I’m incredibly angry about this. Fuck you, pixiv.
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By the way, you can just change your region settings fairly easily. If that’s all it takes, I think of it simply as a way to ward off the tourists. It’s like how Nicovideo also removed their EN and CN interfaces.
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Yeah, I’ve done that… for now.
Who knows when they’ll fix that loophole, though.
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I doubt they will. Their goal is to avoid legal liability. If someone lies to them to access content, I don’t believe they’re liable for that (not a lawyer, etc.)
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I wasn’t really thinking from a legal standpoint, more of a UK bitching “You’re not doing enough to block X, Y and Z!” standpoint.
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I’ll admit, this is a surprising move by Pixiv. They don’t have the resources to be consistently well-read on the laws and customs of every single country.
I’ve done some querying and testing myself, and found that R18 and R18-G loli/shota content is still being shown to people in the US, with only fractions of this content being restricted, with no consistency or observable criteria to be found between what’s blocked and what isn’t. Many loli/shota works are still viewable.
If Pixiv really wanted to avoid legal liability, they wouldn’t have given users the ability to freely change their location settings.
They would have relied on the tried-and-true method of IP-geoblocking + VPN filtering, just like what streaming services do to avoid issues with content restrictions or licensing agreements in certain regions.
I can only hope that they reverse this course of action, and leave it to “view at your own risk”. If this content really were problematic in partner nations like the US, then there wouldn’t be a global app and they would have taken more definitive, conclusive steps to filter content.
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I think it’s the credit card companies getting upset again, with many branches in certain countries probably instituting chargebacks, and this perhaps lends them a discoverability argument, or something.
I just hope they do a complete 180 with this policy/control regime entirely.
It’s obviously not being implemented correctly, otherwise US users would not be seeing any restrictions at all, and countries like Saudi Arabia would be disallowed from viewing R18 content in their entirety (assuming Pixiv as a whole is not filtered at the nat’l DNS), same with South Korea and China.
Technically, even the most vanilla depictions carry with them the same amount of legal risk as loli/shota content in the US. So it’s a mindboggle that they’re even trying this.
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Apparently the only two countries that’re subjected to this are the U.S. and the UK (no surprise there) at the moment.
Apparently Canada and Australia (which is really surprising) aren’t.
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that…genuinely makes zero sense.
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Well the UK being part of it isn’t surprising since they passed that stupid fucking safety law recently, so the rest of the world now has to literally wetnurse the Brits (or so they believe)…
No idea why the U.S. is being subjected to it, though. (I’m guessing the usual credit card BS.)
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No, it’s not by tag. I think that whenever an artist posts something, they can choose the region. For example, if you pick 2 loli images as examples, one may be region-locked, while the other may not be.
That’s what I meant by there being no consistency with how it’s rolled out. Some artists are posting guides on how to change their region settings.
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I completely agree, I think it is an “OK” outcome, if it is only done for gatekeeping and protecting their brand to the benefit of their actual users (some of whom actually pay Pixiv, too! myself included). Especially the fact that users can change their region at will. They could’ve done something stupid, like require SMS verification from a phone number in each country (going by the phone number prefix), so I would need to get access to a virtual phone number in a “more free” (lol) country like Japan just to continue seeing the beautiful art I am used to. And then, they could make an effort to reject virtual phone numbers, making it much more difficult to verify your account as actually being in your region of choice.
Anyway, back to reality: The oneshota work on Pixiv, that I love to see, is not visible to users of “United States” region. I just changed my region to “Japan” and I can see everything now (I think!!)
In a way, it kinda sucks, because some people from “filtered” countries (like the US) who join Pixiv, people who would be predisposed to like the “banned tags”, are going to miss out on seeing such art. But, at least for now, my favorite website remains open to such art.
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