Fear and Loathing in Second Life: The New Sex and Violence Policy
by prokofy on 01/06/07 at 1:30 am
By Prokofy Neva, Community Affairs Desk. Op-Ed.
The new Linden policy on explicit sexual and violent material in Second Life is going to cause a total uproar. It was posted this evening California time at 6:00 pm, and not everyone may have noticed it. It is signed not by Robin Linden, who has signed the last few posts on “ageplay” much less Philip Linden, and not by Chadrick Linden. It’s signed by Daniel Linden, head of community affairs, a Linden from who we actually don’t often hear very often, and see much less in world (he has no office hours).
Here’s the nut graph:
The diversity of things to see and do within Second Life is almost unimaginable, but our community has made it clear to us that certain types of content and activity are simply not acceptable in any form. Real-life images, avatar portrayals, and other depiction of sexual or lewd acts involving or appearing to involve children or minors; real-life images, avatar portrayals, and other depictions of sexual violence including rape, real-life images, avatar portrayals, and other depictions of extreme or graphic violence, and other broadly offensive content are never allowed or tolerated within Second Life.
No more can people endlessly speculate whether the Lindens are or are not banning and penalizing “ageplay” — it’s now laid down in black and white by stipulating that not only “real-life images” but “avatar portrayals” that depict sexual or lewd acts involving or appearing to involve children or minors are now an actionable offense.
The new policy is not put in a TOS — yet — and it’s upgraded considerably from Chadrick Linden’s curious extrajudicial notecarded policy of some months ago. But it’s unmistakeable. No “ageplay”. Full stop.
Going even further — further than anyone might have imagined — the Lindens also appear to be taking steps here against BDSM, Capture Roleplay and other forms of rape, slavery and “extreme or graphic violence”. The mere “avatar portrayal” of rape, as in Angel Fluffy’s popular “Capture Roleplay” maze and many other RP scenes in SL, is no longer to be tolerated in Second Life.
On the one hand, the policy is to be applauded, in my view, for finally explaining very clearly and unambiguously that even “avatar portrayal” counts; that avatars are as real as people when it comes to TOS violations and even RL crimes. That’s striking a blow in favour of virtuality of the kind Urizenus wants to have for the Bragg v. Linden case. On the other hand, many people will seize on this very long-delayed and very disingenous policy as placing a serious chill on freedom of expression, art, creativity, and the kind of deep, intensive human relationships that people have in Second Life, about which Philip Linden especially seems to rhapsodize about. Most disturbing, in two tiny phrases, “our community” and “are never allowed or tolerated,” Daniel both wipes out history — he puts the public record down the memory hole — and makes it appear as if there is something called “the community” which ostensible deliberated and “has spoken”. Neither is the case.
I personally, as a person who believes strongly that virtuality affects reality and is a part of reality (a view that isn’t popular among cynical Herald reporters, readers and commentators), am glad to see the Lindens finally take a moral stand and play the role they need to play as a virtual world service provider on the Internet in establishing the moral code. I have grown increasingly distressed at the way in which both BDSM and “ageplay” have spread virally in SL, have taken in more and more vulnerable and younger people (even if their underage status cannot be determined), and have become more and more tolerated in a climate that creates, as I have often argued, an enabling environment for real-life crime. While apologists for BDSM and pedophilia constantly wave around arguments about “consent” and ‘the age for consent” and “consual adults,” in fact RL penal codes make infliction of pain or enslavement even with consent a crime, and society often questions whether that consent is really what it claims.
The Lindens aren’t a religious people, however; their sudden piety about “a safe world” and their sudden revulsion over extreme sex and violence isn’t driven by morality — it’s driven by a very deadly-earnest practical wish to limit their liability for litigation. Urizenus and other cheerleaders for Bragg — a bad case making a good law (never happens!) want legal sanction for virtuality — this litigation liability development has caused our Lindens to run for the hills and protect themselves with as much legalized language as possible around another set of controversial issues — sex and violence.
How will this policy be policed? The same “community” that ostensibly “spoke” and said it had “never tolerated” these awful things (of course it had!) is now going to be charged with a) policing itself under the new abuse-report regime and b) informing on its neighbours in the police-state method for which SL is notorious. That’s why, when I fired off a response immediately to Daniel Linden, why I applauded him making a clear statement and taking a moral stand — something I think a company making the Metaverse and taking a leadership role in virtuality *should* be doing — I cautioned him that in their current climate of vindictive score-settling, the policy would more likely serve as a club to beat others with and remove undesirables than to really achieve that moral world that Daniel claims is his vision. (And one only has to watch his video presentation at Stanford, where he snickers at the concept of weasels having an “age of consent,” to understand that he is merely hanging on to his job by issuing this edict, he’s not articulating a genuinely-held belief from the bottom of his soul. Oh, well, we’ll take our morality where we can get it, these days.)
So what’s likely to happen? People who are disliked by some, like me, people who are controversial, who have opinions others don’t like — like this one I’m writing — are going to be targeted and victimized with this policy. Somebody like csven Concord, who hated that I supported the idea of accepting that LL must act against virtual child porn, will try to threaten me with chat-logging my tenants he finds suspicious and trying to “pin something on me”, and even outrageously accuse me of failing to report a real-life crime — incredibly vicious posts that he cluttered up Clickable Culture for days with, leading me to challenge him to the hilt, and culminating in both of us not only being permabanned from Clickable Culture by the soi-disant civil libertarian Tony Walsh, but having all our posts for three years nuked.
The Doomsday approach by Ratboy to the controversy around “ageplay” is a taste of what control and morality and the rule-by-community and code-as-law will bring us in the coming years, as the old concept of civil society and rule of law is thrown overboard — because people could not remain moral and law-abiding when let loose in a virtual utopia and left to their own devices. Nor could they be civil in arguing what the boundaries should be.
Or we’ll get things like the odious Jauani Wu, mendaciously blackmailing me and seeking a payment from me of $50,000 Lindens in order to prevent him from publishing what he claims is a lewd chatlog of mine — and then claiming he was paid off — a lie. We’ll see more of that. Whenever there are more things criminalized, whenever a lot of discretion is left to those in power, whenever illegitimate abstractions like a non-existent “community” are put forward as tribal decrees rather than a democratically-created rule of law interpreted by accountable justices, that’s what happens — blackmail, scamming, lies, libel.
