Your fact-checks will appear here
The penalties for accessing child pornography in the United States, including federal and state laws, sentencing guidelines, and collateral consequences.
States differ sharply in how they regulate pornography because federal law draws clear lines around child pornography and interstate distribution of “obscenity,” while most day-to-day content regulati...
criminalizes and creates civil penalties for certain unauthorized entries into the , including entering at an improper time or place, avoiding inspection, and using misrepresentation or concealment; i...
Prosecutors need admissible proof of statutory elements beyond a reasonable doubt — typically that a defendant knowingly possessed, produced, or distributed (CSAM) under -law">federal and state statut...
criminalizes many forms of when the image depicts a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct or is “virtually indistinguishable” from such a depiction, but enforcement hinges on several legal thresh...
Only a small number of jurisdictions explicitly criminalize possession of pornographic material that depicts sex with animals; the most clearly documented example in the supplied reporting is , which ...
Text-only sexual writing that depicts minors is treated far more permissively under U.S. law and constitutional doctrine than visual depictions: federal statutes and precedent focus criminal liability...
— erotic or sexualized artwork depicting anthropomorphic juvenile animals (“cubs” or “babyfur”) — is not categorically illegal across the , but it occupies a volatile legal gray zone where specific fo...
Federal law defines “” for images of minors through a mix of statutory categories and judicially applied tests: the statutory definition in 18 C. §2256 enumerates particular kinds of conduct (intercou...
Electronic service providers (ESPs) and remote computing services determine which files to report to the under §2258A primarily by assessing whether they have "actual knowledge" of apparent violations...
Regional laws are already forcing such as to bake local legal constraints into their moderation systems, producing stricter takedown flows, forbidden-content filters, and provenance-labeling requireme...
and state law treat any sexually explicit depiction of persons under 18 as a grave criminal offense: production typically carries the harshest mandatory penalties (often 15–30 years), distribution/tra...
Downloading or consuming paywalled materials from “shadow libraries” is legally risky in the United States because those platforms frequently host or distribute copyrighted works without authorization...
itself is lawful in many jurisdictions, but interacting with illegal content or marketplaces there exposes users to a wide array of criminal, civil and investigative risks; what matters legally is the...
depicting minors sits in a fraught legal and policy gray zone: principally target visual depictions of real minors and traditionally do not criminalize purely textual fiction, but , state statutes, an...
Criminal penalties for accessing (possession/viewing) versus sharing (distribution/production) sexual content involving minors vary widely across jurisdictions: many countries treat production and dis...
A broad and rapidly growing body of state law now criminalizes the creation or distribution of , with most statutes concentrated on non‑consensual adult intimate imagery and separately on AI‑generated...
carry many of the same baseline legal risks as professionally produced adult content—most notably laws against sharing non‑consensual material, , and —but they lack the compliance scaffolding (contrac...
Section 1466A and Section 2252A are sibling federal statutes created or amended by the to target sexual depictions of minors: §1466A criminalizes obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of ...
States that restrict have used a mix of fines, administrative penalties, ISP blocks, and criminal charges to deter VPN use, but reporting shows few clear, documented prosecutions tied specifically to ...