I saw talk of them being federated with instances like “exploding heads” (literal neo-nazis) and “posting lolis rocks”, along with having interactions from users there. Is that true? idk how to check for that, I can only just barely stumble around the normal forum interface.
If so, why? They’ve been going hard on purging communists user-by-user and comment-by-comment, which seems like a little bit of a secondary concern to nazis and pedos, especially something as simple as just blocking the instances at the very least. What’s going on over there?
What I mentioned, if it is correct, might not be exhaustive, I’m just repeating what I heard about.
To be clear, the “jailbait” forums that Reddit tolerated for years were not officially tolerating material that would be clearly illegal by US standards. If they had been, Reddit would have shut them down out of self-protection. Possessing outright child pornography is a strict-liability offense.
They were, however, posting “upskirt” photos showing children’s underwear. They were posting pictures of children at the beach in swimsuits. They were, in short, posting photos of actual children, where the photos had been selected for being sexually appealing to pedophiles.
Not drawings of fictional characters; real kids, selected for hotness to pedophiles.
I think that’s something about which site owners can very reasonably say, “Even if it is not a criminal offense, we think it’s wrong and we don’t want it on our site” without anyone needing to be concerned about censorship of ideas.