Automatic1111's GitHub account suspended for "ToS violations" [restored]

It looks like the "controversy" was links to a site that included anime child porn (or what some people would call that, regardless of your personal interpretation). I've been to Japan and wandered around some manga stores, and.... what they have on some shelves is, like, really, viscerally, incredibly, disgustingly, way way worse than anything I have ever seen on the internet. And I've been here since the 90s.

I guess my question is sort of 2-part:

1) Should linking to any site, which also hosts animated child porn, really be banned as a general rule? I don't actually know the arguments for/against it. I imagine that animated child porn may prevent child predators from having to go out and find real kids, because they can whack it to pictures of pretend kids. (sorry, I don't know a nicer way to say that) But perhaps that's not the case, or there is some other mitigating factor. I just don't think arguments should end at "eww, ick" or some variation thereof. We should have real intellectual discourse and solid arguments for why we censor content, not just "that's what we ban because we just don't like it" (or the much more likely reasoning: "because our advertisers/payment processors don't like it").

2) What impact should cultural differences have, if any, on enforcement? Like, in Japan, that kind of stuff seems, if not totally normal, at least acceptable enough to be included in stores along with other regular manga. So how should enforcement 'on the internet' reflect cultural values? Should the entire internet just reflect the values of the 'most powerful' countries and cultures? Or, when China eventually becomes the global superpower, are we gonna be OK with the norm then switching to be whatever China deems culturally acceptable?

GitHub doesn't seem to have a problem with Automatic111's arguably racist Rimworld mods but it does seem to draw the line at linking to repositories containing suspect hentai that may come close to violating the law in some countries GitHub wants to provide its services in.

It's a business decision. Making fun of Black people is iffy but clearly not a deal breaker. Linking to pictures that bear a striking similarity to prebuscent (or at least blatantly underage) girls in the context of porn understandbly is.

A frequent discovery of mine is a new foothill of the mountains of spam text dumped onto GitHub. No idea what half of it is there for since it’s not even connected to a GitHub pages setup most of the time. Usually I’ll find them a few pages back for a code search where the spellchecker has helpfully ignored pluralisation and punctuation and I’m getting lots of generic results but for a long enough string of words to narrow down GitHub to the long tail of noise…

Lots of txt and markdown and html and textish formats filled with keywords and phrases, some of which are surprisingly suggestive, arguably outright pornography…

Oh and there’s the matter of all the code on GitHub related to adult websites and the pornography that they contain, heaps of web scraping scripts to harvest videos and pictures from “tube websites” … the flip side of the coin as well, the content moderation tools like perceptual hashing tools and ML models for adult content or nudity detection that need to include sample images as part of testing and training data…

This feels like an area GitHub really shouldn’t be fucking with with respect to the whole “what counts as acceptable”, it’s one thing to prevent people using GitHub to host a free porn site via GitHub pages, it’s another to start policing the definition of acceptable discourse on the topic of adult content and machine learning models, particularly given that machine learning is a highly technical topic and the state of the art is an evolving field full of deeply technical people.

I’m deeply unimpressed by the results from stable diffusion but I do see other people having success with it. For me even the most basic things seem to come out mutated and the same efforts to improve non pornography related human depictions from stable diffusion type models will also be applicable to porn … if the hands on my “18th century porcelain doll of a cowboy“ look like some kind of teratogenic mutant out of a bad hyper realistic cartoon, then the porn version can’t be much better and while rule 34 exists the majority of “pornography consumers” looking to ML model based content probably don’t want that either which leads to a sort of “dual use technology” style stand off between the “pornography” and “non-pornography” uses of the exact same technology.

GitHub are walking a thin line here and it’s not going to get easier for them.

Wanting to making pornography is perfectly normal and healthy; that's not something I consider icky. When I quoted "icky stuff" I thought we were talking about the generation of underage subjects.