Today we received a report about a group that was focused on sexualised images of the girls from Naruto. On inspection there were found to be well over a thousand images that broke our policies regarding underage characters. We removed these these policy violations, but as you can imagine, so many images being removed there was a bit of a stir caused. A very small amount of images were removed accidentally, but we've restored the ones that were and have been notified about. But we're talking less than1% of the images removed.
So why was all this removed?
In short deviantART does not allow the sexualisation of any image involving a human minor, real or fictional.
I know this seems a bit vague and it is clarified a bit in FAQ #248: Are there restrictions on art using children or teenagers (fictional or otherwise)?
But what does that all really mean? Why is it so vague and subjective in parts?
Basically that's a brief list of what we will not allow. It's vague and subjective because a lot of images can be of the same subject but be very different in nature. You can submit an image of Hinata, Sakura and Ino in bikinis and we'll allow it because they're stood there smiling showing peace signs and just looking like the 12 year old girls they're portrayed as. Alternatively you can have the 3 of them in bikinis rubbing oil in to each others oversized breasts or trying to strip each other naked. Both are beach scenes, they could be wearing identical bikinis but the latter image is more than we allow.
But what if they're made to look over 18?
We get that people age, we really do. Draw Hinata looking over 18 in her wedding dress, that's great, cute, hell if you do it well I might even want to fave it. Draw Hinata looking over 18, naked and in bed with Karin and that's going to be removed. The issue isn't the age, it's what they're doing. A 12 year old engaging in a lesbian affair with a 16 year old is against our policies. Making them look over 18 to show them as such is seen as bypassing this policy and therefore against the rules.
Why was this art removed while other worse stuff stays?
Simply put, we receive thousands of submissions a day. In fact, in the last 24 hours we've received 94,208 submissions, 14,182 new members and had 901,034 unique active accounts . It is absolutely impossible to police all of them, no matter how many staff we would employ. So we primarily act on reports we receive, the unfortunate thing is, today a Naruto group was reported. Tomorrow it could be a hardcore porn group, or a sonic sexual RP group. We each handle hundreds of tickets a week ( as seen here ) and some days it might look like we're targeting a group of people/images, but that's simply what's turned up next in the reports list. We do check out all reports, we do look at all images, but sometimes mistakes happen. We will always try to rectify our mistakes however.
I'm still confused, what can I do about that?
Simple, talk to us. You can contact the helpdesk and talk to us there or you can ask me in this journal here. We're not tyrants, we will respond to you if you talk to us. But we do ask that you do it politely.
So for my next journal I will do a journal that is feature of Naruto fanart, it can be any medium, let me know what you think I should feature and the ones I like the most will get a feature in my journal.
