Pixiv have reportedly forced a lolicon artist to make his works “private” on the basis of accusations that they “contained sexual acts involving children”, offering by way of explanation only the claim that “recently internet monitoring has been strengthened.”

According to the artist, about 70 of his works were made private after receiving a message from Pixiv:

This is a message regarding a contributed work from Pixiv’s executive office. We received a report from a third party organization that your submitted work contains sexual acts involving children. The corresponding works were made private. Monitoring of the internet has become stronger recently, and the Internet Hotline Center, operating under the auspices of the National Police Agency, has been requesting measures for the prevention of the distribution of certain content. We ask for your understanding. That is all, thank you.

The Internet Hotline Center is an NPO which apparently acts on reports from the public about “harmful” information found online, and according to its own secret criteria then reports the information to internet filters and the police, and makes quasi-legal demands that domestic hosts take the information down.

One Twitter user however believes this to have been a case of someone misusing the Internet Hotline Center’s report form, pointing out that the form explicitly states it is for reporting sexual acts “involving actual persons under the age of 18”:

However, other users reported finding other examples of randomly deleted/”privated” lolicon material, suggesting it may be a more widespread issue:

Even so, the hundreds of thousands of images on the site which could be construed as sexualizing minors despite not being explicitly tagged as such (millions, potentially, if each example of a school uniform is considered a “child” as with the IHC’s overreaching definition) still seem to be entirely unmolested, as do all the “R-18G” guro and uncensored images on the site. And of course, all good Japanese convenience stores and booksellers, to say nothing of Amazon, still carry the expected variety of lolicon manga as usual.

The incident will surely have many wondering whether or not this was Pixiv trying to stealthily censor inconvenient content without making waves – that is if the message is real and represents actual deliberate policy in the first place…