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Newsletter #13—April 2026
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Mislabeling fictional content as abuse doesn't protect victims, it harms them
In Costa Rica, a 17-year-old girl was arrested over sexually suggestive drawings that she shared on social media. In Australia, a woman was convicted of “child abuse” for writing a fetish novel for adults. In Canada, a horror author faced charges over a dark fairytale retelling. In the United Kingdom, new laws could criminalize sex workers for depicting taboo fantasies like incest or ageplay. And in the United States, state laws threaten school librarians and drag performers with criminal penalties over conduct that is entirely innocent.
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What links these cases is a broader trend: the gradual collapse of the distinction between real abuse and fictional or imagined expression. That shift doesn’t start in cases such as those mentioned above, that might attract public controversy. Instead, it is being driven from a place where almost no one will notice or be willing to push back: the expanding definition of “child sexual abuse material” (CSAM).
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It may seem uncomfortable or even suspect to nit-pick that definition, but CSAM is not just another category of offensive content. It carries weight precisely because it centers victimhood - the documentation of a sex crime against a real child. But, there’s a growing trend among industry, government, and civil society to loosen its definition, including by describing certain AI-generated images as “CSAM.” While it’s tempting to let this slide, unless such material depicts a real child victim, that label is wrong - and loosely applying the term risks doing real harm to real victims.
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When policymakers, law enforcement, and even advocates begin to apply the label of CSAM to fictional or AI-generated content that does not involve real victims, they dilute its meaning. When we include AI-generated or any other sort of fictional content in the definition of CSAM, resources and attention are diverted away from cases that involve actual child victims and survivors. At the same time, a much wider range of expression—often created for entirely different purposes—is pulled into a legal and regulatory framework that was never designed for it. And once that boundary shifts here, it becomes easier to extend the same logic to other forms of expression, often with far less scrutiny.
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The evidence of the harms of this shift is clear: in the United Kingdom, prosecutions involving real victims have declined significantly over the same period that prosecutions for fantasy material (including cartoons and AI-generated images) have surged to make up a substantial share of image-based sex offences. That shift raises serious questions about how enforcement resources are being allocated, and what it means for real victims.
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Drawing a clear boundary between real and fictional material does not mean ignoring harmful or offensive content. Platforms and policymakers have a wide range of tools available—from content warnings and filtering to moderation and bans—that can address AI-generated material without diverting criminal enforcement away from perpetrators of real abuse.
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That's the premise behind our Drawing the Line Principles, which aim to support advocates, policymakers, researchers, and platform operators in addressing the harms of overbroad censorship and discrimination, while meaningfully distinguishing consensual sexual expression from abuse.
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The Drawing the Line Principles draw from a range of intersecting normative and legal frameworks, including the international human rights system—particularly rights to freedom of expression, privacy, equality and non-discrimination, and the highest attainable standard of health—as well as feminist, queer, sex worker rights, and digital justice movements.
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We seek to reframe dominant narratives that pathologize sexual speech and to promote regulatory and governance models that center consent, autonomy, and inclusion. While the principles acknowledge the existence of harmful, coercive, or non-consensual conduct involving sex, they are explicitly concerned with defending consensual expression from overbroad censorship. The principles do not aim to provide a comprehensive framework for addressing online sexual harms—an important but distinct project—but rather to assert the rights and realities of sexual expression in public digital spaces.
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The Latest from Our Blog
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Visit the Website donate to our fundraiser Modtools.io is COSL's project to develop a suite of open source trust and safety tools that uphold safety and liberty as equal values, in alignment with our unique mission. Although originally developed to directly serve the needs of our own community projects such as Fan Refuge, some of our tools such as Dead …
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The 'Keep Kids Safe' Law That Doesn't Keep Anyone Safe
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We’ve all done it. Mindlessly typed in your birthday on a website asking you to verify your age. Maybe you felt a little weird about the website collecting your data, so instead of your real birthday, you typed in a different date, thinking, Why do they need to know that? This is age verification, and we all know that it …
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Drawing the Line at RightsCon
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In February 2026, UNICEF issued a statement calling on countries to expand criminal law definitions of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to explicitly include AI-generated content. In the same month, an Australian writer was convicted of child abuse offences for a fictional novel involving age-based roleplay. These developments reflect a broader global trend in which fictional sexual content—such as books, …
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The Elephant in the Lobby
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The Media, Stigma, and Sexual Expression: Part Two, by Madeline Brooks
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It's no secret that anti-pornography groups and politicians think little of the impact of their statements or their favored pieces of legislation. There are numerous incentives for them not to look into just how bad things can be for sex workers, victims of abuse, for minors and minorities, for refugees and journalists, and for creators. The press offers feedback, smoothes over the problems with unconstitutional policies, and smears or belittles critics. In exchange for the continuous malicious spin, the press gets subscriptions, ratings, and an audience fearful of the 'villains' who have every reason to oppose shoddy policy. The powerful are the good guys while the powerless victims are to be ignored, shunned, kept out of any field or position that would allow them to speak the truth to a prejudiced public.
