save their lives. They just keep saying that AO3 is full of “child porn” and the government just like…hasn’t noticed yet, somehow.
You see what happens when you act like fictional abuse is the same as real abuse? Not only does it make you treat fictional characters like real people, it also makes you treat real people with flesh and blood like they matter just as much as a fake construct in a story that doesn’t actually exist.
People who play GTA V have no trouble understanding this distinction. That’s why jumping cliffs with your car and running people over in that game is funny instead of deeply traumatizing.
Sorry, anon. Can you tell that I’m angry? I’m a little angry.