The police-state concept is alive and well as we can see from the second — and last — paragraph from the Daniel Edict, and the punishment truly harsh — confiscation of one’s land and goods (viz. Bragg)
Please help us to keep Second Life a safe and welcoming space by continuing to notify Linden Lab about locations in-world that are violating our Community Standards regarding broadly offensive and potentially illegal content. Our team monitors such notification 24-hours a day, seven-days a week. Individuals and groups promoting or providing such content and activities will be swiftly met with a variety of sanctions, including termination of accounts, closure of groups, removal of content, and loss of land. It’s up to all of us to make sure Second Life remains a safe and welcoming haven of creativity and social vision.
What can a landlord like me practically do with an edict like this, which professes a morality I share, which comes close to my very own policy drafted in recent weeks in anticipation of the Linden verification procedure — whenever they were to announce it — but contains awfully draconian punishments in store? While no “team” is available to restart my broken and blocked sim 24/7, they’re available to come look at a swingset and see if maybe some child avatar is lewdly posed on it. Because “avatar portrayal” doesn’t just mean pictures; it means any act or motion or…anything at all…in our streaming video world.
Will people get warnings? Will they have a chance to try to warn their tenants? Will they be able to police their land effectively? I’m expecting rough sledding ahead as I try to enforce the unenforceable with the non-compliant and beligerent.
If vigorously implemented (and not merely a show of good intention to limit liability from litigation) and abuse-reported from inworld, these two paragraphs of Daniel Lindens could have a profound effect on the society and economy of Second Life. Hold on to your hats…
mootykips
Jun 1st, 2007
The Doomsday approach, huh?
PatrioticNigra
Jun 1st, 2007
i herd u liek wut i do
bolshev!k
Jun 1st, 2007
Lenin approves of this message
Sn4X15
Jun 1st, 2007
oh god this is hysterical.
Anonymous
Jun 1st, 2007
The PatrioticNigras FULLY support the lindens in closing their pools from the AIDS that is baby fuck and gorean slavery! In addition, we pledge to further this “doomsday approach” to dealing with such manners with our legendary enthusiasm and epic effectiveness in stopping such madness!
peace and chicken grease!
SINEP
Jun 1st, 2007
Looks like Angel Fluffy’s gonna get raeped himself and not in a yeah he’ll liek.
NigraPower
Jun 1st, 2007
Congratulations. The SecondLife aids index has fallen Incrementally in the past 12 hours. Keep up the good work.
humanoid
Jun 1st, 2007
I wonder how they intend to enforce these silly rules when html on a prim comes around. If ever.
NigraPower
Jun 1st, 2007
BTW lindens, I’d recommend dropping the B&hammer on Nemo first. That sim has more child AVs and babyfuck than aids in africa.
Tyffany Flintoff
Jun 1st, 2007
Prokofy if I ever wore a hat I would be clinging onto it for dear life, for there looks to be a storm brewing. I find much about Daniel Linden’s article disturbing, but most of all it’s the virtual open invition to the moral minority in world to play at being religious police which worries me. Just what does “broadly offensive” actually mean? Who should be the judge? The SL community? The Lindens? The real world population?
Second Life is different. Yes virtual worlds affect reality I agree with you and there are certain things happening in world that many people think should cease. However, to me it is a disingenuous shirking of responsibility on LL’s behalf to pass the policing baton to the community. I can see LL’s 24/7 monitoring service(insert laugh here)being somewhat swamped with abuse reports which are nothing other than griefing, score settling and points scoring.
Brenda Archer
Jun 1st, 2007
Dear Prokofy,
I’ve disagreed with you before, but I do agree with you on one thing – the practical outcome of this new policy as it now stands is disastrous. Thanks for the additional info.
NigrasOnMyLawn
Jun 1st, 2007
Here comes the e-pedophiles, claiming they have the right to cyberfuck babies
Nacon
Jun 1st, 2007
“I wonder how they intend to enforce these silly rules when html on a prim comes around. If ever.”
Oh trust me, Linden won’t have to. Kids whom has parent put them behind a protected service like AOL/Road Runner won’t even allow the tranfser data for that HTML-on-prim no matter what the kid tried to do with the prim or SL itself.
Proof? Try getting on protected internet service and view from the profile web tab. Same deal.
Nacon
Jun 1st, 2007
“The new Linden policy on explicit sexual and violent material in Second Life is going to cause a total uproar.”
Yeah… an uproar of minors. (even a whinning adult is minor enough)
csven
Jun 1st, 2007
How wonderful to get a mention.
But how unfortunate that Prokofy didn’t clearly and logically explain why she didn’t contact the real life authorities after seeing – as she claims to have seen – images of real life child pornography inside SL.
She has plenty of excuses… like how the people deleted the pictures from the virtual walls thus forever deleting any trace of them from the Linden Lab servers, and how it was the late-arriving Linden who was responsible to take action. Only those don’t fly with me. I take her at her word when she posted on her own blog that she “forgot”. Nice.
Get ready for the SL Warriors of Innocence, folks. And if Prokofy is any example, they’ll be *much* more concerned with the pixels than the flesh and blood stuff.
Lewis Nerd
Jun 1st, 2007
I guess is the next step towards the teen and main grids merging, and SL going family-friendly.
Won’t affect me in the slightest but I can see a lot of people getting pissed off.
Lewis
janeforyou Barbara
Jun 1st, 2007
So now all wepons will be banned to?Will LL ban the ” killing” and shooting and bombing
Is it og to use a sword to cut off a av head? Is it ok to use a Uzi to ” kill” 60 avs?
