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Newsletter #16— August 2026
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You Don’t Have to Like the Speech to Defend the Boundary
In a divisive opinion that social media has interpreted as being “soft on predators”, a U.S. federal appeals court has affirmed a principle that COSL has been defending for years: the government does not have the power to enter your private home and criminally punish you for possessing fictional material simply because it considers that material obscene.
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The reason the opinion is provoking such a strong reaction is also, in an important sense, the reason the government selected this defendant. Steven Anderegg is accused of creating hundreds of extremely disturbing AI-generated images depicting fictional children in sexually explicit situations. He was also charged with distributing such material and transferring it to a minor. Those allegations are serious, and nothing in the Seventh Circuit’s decision prevents the government from pursuing those charges.
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But that was not the question before the court.
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The question was whether the government could prosecute Anderegg for the mere possession, in his own home, of obscene AI-generated images that did not depict an actual child. The Seventh Circuit, following binding Supreme Court precedent, said no.
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COSL filed an amicus curiae brief in United States v. Anderegg in 2025, arguing that the First Amendment draws an important line around private possession in the home. As we wrote at the time, the case was about whether the government could “throw you in prison for fictional or fantasy content that you privately create or possess at home, simply by labeling it ‘obscene’.”
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That principle comes from Stanley v. Georgia, the 1969 Supreme Court decision holding that the government's power to regulate obscenity “simply does not extend to mere possession by the individual in the privacy of his own home.” The protection is grounded not in the value of obscene material, but in the privacy of the home.
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This does not mean that obscenity is generally protected speech, or that Stanley creates a general right to possess obscene material anywhere. The Supreme Court has subsequently upheld restrictions on importing, transporting and distributing obscene material. But, as the Seventh Circuit noted, those cases did not establish a power to criminalise mere possession inside the home.
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The government nevertheless argued that the federal statute's interstate-commerce requirement took the case outside Stanley. The court rejected that argument. The government was, in substance, prosecuting Anderegg for possessing the material in his home; the fact that the material had previously travelled through interstate commerce did not change that.
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Fiction is not abuse
The harder question was why Stanley should apply at all when the material depicted children in sexual situations.
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The answer lies in the distinction between actual and virtual child sexual abuse material. In New York v. Ferber and Osborne v. Ohio, the Supreme Court permitted the government to prohibit material depicting the sexual abuse of actual children. That rationale does not automatically extend to material in which no child was involved.
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The government conceded that the images for which Anderegg was charged did not depict an actual child and could not be linked to one. The Supreme Court's decision in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition is therefore critical. There, the Court rejected attempts to prohibit virtual material based on arguments that it might facilitate grooming, encourage abuse or normalize sexual activity with children.
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The Seventh Circuit found that those same arguments could not overcome Free Speech Coalition. As the Supreme Court had previously held, the government may not prohibit speech merely because it might increase the chance that an unlawful act will occur at some indefinite future time.
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The court acknowledged that AI technology has changed dramatically since Free Speech Coalition was decided in 2002, and that increasingly realistic AI-generated images may present new risks. But a lower federal court cannot simply disregard controlling Supreme Court precedent because technology has changed. The court accordingly concluded that § 1466A(b)(1) was unconstitutional as applied to Anderegg's in-home possession.
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None of this requires us to defend Anderegg, endorse his alleged conduct, or regard the material as benign. It requires us to recognise that constitutional rights cannot depend upon whether the person exercising them is sympathetic.
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This is precisely why COSL's Drawing the Line project distinguishes between lived abuse and fictional expression. Real children deserve protection from exploitation, and perpetrators who abuse or exploit children should be held accountable. But collapsing fictional or virtual material into the same legal category as material documenting the abuse of an actual child risks giving the government powers that extend far beyond the harm they were ostensibly created to address.
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As COSL wrote in our earlier Anderegg article, “the state does not get to police your private thoughts or the private creations you keep at home.” That is the line the Seventh Circuit has now reaffirmed.
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We don't have to like what was on Anderegg's computer to believe that the government should not have unlimited power to decide what adults may privately possess in their own homes. Indeed, defending that principle is most important when the defendant—and the content—is least sympathetic.
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Civil liberties are easy to defend when we approve of the person exercising them. The real test is whether we will defend the boundary when we don't.
