Discord’s trust and safety staff have come out to publicly explain why they allow for furry cub porn (which is pornography of underage anthropomorphic animals) but have a hard stance on banning loli/shota pornography.

In a post published January 28th, 2019 over on Discord’s Reddit page, trust and safety staff member, Karrdian, explained…

“We think there’s harm which exists with loli content and we don’t want Discord to be a place for that, specifically because it is the sexualization of children. Our policy on loli includes taking action on images where users will protest and say ‘but it’s a 9000 year old magic genie’ because we’re concerned about the impact on the average person that may come across it, who likely do not know (or care) about the backstory of the character. But even this isn’t satisfactory to some, as there are users that will report in all anime art as loli, and will be unhappy that we do not take action on, for example, an image of someone at the beach in a bikini. It is equally unsatisfactory to others that think that they should be able to post all the loli they want (we get plenty of reports every day about loli, which we action). “Regarding ‘cub’ art: our stance isn’t exactly communicable by the single lines that people have posted screenshots of, both of which were in response to general questions. There is some overlap between ‘cub’ and loli. I want to make clear that if such content falls into the loli camp — which is to say, sexualization of human or humanoid minors — it’s still banned. If someone thinks that they can get away with a sexualized picture of a child simply by putting bunny ears or cat ears, they’re absolutely wrong. But, as far as I’ve seen on Discord, there is also some segment of ‘cub’ art that is not, in fact, human or humanlike at all, but instead, for example, mythological creatures. This content is significantly greyer, which is why there isn’t a blanket ban on all content that could conceivably fall under the umbrella. I’m going to re-emphasize, just to make it perfectly clear — if we look at it and we think that it is definitely a human or human-like minor in a sexual situation, that is forbidden on Discord, and we will take action on the content and the account.”

Karrdian added the bold for emphasis.

Plenty of people also challenged the Discord staffer on loli/shota drawings being worse than furry cub drawings, given that in the Discord’s staff logic loli leads to actual child pornography or pederasty, so some users stated that seeing cub art might lead people to real life bestiality.

Strangely, Polygon actually had a balanced article about this incident, and also pointed out that the reason that the staff at Discord may be showing leniency toward furry porn featuring underage characters and not loli/shota content is because some of the staff are furries, apparently. Polygon writes…

“Some argue that there is a direct conflict of interest: The first Discord staff member to state that cub content is allowed is allegedly part of the furry fandom, with a profile on an erotic furry roleplaying site that lists “younger characters” as a kink.”

This would explain why there has been an excuse made for why drawn furry pornography featuring underage characters is okay but drawn pornography featuring loli/shota characters is not.

Discord also courted some controversy previously when they also prevented partnered channels from having any sort of NSFW content on their servers. One would have to question if they would grant further leniency to partnered channels if the NSFW content featured furries?

(Thanks for the news tip Kaos)

(Main image courtesy of laurenems55)