But it will be illigal for a Mistess to were a latex oufitt and a wipp? Will it be illigal to sit on a spankingstand? And Cuff will be banned to? there are 25.000 BDSM item on the SLX shops, will that be banned? I bet there are 10.000 duengons in SL.. will thay all need to close? All the wepon creators get out of work? LL are talking on what RL life forbidd.. RL life forbitt shooting and killing somone and are illigal!!! Sitting on a BDSM item or getting spanked by a Mistress are NOT illigal RL…LL you cant talk MORAL here!!! BDSM SEX ARE LEAGAL IN RL…. period! Killing ppl are ILLIGAL RL..period!!!… If you forbidd— BDSM-Wepons-D/S you close more then half of SL…Besides,, wen the Ambassy of Sweden opend in SL The press in 42 coutries wrote ” Secondlife are owned and run by there users”…Wen i got to SL and got 3 Islands it was for this ” Own your own Isle, create your own fatasyworld”…….i did.
Angel
Jun 1st, 2007
Well, we told you guys that going after us kids would start the ball rolling but you didn’t listen, you went on and on. You sowed the seeds, now reap the crop.
Violent sex is now a clearly perma-ban offense. Furry, Gor, Vamp will soon follow, Mafia, Gangsta, PN will then be in their sights and SL will become a baptist wonderland.
Prokofy Neva
Jun 1st, 2007
Re: csven’s tendentious and libelous post: I’ve repeatedly posted rebuttals to this idiocy, but Tony Walsh deleted them all on Clickable Culture (now HE’s the one falling prey to child porn panic that he claims others are falling prey to — ironic, that!)
So let me try again here, at the still-safe-haven of the Herald.
>How wonderful to get a mention.
Not only a mention, an abuse-report in world for carrying a lie and misrepresentation about my statement on my blog, tendentiously portrayed. Avatar profiles are not places to launch personal attacks on one person.
>But how unfortunate that Prokofy didn’t clearly and logically explain why she didn’t contact the real life authorities after seeing – as she claims to have seen – images of real life child pornography inside SL.
I’ve clearly and logically explained this over and over again:
1. I arrived at this chaotic scene last August where a mob was trying to force a group of people out of a house. It was BDSM v. Ageplay — only in SL! It was very laggy and crashy. I was finally able to maneuver my camera into this house. I merely glimpsed what appeared to be RL pictures of children — I couldn’t see anything detailed about them but they appeared to be RL porn, not avatar pictures. I wasn’t able to take any screenshots of them. Not only was it difficult even to move and get photos, I was very concerned not to be perpetuating anything wrong myself and didn’t want anything of this nature on my SL inventory or my RL hard-drive. By the time I was able to get my zoom into this house and look at these walls, there were gaps where *something* — I cannot be sure exactly what, but it appeared to be RL pictures — was removed. People spoke of RL pictures being there.
I looked at the screenshots of avatars then and the blank spaces and debated what could be taken to show on the Herald without involving the Herald in problems, and it wasn’t easy to somehow chose among these awful scenes.
As I have stated repeatedly, these people were in the process of whisking all this away when I arrived. What I mainly recall about this scene was the spaces or gaps that were left in their clearly arranged photos on the wall — they left ones that were more ‘innocent’ and some avatar posed ones which were gross enough, but clearly they had removed *something*.
I can hardly report to RL authorities something that I have no evidence for — no screenshots, nothing to point to even inworld, as they removed the material. The parcel even was sold and the people couldn’t be located. As I recall, their groups disappeared too.
The Linden hovering over the scene didn’t do anything. He didn’t kick the people in the house or the demonstrators or utter a word or answer my IMs. If the Lindens weren’t doing anything, it didn’t seem to me there was some sort of report to be made — and it frankly never occurred to me to report this virtual scene to RL authorities. I don’t see anything wrong with this whatsoever. It is not the job of reporters to crusade around against evils and report crimes to authorities, quite frankly; it’s their job to get the story (of course if one can even be speaking of doing a “job” in this situation where one is volunteering to freelance for the Herald). And quite frankly, because that’s a cynical sort of job to have, it was a job I resoundingly didn’t take that evening: I did not write that story.
Let’s recall what csven is trying to distract from here: his own tolerance for simulated child molestation — something I don’t tolerate, as I don’t tolerate RL porn, either.
csven of course is deliberately refusing to admit that last summer, the climate in SL was completely different. There were hardly an RL companies. There were certainly no RL police like the FBI or German police barging into SL. There wasn’t any open ageplay debate of the sort causing the Lindens to make a policy. They had no policy. In that climate then, there’s only one position that the Herald editors and their readers would be taking: sympathy for the “hounded ageplayers”. And I simply didn’t wish to be part of that, so I didn’t wish to engage with the story.
At the time, the way I understood the issue, if people were doing something in the privacy of their homes, as despicable as I might find it, I didn’t have grounds to abuse report them. That seemed reasonable to me, but awful.
Since then, having read up on the issue and thought a great deal more, I see two elements to this approach that are insufficient:
o even simulated child porn is a crime in some countries
o even having people look at mere copies that they didn’t pay for of RL porn helps contribute to the overall crime and criminality.
o therefore one can make a stronger case for virtual porn being something that should be outlawed. Good!
>She has plenty of excuses… like how the people deleted the pictures from the virtual walls thus forever deleting any trace of them from the Linden Lab servers, and how it was the late-arriving Linden who was responsible to take action.
1. I don’t have excuses, I have reasonable explanations. Had I somehow whistled for the RL police, without even a picture or name to give them, not even an avatar (I couldn’t manage at the time to get all their exact names), csven would have been the first to scream “witch hunt,” so eager is he to support fuck-you hedonism of this sort and so eager is he to sustain the right to engage in virtual pedophilia.
2. It truly is not my problem, what is or is not on the Lindens’ servers. They don’t, as a matter of policy, do rollbacks on the mainland. They have told us they don’t take snapshots of the grid. So when they can’t find stuff deleted and trashed, they may be telling the truth, I don’t know. I never claimed they were “forever deleted”. I said they were deleted from the walls of a house, so that one could no longer see them. Then the land was sold.
3. The Linden didn’t arrive late, he pulled up even as I did. There was a mob scene on two parcels and they sim crashed at least once — they were overloaded with many avatars. He did and said nothing. Because…there was no policy then.
