I’d recommend checking out the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund when it comes to the dangers of restricting certain topics in fiction (including child abuse or child sexual abuse), and the dangers of censorship in general.
The US went over this before in the Aughts with Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition and the PROTECT act passed in 2003 (with certain parts of it later declared unconstitutional), and later with SESTA and FOSTA, which had a chilling effect, forcing closed online resources that sex workers used to protect themselves. The more recent bills like KOSA and the KIDS act are modeled similarly to close the internet as a vector of free speech under the premise of protecting kids from porn, with the intention to also silence subjects that are ideologically controversial, such as LGBT+ content, ( trans ideology ), sexual education material, women’s health information and political speech that criticizes the Trump administration.
I still submit that media should be restricted as little as possible. Yes, we should restrict CSAM that creates actual child victims (such as filmed CSA and deepfakes of real kids), in order to protect the victims. And yet, when we criminalize fictional depictions of CSA, it not only starts cutting into legitimate artistic content (such as A Game of Thrones, or The Sandman comic series, Superman 1978 is an edge case), but it then becomes very easy for conservative moral guardians to creep the mission and expand the list of restricted content.
Are you Australian?
I’d recommend checking out the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund when it comes to the dangers of restricting certain topics in fiction (including child abuse or child sexual abuse), and the dangers of censorship in general.
The US went over this before in the Aughts with Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition and the PROTECT act passed in 2003 (with certain parts of it later declared unconstitutional), and later with SESTA and FOSTA, which had a chilling effect, forcing closed online resources that sex workers used to protect themselves. The more recent bills like KOSA and the KIDS act are modeled similarly to close the internet as a vector of free speech under the premise of protecting kids from porn, with the intention to also silence subjects that are ideologically controversial, such as LGBT+ content, ( trans ideology ), sexual education material, women’s health information and political speech that criticizes the Trump administration.
I still submit that media should be restricted as little as possible. Yes, we should restrict CSAM that creates actual child victims (such as filmed CSA and deepfakes of real kids), in order to protect the victims. And yet, when we criminalize fictional depictions of CSA, it not only starts cutting into legitimate artistic content (such as A Game of Thrones, or The Sandman comic series, Superman 1978 is an edge case), but it then becomes very easy for conservative moral guardians to creep the mission and expand the list of restricted content.