> 4chan and 8chan know the line, though it is in a weird place

"Things we legally cannot host" is exactly where one would expect them to draw the line. Whether or not you agree with that position is another matter.

The mods remove those posts as quickly as they can. It's impossible to prevent it when you're hosting a board that allows anonymous image uploads. No pre-approval process could keep up with the amount of content posted on a popular board, especially when the site is being run on donations.

Sure, but I would be worried about taking blame if 9/10 white supremacist terrorists turned out to be active on my forum.

Someone tell Facebook and Twitter

Do posters get banned? If it's not accepted on the board then why does it keep getting posted, and posted sufficiently often that many people are claiming 8chan has CP?

"Accounts" aren't banned (because there aren't accounts required to post), but IP bans are very common.

People are claiming that 8ch has CP in order to discredit it. The claims aren't true and the site has been removing such content for a long time now.

They remove it because people keep posting it. Just because its existence is transient, doesn't mean it isn't there

There's nothing stopping the same thing happening to HN, except the people that do it have no interest in doing so (and images don't auto-display, I guess).

They're all behind variable IP VPNs. Permanently getting rid of them is nearly impossible.

8chan deliberately set itself up such that it's impossible to do anything beyond an IP ban. This was a conscious choice they made, and that doesn't mean they get a pass on failure to enforce rules as a result.

How about Bitcoin? Does it get a pass for distributing CP? (Since IIRC there's some embedded in the blockchain)

How would you embed CP in the Bitcoin blockchain?

By making a transaction (or series of transactions) that happen to have a binary representation (or destination address, or comment, or...) that decodes to CP - the same way that you'd store any other arbitrary data there.

The 8ch.net/delicious/ board routinely had extremely realistic animated images and video of prepubescent girls having sex with older men. The images were reported to mods who left them up.

That's the sort of thing that starts to hit some really grey areas, and also starts to illuminate some of the differences in the justifications for banning CP. If you're against CP because it means the exploitation of children, animated images of children that do not exist should be fine - but if you're against it due to it being disgusting or normalizing the abuse of real children it's not. However, I believe that the Supreme Court has thus far held that drawings fall under the 1st Amendment, as (IMO) they most certainly should.

There is an important shade of grey between "clearly artificial image" and "real image", where "artificial but real-looking image" sits. It has the same normalizing effect as a real image.

Otherwise there's no reason to oppose real images, since the harm is done before the image is ever seen.

> Otherwise there's no reason to oppose real images, since the harm is done before the image is ever seen.

We ban specifically real images for two general reasons - one is that allowing them encourages the production of more such images, necessitating additional abuse, and the second is that for the children involved, knowing that other people are looking at those images is a huge violation.

Neither of those applies for "artificial but real-looking" images.

Animated images and videos of prepubescent girls having sex may be distasteful, but under US law it's not considered child pornography.

Fun fact, there are places in the Western world where it is considered illegal to the same degree as photographs of children being abused. And ditto for textual descriptions of this fictionally happening. Scandinavia, for instance. Which is admittedly not famous for its uncompromising approach to freedom of expression.

There are also places where sexual content of adult women is illegal if they look young.

Or at least they're no more true than claiming Imgur and the like have CP. (Dropbox and Google Drive almost certainly do, thanks to encryption)

IP Permaban and allegedly details forwarded to law enforcement. Never ever heard of any actual consequences though, and "everyone" hits 8chan / 4chan through a VPN anyway.

*Formenting \w+ supremacy

GP is correct: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/foment

I think "\w+" is regex for "one or more non-specified words," so they're nitpicking that it should be "* supremacy" instead of "white supremacy", in a weirdly obtuse and technical way.

Aside from the misspelling, it was because I didn't want to look up how to escape italics.

You are correcting someone who used the word correctly. You have also misspelled "fomenting".

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/foment