4. I simply refuse to be baited, bullied, and harassed by csven Concord, who sanctions simulated child rape, with this completely disgraceful “tables-turning”. it’s a typical tactic used by pedophiles such as was done on the New York Times reporter — try to smear critics with someone digging up that they, too, are objectively supporting child porn.
But I’m not doing any such thing. I cannot report something to RL police that isn’t there, in a virtual world where I don’t have access to the internal server information. It’s up to the Lindens to do that.
>Only those don’t fly with me. I take her at her word when she posted on her own blog that she “forgot”. Nice.
Putting a nasty incident out of one’s mind isn’t ceasing to care about it. I forgot about the incident merely because policing ageplay, and trying to battle pedophiles, isn’t in my agenda of concerns. There are plenty of people on both sides of this issue already. No journalist trying to cover it can escape the minefield containing absolute, total, unadulterated assholes like csven Concord, who try to smear people and make outrageous innuendos about them. I didn’t wish to cover a story in which it might appear that one should sympathize with those hounded inside the building, because what they were doing was awful stuff. There was no good side in this issue. There was enormous hysteria around it. Therefore, I sent it to the Herald editors to let them decide, did they want to touch it and endure pages and pages of bile — like I did some years ago when I took on the BDSM freaks. No thanks. Life is short. I pick my battles in fact. I said my piece on my blog about pedophilia mainly because I was really annoyed at the sheer amount of propagandistic argumentation being used in this “cause” that was not unlike Bolshevik propaganda — smearing opponents who are cause crusaders by appearing to trip them up with a damning hypocrisy; arguing from the particular to the general,e tc.
>Get ready for the SL Warriors of Innocence, folks. And if Prokofy is any example, they’ll be *much* more concerned with the pixels than the flesh and blood stuff.
I’m concerned equally with both. I do not tolerate either on my land. I refuse to be bullied about this. I’m not on porn watch, zealously crusading around the grid. I will remove any and all suspect material as I have 0 tolerance for it. Those who have the bile and malice to take on this truly awful subject are welcome to have at it.
Prokofy Neva
Jun 1st, 2007
but most of all it’s the virtual open invition to the moral minority in world to play at being religious police which worries me. Just what does “broadly offensive” actually mean? Who should be the judge? The SL community? The Lindens? The real world population?
I’m afraid I can’t get all indignant about any so-called “Moral Majority” here. They’ve never heard of SL, or if they have, don’t care. It’s not big enough. It’s a decidedly secular humanist MINORITY of people concerned about limiting liability for litigation–that’s all. There are no Baptists. There are only California hippies. All this screaming about Middle America is misplaced; this is coming from a hippie commune in San Francisco — because of the German police.
And the language and wording they’ve adopted they’ve done not only to limit lawsuits but in keeping with any normal Internet web site out there. Pull down the TOS of whatever ISP you are using and whatever website you blog with or use for work. it will have the exact same sort of policy against “broadly offensive” material.
csven
Jun 1st, 2007
“Not only a mention, an abuse-report in world for carrying a lie and misrepresentation about my statement on my blog, tendentiously portrayed. Avatar profiles are not places to launch personal attacks on one person.”
Only you weren’t named.
-
“I couldn’t see anything detailed…. People spoke of RL pictures being there.”
versus what you wrote on your blog:
“I got there and found a house full of pedophiles hastily clearing out the *real-life very graphic child pornography” off their walls — they were photographs imported from real life porn”
Looks like you want to change history to me.
Prok, I have a copy of your webpage saved. You can change your story here, and change it on your blog, but I’ll have your words documented and they clearly indicated you saw more than you now wish to admit.
So instead of writing a whinescraper, just explain in some sensible way why you didn’t contact the real life authorities please.
Io Zeno
Jun 1st, 2007
“Well, we told you guys that going after us kids would start the ball rolling but you didn’t listen, you went on and on. You sowed the seeds, now reap the crop.”
Oh will people shut up with this stupid shit.
Like anyone has the power to make LL do anything, like LL listens to what the residents say on some blog and then implement it as policy, please. They ignore hundreds of comments on their own blog about everything they do but the residents *made* them do this? Come on.
Nearly all of the comments about LL and their “age play” policies came *after LL already changed the policy*. Not in response to some “community outcry” that was nonexistent. That is BS on their part to try to blame the residents for their own damn decisions.
They couldn’t care less what we think one way or another. The *do* care what their lawyers say, what the media says, what some German reporter waves in their faces on TV.
csven
Jun 1st, 2007
btw, thanks Prok. That abuse report should serve as further documentation of what I read on your blog.
For everyone else, here’s what I added to my profile which will be archived:
-
SL observer who wonders about things like: why didn’t this well-known SL resident go to the real life authorities when she saw real child porn in Second Life as vividly described on her blog?
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/05/the_pedophiles_.html
“I … found a house full of pedophiles hastily clearing out the *real-life very graphic child pornography” off their walls — they were photographs imported from real life porn and as they whisked them away… I took a few shots”
-
I’d say that’s a pretty accurate “About”. And those are her words.
mootykips
Jun 1st, 2007
angel if furry and gor are gone we really won’t have much to do
plus, don’t you think we’re in the Lindens’ sights anyway? if it was simply an issue of being able to policy us away they would have done it by now.
This is great.
LAWLKING
Jun 1st, 2007
Woo HOOO! Burn the witches burn the witches!
Seriously though I laugh at this. The flagship sinks every day I read an article on here. And sooon.. soooooooon. There will be no more. And I love it. Those who stay are the slaves of Linden Labs. Pluck a dime in their measly yuppy pockets. Just so you can live your life in this shit hole called Second Life.
ENJOY!
Prokofy Neva
Jun 1st, 2007
The actual text:
“Last summer, when there was an “ageplay” (and I’m going to go on putting it in scare-quotes because I believe it to be a euphemism) scandal in Yongchong, I went out to investigate it for the Herald because people holding a furious demonstration about child porn summoned me. I got there and found a house full of pedophiles hastily clearing out the *real-life very graphic child pornography” off their walls — they were photographs imported from real life porn and as they whisked them away, leaving holes in the spaces of the walls, Guy Linden flew up. He remained, hovering over the scene silently.”