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The Latest from Our Blog
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Drawing the Line: Online Harm, Queer Expression, and Platform Governance in Asia-Pacific
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October 6 at 10:15–11:15 NPT, 4:30 UTC, 14:30 AEST, 21:30 PST, October 7 at 0:30 EST Across the Asia-Pacific region, governments and online platforms are expanding systems intended to protect children and adults from "online harms", including pornography, AI-generated abuse, obscenity, extremism and disinformation. Yet these frameworks increasingly affect communities and forms of expression far beyond their original targets, often …
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Medical School Berlin workshop
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Perspectives on Child Sex Stories – A Panel DiscussionSeptember 28 at 7:00–9:30 BST, 8:00–10:30 CEST, 16:00–18:30 AEST, 23:00–1:30 PDT To date, little to no empirical research exists on text-based depictions of sexual interactions involving underage characters (for an overview, see Lehmann et al., 2025). From a theoretical point of view, these so-called child sex stories have been proposed as a protective factor (e.g. providing …
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What I Learned Building Age Verification for a Platform With a Billion Users
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A few years ago I sat in a room where a small group of people decided how a platform with over a billion users would try to figure out who was too young to be there. I helped build that system. It is a strange thing to be in that room, watching smart, well-intentioned people try to solve a problem …
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Meta Glasses Petition to the FTC
Protect the Public from Covert Recording by Smart Glasses
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The seemingly stylish glasses that Meta have created initially held the purpose of revolutionizing content by taking away the ability for someone to hold a camera and capture media. Many collaborations with Meta have taken place, including with Ray-Ban and more recently, Kylie Jenner. Influencers have flocked over this invention to help with creating innovative photo and video content for their brands, but it is not without its major flaws.
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Many individuals and organizations have held concern that these glasses cause covert recordings of unaware patrons, safety risks for women, privacy issues, and data collection misuse with Meta’s skeptical background. Jenner’s Meta Glasses in particular are being labeled as “surveillance chic”, where a fashionable accessory is able to, according to the Financial Times, ““continuously record audio while taking photos every few seconds” with no visual indication. Women have notably been the victim of nonconsensual recordings, as an instance occurred where Toluwa Omitowoju was videoed by a man wearing the glasses. It was brought to her attention by distant friends that the video had amassed hundreds of thousands of view online, where she stated “I had no say”. Concerning privacy and data collection, images and videos taken by the glasses are AI processed when being uploaded to Meta’s cloud servers. This is done without the consent of the user and raises issues of how the data is used outside of what the user wanted to record.
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The overall consensus the general public has about Meta Glasses is unfavorable, showing that this technology created by a controversial corporation can be disastrous when used by dangerous individuals. By signing this petition, our team will forward it to the Federal Trade Commission to request a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. The misuse of Meta glasses are a deceptive practice and clear privacy violation, which go against FTC regulations. A ban on the glasses has already taken place in New York as courts in the state since legal proceedings were being videoed. We want to take action by ensuring punishments for fraudulent privacy claims, no tampering can be done to secretly film people, and court orders can be made to delete personal data. Meta has proven ever since its conception it is not a trustworthy company, seeing it recently being sued in a nationwide case lying about how safe its social media platforms are. Join us and sign our petition to urge nationwide change and regulations for this harmful surveillance technology.
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Major update to Rocket.Chat PhotoDNA CSAM scanning app
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COSL maintains a CSAM scanning app for the popular chat platform Rocket.Chat. This app is part of the suite of open source trust and safety tools that we maintain at Modtools.io, and is used internally by one of the clients that we host at Liberato.io. The app enables Rocket.Chat administers to be confident that their chat service won't be misused to distribute illegal content, and it helps them to report any such content that is uploaded. Bear, the app's new maintainer, writes:
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I recently took over maintenance of the Rocket.Chat PhotoDNA CSAM scanning app. It’s been a useful tool, but hasn’t had proper maintenance for at least a few years now. A review of the codebase identified a number of major and minor issues that had been left unaddressed, so I took it upon myself to overhaul the entire repo, modernizing it and fixing those issues in the process. There are still a few minor improvements left to make, but the current version is now something I can say confidently is more secure and works better than the last!
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You can browse the source code to the app at Github by clicking the button below, and soon you'll be able to install it into your own Rocket.Chat instance through the Rocket.Chat app marketplace.
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Elephant in the Lobby:
The Great Wattpad Migration
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In recent weeks, an update to Wattpad’s Content Guidelines has triggered a wave of anxiety across online storytelling communities. Although Wattpad maintains that its rules on explicit material have not fundamentally changed—only clarified—many users interpreted the revisions as a crackdown on mature and erotic fanfiction. The resulting “exodus” has directed large numbers of readers and writers toward Archive of Our Own (AO3), the nonprofit, volunteer-run repository that has long positioned itself as a stronghold for uncensored transformative works. Amid this migration, longstanding tensions within fandom have resurfaced, particularly around the activities of a vocal subset of participants known as “antis.”
