Which countries criminalize lolicon content?

Art and fiction
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I am not sure which category to file this under, so I’ll leave it uncategorized for now, just to make sure I don’t break the guidelines. I would also like to note that while there is already a similar post on the forums, they focus on the United States only.

As someone who travels a lot around the world, I’m rather interested in knowing which countries criminalize this form of content, it’s rather hard to get an answer that is not just “perhaps” surrounded by a wall of text. So I thought about creating a post here where we can categorize countries via discussion.

Here is the current list of countries: Control+F your country if interested
United Kingdom: Illegal & Criminalized under the Obscene Publications Act
Austria: Legal, except for photorealistic content.
Denmark: Legal.
Canada: Illegal & Criminalized under the C-46 Canadian Criminal Code
France: Illegal & Criminalized unless government classified as “Art” under the Regulation of Online Child Pornography Under European Union and American Law.
Germany: Illegal & Criminalized (unless it is fictional and has no relation whatsoever to real people, locations or events) under the German Code of Law Offenses against sexual self-determination.
Sweeden: Illegal, currently being revised by the supreme court.
Japan: Legal.
United States of America: Legal unless considered obscene by a judge.
Australia: Illegal & Criminalized under the Australian Child Pornography Laws.

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This is brilliant work! Thanks (and don’t worry about categorization, this forum doesn’t rely on it much). I do have some information to add. In Korea, a recent law banned sexual art that “obviously depicts a minor” and a constitutional challenge against this law failed. So currently this means that there is at best a very grey area around the legality of lolicon in Korea. Maybe someone can find links to the law and the court decision that I am talking about, otherwise I will add them later.

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Thanks!
I attempted to search but was unable to find anything related, its possible that it might be too recent for there to be translated copies of the legal documents out there in the net, ill keep an eye out in case anyone posts a link (including you).

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I don’t know if you’re interested in going lower than the national level, but I felt that I should mention that obscenity is legal in Oregon.

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Im always willing to expand this post, information is power and there can never be too much of it.
Ill work on making it easier to read and far more specific.

Edit: Im re-making it as a PDF for ease of reading, this will also allow me to include pie charts and other useful info-graphics.

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Allegedly, in the Netherlands law recently changed so that artwork is treated the same as child pornography.

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A lot of sites have purged lolicon content as of late, likely due to legal liability and search engines have been very aggressively delisting content. Toddlercon and 3DCG seem to be particularly feared, perhaps because they could be considered more obscene in the eyes of a judge and the other likely to be mistaken for the real thing at a quick glance.

Realistic 3DCG is particularly vulnerable as industry AI (from what I’ve heard) tends to be trained on millions of pieces of CP and they can be similar enough that the AI will sometimes trip up and do the wrong thing. It seems unlikely that this can really be fixed without affecting the detection of real CP as-well.

Ages between 13 and 18 (not technically lolicon, but still falls under the definition of a minor) seem to be largely unimpacted, it would seem that law enforcement don’t bother to go after these? I wouldn’t rely on this however.

It would also seem that Steam is also cracking down on this content after leaving it in a bit of a grey area for a number of years.

This isn’t primarily related to this, but it shows the direction that things are moving in.

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I cant really add much to this, but here are my thoughts on your post.
First off, steam is not cracking down on it officially, they decided that all content was to be allowed unless illegal (or against the guidelines, more below), “Valve shouldn’t be the ones deciding this. If you’re a player, we shouldn’t be choosing for you what content you can or can’t buy. If you’re a developer, we shouldn’t be choosing what content you’re allowed to create.” were the specific words used. The reason why content is being taken down from steam is because the employees have unchecked access to administration tools, if they dont personally like it, they take it down.

That said, some games that I have seen taken down were done so with sound reasoning.
The steam direct guidelines are not very specific, which is highly problematic.
Here are a few issues with the current guidelines:

“Libelous or defamatory statements” - By this logic, all WW2 games should be banned because there are nazis inside of them.

“Content that exploits children in any way” - This one is just plain confusing, as I see it, this means “content produced in sweatshops using children as programmers”, but of course, this does not make much sense given that children dont do for good programmers; which leads me to the conclusion that this is just a loose way of saying “No portrayal of child-like characters being exploited in any sense”.

Pornography also used to be banned according to old screenshots of this post.

As for the 3DCG, I dont quite see much of a problem, it should not really be banned unless it goes over the uncanny valley (the definition of “realistic” is too loose and easily exploitable).
For better or worse, we are many years away from going over the valley. Current 3D-CGI is easy to distinguish from reality.
Once we cross the valley, it becomes a logistics problem, whether or not we can provide “CGI” certifications to legitimate pornography manufacturers will decide whether that (valley-crossing) form of pornography is permitted to circulate or outright banned.

As a closing note, I would like to mention that I am currently away on a long business trip and might not be able to upload the document iv been working on as soon as I was hoping to.

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If that information conflicts with the table on wiki, an update is needed.