“Then you were chilled. These adults (we can only hope they were) had made child avatars that were creepy enough — child avatars are *always* creepy in Second Life — and had enacted all kinds of really graphic BDSM scenes. These weren’t 17-year-old teenagers. These were children of 8, in their pajamas, horribly brutalized in BDSM muzzles and shackles, whipped with chains. I tried to piece together in my mind that pedophilia was also combining BDSM — somehow the two just didn’t seem to “go together,” but it shows you how little I know of the extremities of human depravity. I took a few shots that I thought might be acceptable to go on the Herald’s blog and not have the blog shut down by the provider, thought about how to write up this story, shuddered, and gave up. I sent them to the Herald mailbox — I didn’t want the pictures on my hard-drive. Nobody followed up — nobody felt like following up, the people sold their land and disappeared and the story was over.”
csven’s tendentiously shortened text:
“I … found a house full of pedophiles hastily clearing out the *real-life very graphic child pornography” off their walls — they were photographs imported from real life porn and as they whisked them away… I took a few shots”
Again, note what is said here:
o hastily clearing out
o they whisked them away, leaving holes in the spaces of the wall
o These adults (we can only hope they were) had made child avatars that were creepy enough — child avatars are *always* creepy in Second Life — and had enacted all kinds of really graphic BDSM scenes.
So what can obviously be seen here is that what I could see, after the whisking away and only glimpsing something, and the blank holes in the walls, *were SL screenshots made by avatars* — the very things *csven supports*.
I didn’t *take a few shots of RL porn” *because there was nothing to shoot, they whisked it away.
I saw gaps in the wall, and I saw *screenshots of avatars posing*. THAT WAS BAD ENOUGH. I hesitated even taking photos of THAT.
And that’s what csven refuses to admit — he tries tendentiously to maggle the quotation of my text, which is available on the public record, and make it seem as if I took copies of RL porn and then failed to alert authorities. But I did no such thing. What was at issue were the *very items csven tolerates — which I do not tolerate*.
csven
Jun 1st, 2007
“So what can obviously be seen here is that what I could see…”
“…a house full of pedophiles hastily clearing out the *real-life very graphic child pornography” off their walls — they were photographs imported from real life porn and as they whisked them away, leaving holes in the spaces of the walls”
-
Seems clear to me what you saw: “photographs imported from real life porn”. And they were “real-life very graphic child pornography”.
Anyone else seeing the words I see?
protozz
Jun 1st, 2007
Prokovy Neva,
“o even having people look at mere copies that they didn’t pay for of RL porn helps contribute to the overall crime and criminality.
o therefore one can make a stronger case for virtual porn being something that should be outlawed”
One can make a “stronger case” against “virtual child pornography” with that reasoning all they want, but for US citizens at least, that type of case was already REJECTED by the US Supreme Court in Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition. When are you going to get around to actually reading that case decision?
Quoting (minus citations):
“The argument that virtual child pornography whets pedophiles’ appetites and encourages them to engage in illegal conduct is unavailing because the mere tendency of speech to encourage unlawful acts is not a sufficient reason for banning it, absent some showing of a direct connection between the speech and imminent illegal conduct. The argument that eliminating the market for pornography produced using real children necessitates a prohibition on virtual images as well is somewhat implausible because few pornographers would risk prosecution for abusing real children if fictional, computerized images would suffice. Moreover, even if the market deterrence theory were persuasive, the argument cannot justify the CPPA because, here, there is no underlying crime at all.”
Nicholaz Beresford
Jun 1st, 2007
Prok, You know, you’re beating up on the Californian liberal Laissez Faire all the time, wanting a clear moral compass (preferably one that matches your coordinates of course), now you’re getting it. Unfortunately this stuff usually comes with mobs, torches pitchforks and a blockwart (block supervisors, look up the term if you like), but you were advocating this, so well Prok, you can’t have it all. Either have the cake and eat it.
And, with a bit of a smirk I’ll remind you of me being in favor for open source/open sim. You may have been close to right in your objection that hosting own sims would not help with ageplayers, but I’m not doing that stuff anyway. Back then, 95% of the comments were not complaining about ageplayers but about “what next?”
The “what next” came pretty quickly, and now please don’t tell me, that open sourcing/open sim’ing would not help these people either. Not now, not yet … but the Lindens are tightening the screws well beyond what’s illegal, and distributed sim hosters would make all the difference in the world for those who do not want to endure that.
The witch hunt and the mobs will be far worse than west coast style geekish liberalism.
Not for you of course, not now anyway. But who knows, you might need a safehouse (sim) some day too when they enforce German RL laws about rentals on virtual rentals.
You were asking where Larry Linden is. Maybe he saw that coming.
dandellion Kimban
Jun 1st, 2007
I saw the title and thought that Gideon Television is back. And then, this boring Prok came to molest us with his oversized text and a snapshot we saw a thousand times. It isw shame to steal titles. Give us Gideon back, he is interesting to read!
NobodyImportant
Jun 1st, 2007
Two things:
To our dear resident Crazy Cat Lady, congratu-fucking-lations.
You’ve amazed me once again. You really are something, you know that? You have an uncanny ability to take anything that happens and twist it so that it looks like you’re going to be the victim.
How the hell do you do it… and can you teach me how?
To our dear resident Furry, Angel Fluffy:
I’m pretty sure the PN won’t really care if they get removed from SL, if “Furries, Gor, Vamp, Mafia, [and] Gangsta” stuff goes down with (or before!) them.
Also, the Goreans seem in hot water right now – the whole “slavery” thing, you know?
All that said, I suppose it couldn’t hurt to add one last thing:
This will change SecondLife as you know it, and who among us can say if it will be for better or worse?
Jessica Holyoke
Jun 1st, 2007
My concern with this policy is that previously Robin Linden has stated that this type of content, explictly sexual or extremely violent, would be defined as “Adult Content” and the type of content which would require Age Verification in the forms previously described. Now Daniel Linden comes along and says that this type of content is now completely out of the question for Second Life. It seems like a complete about face as to a person’s ability to create content.
