I’m sure this will come as a disappointment to many of you as you have joined this instance specifically because we do not block or defederate with anybody. Unfortunately my hand is forced on this occasion. As many of you know this server is hosted in Ireland. It has been brought to my attention that under Irish law: Virtual child pornography is illegal in Ireland per the Child Trafficking and Pornography Act of 1998 which includes “any visual representation”.[Irish Statute Book] [http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1998/act/22/section/2/enacted/en/html#sec2] The country has strict laws when it comes to child abuse material, even if it doesn’t contain any “real children”. As you can understand this requires me to defederate and remove the offending material from my server. There are newer admin tools in the works which will allow me to block specific communities instead of whole servers. Once this is in place I will refederate with burggit and block the individual offending communities. This will also apply to other servers with offending content but as far as I’m aware burggit is the only one for the moment. I still maintain my ideal of not defederating as much as possible but sometimes its out of my hands. Thanks to everyone for helping create this vibrant community and for supporting. I am dedicated to make VLemmy the best it can be.

Another one down. Looks like their admin isn’t actively hostile to us, they’re just in a hostile jurisdiction:

I’m sure this will come as a disappointment to many of you as you have joined this instance specifically because we do not block or defederate with anybody. Unfortunately my hand is forced on this occasion.

As many of you know this server is hosted in Ireland. It has been brought to my attention that under Irish law:

Virtual child pornography is illegal in Ireland per the Child Trafficking and Pornography Act of 1998 which includes “any visual representation”.[Irish Statute Book] The country has strict laws when it comes to child abuse material, even if it doesn’t contain any “real children”.

As you can understand this requires me to defederate and remove the offending material from my server. There are newer admin tools in the works which will allow me to block specific communities instead of whole servers. Once this is in place I will refederate with burggit and block the individual offending communities.

This will also apply to other servers with offending content but as far as I’m aware burggit is the only one for the moment.

I still maintain my ideal of not defederating as much as possible but sometimes its out of my hands.

Thanks to everyone for helping create this vibrant community and for supporting. I am dedicated to make VLemmy the best it can be.

  • @MikaGoesDown
    4•1 year ago

    This seems like an opportune moment to ask: is there a post on this site somewhere detailing the legality status by country? There is the every useful wiki page, but still external references would be helpful. For example, take the US. Nominally illegal (ish, and depending on state), but practically seems very difficult to enforce due to ambiguity of language unless you have some other, related, offense.

    • The Man With Shoes For Hands
      5•1 year ago

      One of the best resources I have found is this Wikipedia article which goes through basically each country and gives a basic rundown of the laws. I wish the page on exclusively fictional content was as informative as this one is, but unfortunately, it is not. To go even deeper into each country’s laws would require you know the language of said country, as I feel most sources would likely be in the country’s native language as opposed to english. Since like, it’s most likely you’d want to know the laws of a country if you lived in said country, so the most informative information would be in the native language.