According to the table, fiction is legal in Sweden.

Yes, Oregon abandoned it’s obscenity law.

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From what I know, the information on Wikipedia is extremely out-of-date and may land someone in hot water if they actually follow it.

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By request, we have a new “Art and fiction” category. I’ve moved this topic there.

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For the United Kingdom, I believe there are four laws.

The Obscene Publications Act, one that criminalizes child pornography, one that criminalizes pseudo-photographs and finally the Coroners and Justice Act of 2009 that criminalizes any non-photographs that appear to be under 18. I did hear however that the Coroners and Justice Act may not apply to Scotland as they have their own legal system.

In regards to 3DCG, some have reported seeing some which are difficult to tell if they are entirely CG or not. Sites usually err on the side of caution and purge them as no one wants to be even vaguely associated with child pornography.

There has been a bit of a panic even over ones that aren’t as controversial however simply because they’re realistic, sometimes it takes a bit of fighting just to stop realistic works being escalated for deletion simply on grounds of being too realistic.

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I am glad to see people adding more information to this post in the form of replies.
I have paused (for the time being) work on the PDF version.

This is mainly due to two reasons:
First, I will soon start attending university again, this puts a heavy strain on my time.
Second, the country I will study in is known to “spy” on users which search using specific keywords on the web, making research dangerous to my legal status within the country as a student.

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I hope you’re using a VPN to help protect your right to privacy. (If not, I highly recommend ProtonVPN as they are a Swiss company so they are protected by Swiss privacy laws – Plus, they have a good reputation since they’re the same company that made ProtonMail)

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I would imagine he’s being sarcastic about it being a child trafficking platform.

I wouldn’t know if there were multiple sites with the same name however.

No one seems to know where on earth they were / are hosted lol, once moment someone claims they were hosted in Norway, the next it’s the Netherlands, another moment it’s Switzerland, now it’s Moldova. Well, that’s fine, I guess.

One of ATF’s problems may be that they allow legal pornography in certain sections and sometimes they link to videos with youthful actresses. It’s possible that someone may have seen that and mistaken it for child pornography. It is usually important for any lolicon site to draw a thick line between real people and CG / cartoons, otherwise it just ends up confusing people.

If people want youthful actresses, they can just go to Pornhub or similar. It also encourages some people to post real child pornography, which ends up deleted, as they see all these things which appear to be the same.

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I usually use Tor (The Onion Router) for anything vaguely related to lolicon, as snoops be snoops, but they will know you’re using it which is a marker in and of itself. There are also VPNs, but the same applies to some extent and they may keep logs. Some search engines track more data than others as-well.

It might be safer to just pass the time without putting your hand in the hornet’s nest so to speak, although it is really up to you.

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AtF sucks anyway. The staff can’t decide if they want to be full pro-pedo or full anti-pedo, one moment they’re trying to oppress people for their sexuality, and the next, the mods forget to moderate some place (for weeks on weeks on end and sometimes even reply) and people start saying very squicky things that start to scare people.

I offered to moderate for them to get rid of some of the squickiness while keeping it somewhat reasonable in terms of people’s rights, but they didn’t seem interested. There is just too much office politics involved there, there are are much better sites for this sort of thing which don’t try to be everything.

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Apparently, a link to AtF was added to a certain list in the dark web, and all the unsavory sorts are starting to go there now.

They’re even having to stomp out child molesters and rapists (people associate pedophiles with that by default, but they actually admit to it privately or otherwise). Their moderation teams simply can’t cope with these sorts of people, so they’re probably on edge.

There is even an obvious vigilante who posts images of minors pretending to be those minors trying to draw people in now. With any hope, some of the CP addicts could be assimilated and taught to use safer outlets, but it is dicey.

This is perhaps one reason why lolicon should remain legal. I’m slightly on the fence on CP addicts, as I have met several who have used lolicon content to shunt themselves onto a safer outlet. But, as for molesters and rapists, they need to be reported to the police and sites shouldn’t fear to do so thinking that they too would be implicated by doing so.

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They’re just bad at moderation.

Someone will make a post confessing to going to some CP site, lusting over a four-year-old child model, etc. and a moderator will make a post about the overarching topic of the thread a few posts later and be completely oblivious to anything that’s going on.

Delete / edit / make a reply to knock it off. Generic moderation work that takes approximately twenty seconds.

They will then proceed to rant over and over in an unrelated section about how bad the moderation is and start taking their anger out on random users. I.e. Kadaban.

There are perhaps one or two posts a week that are actually problematic. Possibly less, and trouble tends to cluster around the same areas.

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I wasn’t aware of this law until today, but it should be mentioned that under the CLOUD Act, if you access a lolicon site or any platform in the U.S. that hosts lolicon content, then other countries could order that company to hand over your data (along with other users, depending on what legal protections a country’s system has, the U.K. can order it for huge swathes of people based on a vague suspicion).

This is why you really shouldn’t look at that content in a country where it is criminalized.

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