The other interesting thing to me is that obscenity, as a form of speech that is not protected, is almost always dealing with sexual content, not violent content. Looking at the movies, you can be as violent as you want, as much blood and gore as you want. But you have to be careful with showing breasts. Here, Daniel Linden is stating that extreme depictions of violence are as potentially illegal as certain depictions of sexuality, which is not the case, at least in the US.
Myrrh Massiel
Jun 1st, 2007
…this is what linden lab’s forsaking of a common carrier model will inevitably bring: the chilling of expression – through victimless consensual behavior – to a least common denominator amongst the global myriad of parochial societies to which it caters…
…no longer, in this model, does the metaverse represent an enabling world without boundaries, rather, the jyllands-posten controversy becomes a template for this shallow, banal digital shopping-mall…
Prokofy Neva
Jun 1st, 2007
< "So what can obviously be seen here is that what I could see..."
>“…a house full of pedophiles hastily clearing out the *real-life very graphic child pornography” off their walls — >they were photographs imported from real life porn and as they whisked them away, leaving holes in the spaces of the walls”
>Seems clear to me what you saw: “photographs imported from real life porn”. And they were “real-life very graphic child pornography”.
>Anyone else seeing the words I see?
csven is tendentious and selective in his seeing here. The operative phrase is WHISKED AWAY and LEAVING HOLES IN THE SPACES ON THE WALLS. I can’t report anything other than what I see. I can only be faithful to what the experience was, and sorry, the RL porn there was only glimpsed, did not remain, and was not something I could report — especially when I could see that the Lindens, who had far more capacity than I to go checking into copies on servers and such, did nothing.
There is no screen shot I could have taken, and nothing specific even to describe — just an impression that a) there were pictures of RL people and b) the circumstantial evidence of gaps in the wall AND chat that people said there was RL porn.
Sorry, but that’s just not enough to go on, and the Lindens didn’t go on it either, nor did anyone else.
csven can keep goading all he likes, but the fact is, he’s covering up and distracting from the real issue: he can accept and tolerate and apologize for virtual child porn.
If I had to go before a court of law, I couldn’t summon up anything but the vaguest impression of dark pictures that appeared to be taken from real life.
But I have a very distinct memory of what remained on the walls, screenshots from Second Life with avatars, that csven thinks ok — and so “ok” does he think it is, that he’s willing to go on bullying me over a fake issue and a non-issue to keep distracting from *that* horror.
The picture I distinctly remember showed a child of perhaps 8, crawling on the grass, humiliated, in her pajamas, completely covered with muzzled and harnesses, and adults with whips. It was deeply sickening. I was stricken to the core.
THAT’s what Csven thinks should stay in SL and be OK.
Prokofy Neva
Jun 1st, 2007
>My concern with this policy is that previously Robin Linden has stated that this type of content, explictly sexual or extremely violent, would be defined as “Adult Content” and the type of content which would require Age Verification in the forms previously described.
Actually, she has never stated this anywhere that I can see, merely implied it. I sent a query to her a few days ago asking precisely this question and she said that they were working on a statement and talking to their lawyers — possibly Daniel’s post is the result, I don’t know.
Nowhere has Robin exonerated the “behind closed doors concept” — it’s merely been implied.
Prokofy Neva
Jun 1st, 2007
>Prok, You know, you’re beating up on the Californian liberal Laissez Faire all the time, wanting a clear moral compass (preferably one that matches your coordinates of course), now you’re getting it. Unfortunately this stuff usually comes with mobs, torches pitchforks and a blockwart (block supervisors, look up the term if you like), but you were advocating this, so well Prok, you can’t have it all. Either have the cake and eat it.
I live in a country that has the highest freedom of expression standards in the world, if I’m not mistaken. The First Amendment protection that keeps people out of jail for their thoughts and writings is at the heart of American democracy and prosperity. But nothing in that concept says that private companies have to enforce the protections afforded in the general public space. That very same First Amendment also says that the Congress can’t make laws to intrude on assembly, either. Everyone ALWAYS forgets that part.
Until it becomes open-sourced and welded into the rest of the Internet, the SL code and world is a separate private club and the company that made it has this right. I’m all for pushing the boundaries; I don’t think that pushing them in the direction of pedophilia and bondage is desirable or prudent.
I totally understand the difference between block committees and perlustrators and lustrators and Central Committees, and a policy of a private company trying to keep things civil.
>And, with a bit of a smirk I’ll remind you of me being in favor for open source/open sim. You may have been close to right in your objection that hosting own sims would not help with ageplayers, but I’m not doing that stuff anyway. Back then, 95% of the comments were not complaining about ageplayers but about “what next?”
Open sourcing will not create any safe haven for what is illegal in RL jurisdictions and found broadly offensive by RL communities — if anything, the person trying to host their own sim will find more problems, not less and will have no LL to hide behind.
>The “what next” came pretty quickly, and now please don’t tell me, that open sourcing/open sim’ing would not help these people either. Not now, not yet … but the Lindens are tightening the screws well beyond what’s illegal, and distributed sim hosters would make all the difference in the world for those who do not want to endure that.
Hardly. Distributed to…where? To some Maaagical Candy Mountain with leopleuridons??? There isn’t some place where these hosted sims could exist that won’t fall under RL jurisdiction. Read Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds for how he understands this — if government agents don’t have access to worlds and can’t monitor them with ease, they’ll pull the plug on them.
>The witch hunt and the mobs will be far worse than west coast style geekish liberalism.
Then you have to face your own community and ask yourself why it evolved these norms over the centuries, and what’s up with you that you need to countenance the rape of a child in order to feel like you’re an artist.
>Not for you of course, not now anyway. But who knows, you might need a safehouse (sim) some day too when they enforce German RL laws about rentals on virtual rentals.
I don’t expect privately-hosted sims to be more free; I expect them to be less free, just like the Balkans and the post-Soviet stans.
>You were asking where Larry Linden is. Maybe he saw that coming.
Maybe.
Jessica Holyoke
Jun 1st, 2007
Thought of three additional things after I took my dog out this morning.
