The DSA (Digital Services Act) from the EU will start heavy discussions on fiction and its censorship in a way that has never happened. As you know the DSA was approved October 4th, 2022 and will come into effect January 1st, 2024.
According to the DSA any big platform has to obey by EU law and the laws of one EU Member State. Do you see the problem? First, the DSA obviously prohibits child pornography, BUT it is written from the POV of the EU which defines CSAM as imagery containing actual children. However, the law does not clarify this, so member states adopting this law (which they must) are going to use their definition.
Secondly, the first point does not even matter ha! Any content banned by one (!) member state must be deleted even if said content is legal and protected by the constitution of anothers member state. Recipe for disaster.
Given the obvious problem of countries banning LGBT, or other stuff nationally that technically leads to a state where platforms must ban all such content internationally.
Fictional pornography is obviously affected here. There were some member states who had their own, national version, of the DSA, but these weren’t effective. Now it’s the entire EU enforcing such rules, so it will lead to mass censorship on Twitter, Pixiv and other art pages. “Social media” also applies to let’s say Pixiv, because User Generated Content can be shared with other users who can also communicate with one another. Seeing how Germany banned one of the largest platforms regarding fan fiction, because of a few russian fictional stories containing minors it seems very likely. So yes, a few bad apples can and will lead to legal actions if not acted on. Will platforms risk the entire EU as their Users, because of some art that is controversial anyways? Most likely not. Will they risk 10% of annual earnings in penalty, for every time they dont obey a request? Most likely not.
2024 will be a very interesting year regarding censorship and I am honestly very curious how the world, platforms and users will react.