Pixiv has banned loli in the United States... poorly

baconmeh2 said:

Recent policy changes on Pixiv have caused content tagged loli to be unviewable if your account is set as “In the United States”.

This is easily bypassed by going into account settings > Language and location settings > Country/Region > and selecting ANYTHING besides “United States”. That’s all you have to do.

They also seemed to have unbanned VPNs from using their service as well, for the past 6 months of me trying to use them on pixiv, it just werks now when it only ever gave a blank white screen before the policy change.

lalalililulu said:

It's not. There have been 2 supreme court rulings on it. Also juvie at 19? I doubt your story.

Well to be honest, I'm not sure how it works, but I know for sure it was juvie. And yes, this was true.

Arcaeca said:

Kkkkkind of. Per Ashcroft, fictional/drawn child pornography are protected under 1A unless found to be obscene, but the prevailing standard for what counts as "obscene" set forth by the Supreme Court is, I kid you not, "I know it when I see it" and "patently offensive >:(". That is... there is no standard.

What happened was congress tried passing laws three times that made the whole fictional/drawn porn of apparently child characters illegal. The first two times the laws were challenged as soon as they went into effect and the Supreme Court swatted them down as unconstitutional. However, the third time that didn't happen and the law has been used with restraint by prosecutors (which is surprising as hell). It's mainly used to pile on charges for someone out on parole with a parole condition to not access any pornography. (Mainly convicted sex offenders.) Those cases would make for a lousy case challenging the law and likely fail. I honestly don't understand why the ACLU & others didn't challenge it immediately like the first two, so I assume it's that and/or congress managed to write it so it's difficult to challenge before it's been abused to deny someone their first amendment rights.

So technically loli & shota is illegal in the US, while realistically, no one's getting arrested and charged for having/producing it alone. This is part of why US-based companies are so strict about it. It really is illegal, so they have to act accordingly. The stuff with credit card companies banning all porn payments is only partly due to the law, it's mainly them caving to the anti-porn zealots whose goal is to get all porn banned worldwide.

That said, it doesn't excuse Pixiv's actions here. This seems much more caving in to the anti-porn zealots and/or US credit card companies than for any actual legal reason.

And, whose to say in the future; the new policy may get updated and gets Google-levels or DeviantArt-levels of worse, where Pixiv may track your actual location and potentially ban you for faking your nationality on your Account Settings. Just for wanting to look at lolicon/shotacon stuff!

I think Pixiv has already prevented people from certain countries from commissioning R18 art on their site, if they found that the method of payment you're using is coming from a country that has a law that banned porn.

I came from Thailand, which has a *de jure* law that forbid any kind of distribution of porn. While this is largely unenforced, this has effectively caused certain sites from automatically blocking Thai people from using certain features, such as Pixiv.

Hilariously enough, Pixiv still allowed porn content to be displayed to any account that set "Thailand" as their location, and the commission lock can be easily bypassed by setting your language to Japanese.