The first deals with “sexual violence”. Because Rape is a crime of violence and power in RL, including rape as part of “sexual violence” isn’t a help to the residents. One can be raped without having intercourse, and one can have “rough sex” without being raped. “Violence” with “sex” can be so widely defined that there’s almost no point in trying to find boundaries. (Although, under this policy, you can still have sex slaves, you just can’t punish them, unless sex slaves count under the “other broadly offensive” catch-all category. Which would be a problem with a catch-all category.)
The second deals with Bragg v. Linden. In the Judge’s response to the motion to compel arbitration, the Judge savaged the ToS in regards to the remedies available to the Linden’s as compared to the remedies available to a resident. If the Linden’s don’t like what I’m doing based on an abuse report, then they can take almost any action. If I don’t like what they are doing, I have to pay three arbitrators in San Francisco to do anything about it. In RL, if the local government had issues with what I was doing, I could go to a local court to seek an injunction against the government action. I don’t have that option in SL.
The third issue is whether this is the Linden plan to deal with concurrency issues. If the Linden’s make SL unappealing to certain populations, those populations will leave and the target audience they want for SL will be better able to access the service. I know that certain members of the SL community would applaud this move.
Jessica Holyoke
Jun 1st, 2007
http://blog.secondlife.com/?s=adult+content
Sorry, I’m not that good at making the hyperlinks precise.
But here, Robin Linden is stating that “adult content is that which is overtly, graphically, or explicitly sexual in nature or intensely violent.” While “sexual violence” may not be included in the definition of “sexual content”, “intensely violent” can be easily equated with “extremely violent.”
Nicholaz Beresford
Jun 1st, 2007
>> Hardly. Distributed to…where? To some Maaagical Candy Mountain with leopleuridons??? There isn’t some place where these hosted sims could exist that won’t fall under RL jurisdiction. Read Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds for how he understands this — if government agents don’t have access to worlds and can’t monitor them with ease, they’ll pull the plug on them. <<
Well, what Linden seems to be enforcing now is way inside the realms of what’s covered by RL laws. Hosting own sims would not do much for virtual age play (although even that, as it seems to be legal on the avatar level inside the U.S.).
But, given things like CARP/Gor (violent sexual), Toxic/Midian (extreme violence) becoming broadly offensive and bannable under Lindens government, there is a lot of leeway between these types of virtual experiences and law.
As you correctly say, nobody can force a privately held company to give you the full extent of First Ammendment within their property. Linden Labs seem to use this freedom (drawing the line earlier) and it is their right to do so.
But, as soon as there is a gap between what law allows and what the Lindens do, there will be people who want to go further than that.
With virtual ageplay the gap between law and Linden was pretty thin (depending on country), again you are right there, not being much leeway or benefit for open hosting.
Given what is happening now (and I do not believe this will be the end of it), this gap is widening dramatically. Heck, if they enforce what Daniel Linden writes (assuming that it’s not another piece of gross miscommunication), even WoW is now more liberal than Linden in one specific area.
If this is coming as in the blog post, there will be a lot room for more diversity and well within the confines of law and without running the risk of getting sued for hosting a sim that offers something that Linden Lab doesn’t offer anymore.
Sadako Shikami
Jun 1st, 2007
From SL’s blog, here’s the part that truly worries me:
“… and other broadly offensive content are never allowed or tolerated within Second Life.”
Where’s the list specifying what is considered to be “other broadly offensive content?” What is the arbitration process? Will warnings be given? Or, per the current TOS, can someone lose their land holdings, money, inventory and membership immediately and without explanation, simply because someone else reports their “offensive” behavior? How many reports have to be turned in before LL takes action? And so many other questions.
What is “broadly offensive” to one person is completely ignorable to another. It’s too vague. In addition, everyone in SL has the option of not entering mature sims, or areas labeled as adult. If someone stumbles into an adult area, they can fly or TP out.
Why the new need to ask for “reports?” I absolutely agree that child sex in any form should be reported as abuse, using the current abuse report system. It’s the “other broadly offensive” qualifier that seems ridiculously vague to me.
I don’t lump BDSM in with child sex or non-consentual rape. BDSM is an umbrella term that encompasses everything from someone simply wanting to kneel leashed at the foot of another, all the way up to “consentual non-consent” capture and pretend rape scenes. I believe it’s up to the BDSM communities in SL to police themselves, just as they do offline.
Speaking of the vast BDSM umbrella, there are quite a lot of people in SL who simply want to kneel at the foot of another, bound in cuffs or ropes, or collared and leashed, and say “Yes Ma’am” and such – this is because SL is a virtual world created to break real world barriers in every way …. we can fly if we want to! Can we not also kneel as a “slave?”
Recently in the Lost Gardens of Apollo, simply kneeling at someone’s feet was considered to be offensive, and the Dom/sub were asked to not engage in this behavior. They complied, and asked for clarification of the sim’s policies. That’s a perfect example of a sim owner policing their own sim … now, why does Linden Labs not trust land owners and renters to do this?
Violence … people seize on the BDSM communities when they hear this term, but what about sims with weapons and realistic violence including blood and guts? All of the various RP games centered on combat? Samurai sword fights? It goes on. I personally am a non-violent person … I don’t visit the sims with weapons and killing. Yet I wouldn’t report them to Linden Labs, because I have the power to leave (i.e., turn off the channel).
Regarding SL residents being asked to turn “informant” … I see this as an invitiation to griefers of a new kind, perhaps even “prude gangs” with nothing else to do but create huge piles of spurious reports – taking up even more of Linden Labs’ time with nonsense rather than addressing their service issues.
David Cartier
Jun 1st, 2007
I’m alright with clearing out the sexual content on the mainland, but without extreme, gratuitous violence what the fuck are we supposed to do for fun?
shockwave yareach
Jun 1st, 2007
LL didn’t care about the open letter. LL hasn’t fixed it’s own breadwinner program. LL hasn’t enforced the TOS on the greifers. LL hasn’t repaired its creditcard and Paypal system so folks can get money into the system. LL hasn’t enforced its “no minors on main grid” rules. LL can’t tell people what they can/can’t do on their own land – there’s a legal case about who owns land in SL coming up through the courts right now in fact.
