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.
I understand this decision and support it but can you really get in trouble for something like this? Does this mean you need to basically review every community to make sure it follows Irish law??
Im just liable to show that i make a good attempt. It was clear in this case so im obligated to do it.
I see - that’s completely fair and understandable.
If I understand that correctly, Lemmy instances cache other instances’ posts and whole communities in order for federation to work, so even federating with such servers is pretty risky as it may technically count as distribution of child porn
That seems like a pretty unfortunate flaw with federating. How can you possibly monitor what every instance is doing?
I would say it’s rather a flaw in law, not federating. You should only be liable for stuff you do, not what your software does. The only ones to blame in this case are those who produce and those who actively share that content - otherwise we could fine the ISPs and backbone network owners solely for the fact the materials travel through their network.