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The news media, mainstream or otherwise, deal heavily in stigma because it benefits them and their political patrons. If NCOSE says that an entire country is full of predators seeking to hurt your kids, then it's gospel truth in the BBC, The Guardian, VICE, the Daily Mail and CNN. Don't ask questions on whether or not that's true, just look at the segments showing Congress making speeches about heavily inflated and conflated stats about the issue! And if you still have questions, then you must not care about kids. You're with THEM, and that means you're irredeemable, you're a predator who wants to torture kids and their families, you enable trafficking and exploitation and we need to check your hard drive and search history.
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This is how they silence victims—by saying that fiction is not what caused a close friend or trusted teacher to molest them. It’s how they tell a sex worker who was trafficked, but still wants to do sex work in better, safer conditions, to shut up. It’s how a fan who draws taboo art, and advocates for privacy, is told they’re not mentally well because they oppose censorship of disturbing topics—even while still suffering from the trauma of sexual assault by a family member. It looks bad to defend the indefensible, and this is not by accident.
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Years of redefinitions, conflation, and willful muddying of the waters have led to criminalization of art and the arrests and fines of artists. I repeat: the media and politicians have much to gain from this kind of rhetoric.
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The Irish tourist who was arrested for having anime images on his phone may feel a sense of vindication in the fact that the case against him by the Irish government was dropped. Several others sadly do not get that luxury. And all the while news outlets are content with either not correcting the record or preferring to bash the targets of misguided campaigns like this.
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It is for this reason that the media needs to be held accountable frequently and firmly.
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Dead Dove update
COSL's content warning Wordpress plugin Dead Dove has just received a minor update, to add new functionality that was requested by a user. Dead Dove is part of our project to develop a suite of open source trust and safety tools, Modtools.io.
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When we previously reviewed Dead Dove, it provided the ability to "blur out" parts of a Wordpress-based website that had been marked with a configurable content warnings, such as "Not Safe For Work". The user would be presented with a dialog box allowing them to reveal the content if they clicked on the blurred area – however there was no visual cue telling them that they should click on the blurred area to see that dialog.
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This has been fixed in the latest version 2.3.2, which now provides the ability to set a help message that appears alongside the blurred content, prompting the user to click. A (non-working) example of this new help text, showing "Click for options", is shown below:
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We intend that this will make Dead Dove more intuitive to the user. But for those who prefer a cleaner look, the blurred text can also still be shown without any helper text. You can check out the latest code for Dead Dove on the official Wordpress plugins website.
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Australian Classification submission
This month COSL made a submission to an Australian government consultation about proposed revisions to the classification framework that is used to label media works such as movies, TV, and computer games. In general, strongly COSL supports advisory classification guidelines as a better alternative to censorship.
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However, historically, Australian classification guidelines have been very culturally biased, including by discriminating against LGBTQ+ works that have tended to be assigned a higher age rating or even refused classification altogether. The current Australian government consultation is an opportunity to reset the classification rules by ensuring that they are based around harms-based rather than morality-based reasoning. As we write in the submission,
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Importantly, a harm-based approach does not require abandoning community values. Rather, it reframes them. Community concerns — for example, about violence, sexual violence, or discrimination — can and should inform classification decisions. But they should do so through an evidence-based assessment of impact, not through assumptions about offence or propriety.
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We also point out in the submission that a focus only on updating classification guidelines is incomplete if it leaves Australia's antiquated criminal law of obscenity untouched. As we write:
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In practice, criminal law may override or pre-empt classification-based reasoning, leading to outcomes that are difficult to reconcile with the objectives of reform. This inconsistency has also been documented in recent scholarship. Remminga (2026) observes that Australia’s obscenity laws, particularly under the Customs Act 1901, are applied unevenly across state and federal jurisdictions, resulting in contradictory and difficult-to-predict outcomes for creators and distributors of erotic and queer media.
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The submission is just a part of COSL's outreach from our Drawing the Line project. In line with that project's Drawing the Line Principles, our submission proposes that the central task of modern classification policy is to clearly distinguish between content that reflects or risks real-world harm, and content that constitutes fictional, simulated, or consensual expression. You can read the full submission, and also feel free to let us have your comments.
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