$realitysquared

Well the new Moderation system has been active for twenty-nine days so far and we are already creeping up to 42,000 cases having been filed; that's a little over 1400 cases filed every single day since the launch.

So far it appears that reports of misplaced deviations is about the same, reports of art theft have probably increased and reports of things in need of a mature content tag or which contain prohibited content have remained about the same.

But what I actually want to bring up for this journal concerns one of the types of prohibited content; namely "pornography".

Now it seems that prior to the new system launch people would report all sorts of things as "pornography" even if they did not meet the currently definition which is in use right now. Without the option to receive feedback on their report it appears many people convinced themselves that the reported work stayed up because we were all simply far too overworked to have gotten to their report when the fact of the matter is that what they reported was simply ruled not to be a violation.

Now that the new system includes a couple of types of feedback, a note to reporters and the option to see whether or not something was reported incorrectly in the past, a few people are becoming upset.

I can think of a couple of names off the top of my head, but one person in particular has been particularly vocal and has unfortunately taken to exaggeration, misquoting, and generally giving out skewed versions of private conversations in an attempt to stir up mob reaction.

Rather than attempt to correct every single misquote or exaggeration I will simply clarify the situation here so that it will be conveniently in one location.



deviantART has an Artistic Nude Gallery as well as a Fetish Gallery. We've had them for years and the mere presence of both of these galleries means that we tolerate and welcome a certain level of erotica.

Now the policy governing these types of works has changed slightly from year to year (but not recently) as we've refined things after listening to community input from both sides of the issue as well as legal advice and the opinions of certain core staff members.

At the very beginning there were some minor attempts at forcing any sort of nude photograph to conform to an artistic minimum but that was abandoned after a time as unworkable. For one we did not enforce "quality standards" anywhere else on the site and it made no sense to do it in just two galleries but not the other thousand plus areas which make up the gallery structure.

The FAQ attempting to explain the boundary has also been rewritten several times; not because of changes to the policy but rather to make it less grey and less open to reinterpretation. Currently the FAQ is as specific as possible without listing hundreds or thousands of distinct scenarios covering every possible situation; going into that sort of painful detail is never productive and is in fact useless because you can never cover everything so accept that it will continue to contain a little grey area to keep things simple.


The purpose of the policy is, as I stated already, to draw a dividing line of judgment and to remove as much grey area from the decision making process as possible.

I should point out here that the decision making process involves a qualified and trained member of staff. Your personal interpretation of the policy is not a factor in the decision regardless of how personally offended you might be.

That's just the way it is; policy cannot flip flop back and forth depending on who is whining the loudest at the time because policy must be as consistent as possible, and regardless of what complaints you may hear the enforcement of this particular policy is as consistent as humanly possible.

As I stated previously deviantART allows a certain level of erotica; pinups, nudes, fetish, etc.
The difference between erotica and pornography is that pornography has the objective of showing you sexually explicit scenes in some manner while erotica does not.

Our policy seeks to define what we officially consider to be sexually explicit.

I know that some of you look towards a definition which includes "exploitive" or "degrading" or "intent of the artist" and similar subjective opinions.

Our policy does not rely upon subjective opinion but rather the work itself. The reason for this is that by introducing subjectivity you cannot hold a consistent standard against to judge something.

The policy must be objective and neutral and a policy judgment must be made after looking at the work as a whole with subjectivity and personal opinion removed.


Firstly bear in mind that these are general clarifications written without example works in mind; since all judgments are made after an examination of the work in question the outcome can vary case-by-case depending on exactly what the work presents.

FAQ #565: You prohibit the submission of 'pornographic material'; what do you consider this to be?

The portions which seem to be most often misinterpreted are;

• Masturbation
Hands should not come into contact with genitalia in a manner which is clearly a display of fondling or masturbation.

Notice the phrase "clearly a display". I trust that I do not have to painstakingly explain the mechanics of masturbation to you people. Needless to say placing your hand near your genitals is not "masturbation", neither is covering yourself with your hands, etc.
The question you need to ask is "does this clearly and without a doubt show somebody masturbating?". "Implied" doesn't cut it here and neither does "Suggestive" because it's a "Yes or No" answer.

• Sexual Intercourse.
Subjects should not be positioned in a manner which is clearly a display of sexual intercourse. This can include depictions of sexual penetration, genital to genital contact, genital to anal contact, oral to genital contact, oral to breast contact or oral to anal contact.

Notice that the qualifier here is "can include". There are exceptions which can and do occur and while this line is supposed to make that clear I suppose it falls a bit short of that. I will edit this line in an attempt to clarify it further.

• Vaginal or Anal Spreading
Female subjects should not be depicted with their vagina spread or opened by hand or manipulated open by any other artificial means. Neither sex should show the anus opened in a similar fashion.

I had though this one was fairly clear but evidently it is still open to misinterpretation. This is intended to address the vaginal area or anus being manually spread open by hand, or clamps, or some other clearly artificial method. Opening ones legs or bending over or doing some sort of bizarre yoga move doesn't count. I will edit this description slightly in attempt to eliminate the ability for this section to be misinterpreted.