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In fandom parlance, “antis” (short for anti-shippers or, more broadly, opponents of “problematic” content) are individuals who actively campaign against fanworks featuring themes, pairings, or depictions they deem morally unacceptable—often including dark, non-consensual, or age-gap scenarios involving fictional characters. Their preferred tactics frequently involve mass-reporting, public shaming, and pressure campaigns aimed at platforms and creators.
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It’s happening again. Antis are scrambling for yet another site and hobby to lay waste to simply because they kept reporting materials they found offensive, to the point where websites are cracking down even on the works that antis favor. With no place to go, they are running to Archive of Our Own, the last remaining bastion of fandom expression.
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And now, as I sit writing this, I ponder the irony of the situation. Antis, who have long been opponents of free expression, and of expression that they dislike, are flocking to a non-profit, volunteer-run archive that is an oasis in a desert of censorship. This implies that they enjoyed what platforms such as Fanfcition.net and Wattpad had to offer, while being free to call for the censorship of others…until Wattpad and FF.Net changed their rules yet again. They don’t like that it’s suddenly impacting them and their quality of life. Now they’re rushing into Archive of Our Own, mass reporting any Dead Dove material they find. They will be sorely disappointed in that regard. Mass reports only slow down the process of analyzing the reported works to see whether or not they are in violation of the site’s ToS. Even so, a work is not likely to be taken down due to mass reports and there are only a handful of volunteers on board to analyze each and every single one.
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AO3 is a purely non-profit organization, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works, and as such, is not subjected to the whims of advertisers or corporations looking to ‘clean up’ their content in the hopes of reaching a broader audience. It was the very first purge of mature and NC-17 fanworks on Fanfiction.net that spurred the founders to create AO3 in the first place. Newcomers may be alarmed at the less-than-typical material available for perusal on the site, but AO3 allows users to curate their experiences on the website by means of customizable filters. It’s also important to note that they don’t host illegal content or anything that violates the law or their terms of service.
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Antis enjoy freedom of expression and the benefits that are offered because of it. They just don’t want to see others who create things they disagree with also prosper under the same benefits. I fully believe that antis created the conditions that caused them to flee Wattpad and FF.Net in the first place. Rather than admitting that they contributed to their favored works being censored, blocked, taken down or even reported to authorities, they have now set their sights on turning AO3 into yet another fandom wasteland. These campaigns start with someone’s works being discovered on their personal feeds, on social media, or even being widely shared by an anti without the creator’s permission. The person whose work is shared is now a target not for constructive criticism, but for censorship, for harassment, for cyberbullying, for being financially cut off if they have a job outside of their hobbies. And all of this is for the sake of a few clicks, or a few more eyeballs and subscribers on social media. To make the antis look as though they are doing the ‘right thing’, as if they’re saving actual victims when all they’re doing is harassing someone who drew an erotic fanwork of two fictional characters or someone who created a ‘ship’ that they detest.
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The message is clear: they would rather you share in their misery than reflect on how they got in this situation in the first place. I only point out what’s happening at AO3 with Wattpad users because it’s an active example of how niche spaces and areas get infiltrated by antis and how they spread so quickly. Thankfully, the Archive is holding its own and has no intention on changing in order to please antis. Sadly, the same can’t be said for art sites, game vendors, game devs, game publishers and editors, comic and manga sellers, online vendors and many others who were victims of mass reporting like this. Collective Shout, Exodus Cry, NCOSE and more also operate in this fashion, and have succeeded in getting financial giants, lawmakers and creators to do as they command. Imagine how many legitimate issues have been reported, only to have the process for evaluating them slowed or even ground to a halt because a group of antis mass reported, tying up the system. Perhaps you don’t even have to imagine. The deadly outcomes of this kind of event are present in the lack of prosecutions for CSAM, trafficking, abuse, CSA, domestic abuse, and so much more.
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So many people could have been saved from the worst crimes known to humankind had the systems that child protection and law enforcement agencies use not been clogged because someone saw an illicit cartoon or an erotic comic—none of which contained the very real victims of crime. For every game’s outfit that gets censored, for every erotic book banned, for every fandom that’s sanitized, there’s probably 100 children that go unheard, unaided, because the resources needed to get them out of the danger they are in were diverted. I ask again: who does this save? Who was aided by this?
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Mass reporting has been turned into a tool used by censors to enact revenge on creators, on members of communities that aren’t mainstream, on the vulnerable and marginalized who may only be able to find solace in these places and things that they can connect with. A countertool needs to be created to not only disincentivize malicious mass reporting, but also to help pick up the genuine concerns in order to make communities safe—and more importantly, free to express themselves without harassment.
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