What makes anyone think that LL will do anything more than ban a couple of token cases who will then come right back as an alt? If LL won’t stop the simcrashers, then the cartoon orgy in someone’s private club shouldn’t matter to them in the least.
Hazim Gazov
Jun 1st, 2007
>>If LL won’t stop the simcrashers, then the cartoon orgy in someone’s private club shouldn’t matter to them in the least.<<
I am not Plastic Duck.
Prokofy Neva
Jun 1st, 2007
Jessica,
A little law school is a dangerous thing. When you come out of the Ivory Tower and actually have to *practice* law instead of just *read about it* in *the real world* you will see that you have to look at a huge host of factors from the judge’s reputation and rulings to the precedents to whether your client is actually guilty but you still have to do your best by him. I think you simply have no clue as to how different it will be from what you imagine. Experience will knock all your assumptions flat.
The Lindens are limiting their vulnerability to litigation or even investigation. They have crafted a broad enough policy that they can use their discretion to remove what they, by their own lights, determine is broadly offensive. That’s all they need. The series of precedents created will help then define what is permissible.
All this what-iffing and making up of specious hypotheticals are useless because we don’t know what their jurisprudence will be. It will likely lurch around for a while before it finds some norm — it may never find it and they may move the entire service to PG-13 to stop the endless, ennervating chore of trying to deal with people like you trying to use the law to extend out endlessly your licentious and your fuck-you hedonism. It’s just that simple. People like you trying to wear them down do not gain more freedoms; you gain less. They respond by shrinking, not conceding your specious, drilling, literalist arguments and saying, “oh, ok, why yes, we need to be more broad-minded about that, surely!”
The history of Second Life is about extremists pushing the limits and finding that they ended up shrinking the world not only for their own stated goals of extremism, but shrinking the world even from the formerly liberal tolerances it had. It’s a casebook study of this problem.
csven
Jun 1st, 2007
“If I had to go before a court of law, I couldn’t summon up anything but the vaguest impression of dark pictures that appeared to be taken from real life.”
Vs
“the *real-life very graphic child pornography” off their walls — they were photographs imported from real life porn”
-
So initially what Prok saw was “very graphic”, and now it’s all some murky “vaguest impression of dark pictures”
Which is LIE???
csven
Jun 1st, 2007
Sorry if I missed it – there are some huge sections of noise drowning out the signal – but has anyone asked about SOUND?
There’s a court case about some blind guy purchasing what are being called pornographic sounds. Jessica?
With voice on the horizon, how will that sort of thing be handled? Any guesses?
Prokofy Neva
Jun 1st, 2007
“If I had to go before a court of law, I couldn’t summon up anything but the vaguest impression of dark pictures that appeared to be taken from real life.”
Vs
“the *real-life very graphic child pornography” off their walls — they were photographs imported from real life porn”
What’s contradictory about that? I fail to see it. If csven or anybody SAW this scene they’d GET IT. In Second Life, when you see pictures of real people they REALLY stand out. If you see not an avatar, but a human being with their pale skin, it really does appear graphic, and unexpected. But other than an impression of “RL” and “porn” that’s about all I can say. I’m not an expert, and I can only report what I see, in good faith.
When that material is WHISKED away, so that what I mainly see are GAPS on the wall, what can I do? I’m sure the Linden who came, plus the people who began demonstrating against this stuff in the first place have little more to report than I do. Some of them might come forward and report what they saw, some of them may have gotten on the scene earlier, and be able to say something more definitive.
>So initially what Prok saw was “very graphic”, and now it’s all some murky “vaguest impression of dark pictures”
No, hardly. “Very graphic” means *it comes from real life with real-life humans appearing to be in some kind of porn. That’s all. But it is indeed a vague impression of dark pictures of porn. I can only report what I see, and not make up stuff.
>Which is LIE???
There’s no “lie” here but merely a report of what I saw. I can’t make up details that don’t exist about materials I can only glimpse in a laggy sim before it’s whisked away, so that all I can really zoom in on and see is *avatar porn*.
And THAT is what I COULD see very clearly, and reported on, and that was AWFUL. Csven’s belief that avatar-made porn isn’t awful, is fine, is allowable, and my attack of it unfounded is totally sickening — totally. And his side-track into an expedition to get a bead on RL porn that he thinks does rise to the test of criminality (even though it can’t be thoroughly described because it was only glimpsed, even though it’s removed, even though there’s no screenshot, even) — that’s what’s despicable.
Hazim Gazov
Jun 1st, 2007
csven, you’re an idiot, if there was anything that could be AR’d, Prok would AR it, Prok AR’s EVERYTHING!
Prokofy Neva
Jun 1st, 2007
BTW, in logic class, you learn that “if it is raining, then the streets are wet”. Are the streets always wet from rain? No. Do streets always get wet from rain? No, not if they have a canopy over them. But generally if “it’s raining, then the streets are wet”. If I glimpse a RL photo showing RL humans to be in it being whisked away from a house of ill repute and “ageplay” and I see some pictures remaining and some removed, then I can conclude that “it’s raining” and “the streets are wet,” i.e. that material that was removed must have been graphic porn showing children. I couldn’t describe it in any detail myself. But it’s reasonable to assume that the people who were in such haste to remove it, and who left up other stuff that I did get to look at and did find gross, are experts at drawing these fine lines that csven wants to do to preserve the “sanctity” of child rape.
In trying to sanctify child rape because it is virtual, in trying to pin specious and libelous charges on me, in trying to smear me because I wrote against the apologists of pedophilia in SL on my blog, in trying to castigate me and accuse me of failure to report a RL crime, or to be more “hysterical and prudish” about “pixels” and supposedly “indifferent and forgetting” the real stuff, csven is perpetrating a great harm, and is revealing himself to be a very troubled and evil soul.
It’s this kind of outrageous mendacity and bad faith that I can’t bear on these types of forums and I will fight back against hammer and tong.
csven
Jun 1st, 2007
“What’s contradictory about that? I fail to see it.”
Of course you don’t, dear. And we’re all sorry about that.