So essentially erotic photography and artwork has a place here, pornography does not and we have set the official line between erotica and pornography at the place where we believe allows for the greatest leeway for people in that genre while excluding explicit sexual works.

The policy obviously doesn't please everyone; some people want more room and some people want more restrictions and censorship but the point is that the policy was never intended to please everyone, is incapable of pleasing everyone and we aren't even going to make that attempt.

Whether you approve or not the line has been drawn where it is and it is as close to being set in stone as things get around here.

The House Intellectual Property Subcommittee held a meeting on H.R. 5889 on Wednesday. If you don't recognize the title you may know it as The Orphan Works Act of 2008.

If you don't quite know what I'm talking about you can go to The Journal I Wrote Yesterday. If you manage to read through the entire thing then you deserve some sort of merit badge or something.

Today I tracked down the Video Webcast (Realplayer) of the hearing and sat through the entire 47 minutes and 35 seconds to get a good idea of where the lawmakers stand on the issue, because quite frankly the opposition to this bill is painting them as a bunch of hideous demons who want to legalize art theft.

Personally I never rely on what I'm told when I can go and see it for myself; you get a cleaner copy of the data that way.

I have to say that after watching the hearing I'm even less concerned than I was previously, and I wasn't all that concerned in the first place.

If you actually watch the webcast, at around the four minute mark the chairman actually states that their primary concern is protecting the "smaller, less organized copyright owners" and then goes on to describe you, me, and just about every other member of this community.

The entire hearing almost entirely revolves around how to adequately protect all of us, how to ensure that owners are fairly compensated for use and how to ensure that the search criteria is diligent enough that someone cannot get away with misusing it.

I'm tempted to try to paraphrase the hearing here, but honestly I think the best thing I can do is to tell you that if you are still greatly concerned about the bill you should watch the video.

I can speak more in detail about it a little bit later if there's enough demand for it but for now I have too many restraints on my time today.

A couple of weeks ago we observed something of a panic over the Orphan Works Act of 2006; despite the fact that the bill had been dead since September of 2006 there has been a lot of scare tactic fear-mongering being disseminated in an attempt to panic people into supporting a massive campaign against any possible future bill which might be introduced again.

Well, on 24 April the Orphan Works Act of 2008 was introduced to both the U.S. House and Senate. Since the same alarmist articles are starting up again I’d like to take the opportunity to write a journal with the facts on the matter; no exaggeration, no spin doctoring, no deliberate misinterpretations and above all no deliberate attempts to scare you onto one side or the other.

So as I said in my last journal I've carried concerns about online predators and pedophiles and such around with me for awhile, you can't help but see it occasionally in the news as various social networking websites get crucified in the press for being "havens for child molesters" and such.

Earlier this year I sat down and started doing actual research into how these individuals operate.

I dug around and managed to find some good scientific research on the subject, not just the hyped up and alarmist news pieces you can find on a casual web search. If all you've ever read is news stories you'd probably be surprised at the actual truth of the matter.

I assume that most people have the same general impression that I had before I read into the subject; the press-induced idea of some fat old guy with a nasty beard pretending to be fourteen so they can weasel out personal info from your kids, track them down in real life and do unspeakable things to them. Scary stuff when you're a parent.

When you scratch off the news Story veneer you see something different.

Statistics compiled by the Crimes against Children Research Center and presented by their director during a Congressional Caucus on the subject paints a slightly different picture from the impression you'd get from the news.

As it turns out, the predominant online sex crime victim is not a young child but rather a teenager over the age of thirteen (13), or in other words kids who've already hit puberty. I would wager that most parents fear for their younger kids and actually get more comfortable as their children get into their teens; a situation which actually calls for a bit more concern, not less when you consider online predators.

Another big surprise is that violence only makes up as little as five percent of sex crimes involving the internet and actual abduction makes up even less at only three percent. So essentially the sample showed that very few online predators show up to kidnap or sexually attack their victims.

As far as the picture of some nasty badguy pretending to be much younger online? The sample shows that only about five percent used deception as a part of their crime; most didn't misstate their age by very much and most didn't pretend to be any other age but their actual one.

As it turns out about 80% of the offenders in the study were quite explicit about their intentions and age. Essentially they were up front and open about how old they were and the fact that they were looking for a sexual encounter with young teenagers.

It also turns out that seventy-three percent of the victims actually cooperated with the offender and often met with them on multiple occasions.

I found that to be the opposite of what news reports had led me to expect.

Going into this research I didn't have a clue about the best way to make deviantART an undesirable destination for these creepy individuals but after I reviewed the actual data and case studies it was a completely different situation from what I had thought we'd be addressing.

As it turns out what puts children at risk for receiving the more serious kinds of sexual solicitation online is not revealing personal information or having a blog or visiting a website or chat room but rather what puts them at the most risk is a willingness to talk about sex online with strangers or having a pattern of multiple risky activities on the web such as visiting sex sites, sexually oriented chat rooms, or initiating sexual discussions with strangers.

In this respect it appears we've been making deviantART an undesirable location for these people for a very long time now.

I posted a News Article Today which outlines the very small changes that were necessary for us to optimize optimize our efforts in this area.