@OneMoreAnonymous
The rules here do evolve over time, and things like international agreements do influence what and how we handle things. For example, before GDPR we didn’t have a
Privacy Policy.
It’s important to remember though that, while there are laws that cover hosting images of child pornography, we’re not lawyers, and we don’t want to pay lawyers to look at every image to make sure that we’re not deleting something that we could host, or hosting something that might end up with the site being shut down and one of us tagged as a “child pornographer” for the rest of their lives.
So, while we do want to avoid breaking any laws that might hurt one of our volunteers, or get the site shut down, I think it’s also important to keep in mind that there are just some images that we do not want to host.
Here is the most recent change to that guideline. This particular change was really not due to any legal changes in the countries that we are based in. It was more due to a small, but very active and apparently obsessed, group who were trying to “find the line” of what was and what was not acceptable. The group also appeared to include some people who wanted Derpibooru to be some sort of test bed for changing laws about child pornography.
It reached a point where we were resetting the “Is this Rule #5 clock” every few hours, and some days there were debates about individual images that were continually ongoing, involving artists and supporters and people against and for the images. The point that I remember it reaching a place where we had to nope out was when artists were effectively drawing children with strap on ears and wearing socks that had “hoof feet” on them, and asking if that was “too anthro”. The staff were ending up trapped in debates about this stuff so often that people were burning out.
So, we moved the line to someplace that was easier for our existing team to judge and explain to artists.
We still get images that we’re not sure how to handle - and because we’ve got volunteers from all over the planet we don’t actually have anything like a consensus as to what “child pornography” is. People used to Japan’s way of handling this see one thing, and Russians and Americans see something else, and folks from the UK or France have their own ways of looking at these things.
But, since the “September Change”, things have been a LOT quieter, and Rule #5 now only results in flat out fights between users and staff every few weeks, instead of nearly every freaking day.
I think the only thing that really happened because of SESTA/FOSTA was how we handle underage sexual roleplaying on the site. It’s never been explicitly “allowed”, but we finally made a statement saying “Please do not do that here” and deleted some posts where people were doing that.
Other than that, our existing approaches to privacy and our existing guidelines and practices are good enough, and the site really isn’t big enough, to be covered by a lot of those things that the US, EU, or the UK are doing.
The changes to Discord’s TOS actually effected us a lot more than any of those other things. Their new TOS made us actually have to delete channels.
And - as always - remember that I’m just one of the volunteers here. So while I try to reflect what I feel is the general practices and guidelines of the site, other people on staff will have their own take on all of this, and may disagree with me.
I hope this answers your questions, but if not, please do not hesitate to reply.
