A clarification to Discord’s Terms of Service regarding the chat platform’s policies on underage pornography has ignited community concerns, with some users calling Discord’s approach to explicit content — especially involving anthropomorphized animals — hypocritical.
Discord allows sexual content when it is deemed consensual and shared appropriately, but draws a strict line when it comes to material involving minors. Last July, Discord cracked down on lolicon and shotacon — specific types of explicit cartoon material focused on young girls and boys, particularly underage fictional characters — but after an inquiry from a Discord user, one of Discord’s Trust and Safety specialist said in a statement that Discord does not “consider ‘cub’ content to be a violation of our Terms or Guidelines on its own.”
“Cub” content is what the furry fandom refers to as explicit material depicting underage, animal-like characters. As with lolicon and shotacon fan art, cub content represents a small, yet contentious area of the furry fandom.
Prior to this, a separate Discord user said they had asked another Trust and Safety specialist about whether cub content falls under the loli/shota ban. That time, the staff member maintained that cub content did violate the Terms of Service, according to the user. The user reached out to a third member of Discord’s Trust and Safety team, who reaffirmed that “this kind of [cub content] is allowable as long as it is tagged properly.”
After screenshots of this exchange were shared to r/Discord/, a Discord staff member going by karridan on Reddit stepped in, in an effort to temper growing resentment.
“When we made the decision to ban loli, there was a huge outcry on Reddit from users that argued that it wasn’t harming anyone, it was art, it would be the beginning of a slippery slope of banning NSFW content, and more,” wrote karridan. “We think there’s harm which exists with loli content and we don’t want Discord to be a place for that, specifically because it is the sexualization of children.”
“There is some overlap between ‘cub’ and loli. I want to make clear that if such content falls into the loli camp — which is to say, sexualization of human or humanoid minors — it’s still banned. If someone thinks that they can get away with a sexualized picture of a child simply by putting bunny ears or cat ears, they’re absolutely wrong,” they continued. “But, as far as I’ve seen on Discord, there is also some segment of “‘cub’ art that is not, in fact, human or humanlike at all [...] This content is significantly greyer, which is why there isn’t a blanket ban on all content that could conceivably fall under the umbrella.”
Users, however, have an issue with the idea that “there is some overlap between ‘cub’ and loli,” arguing that cub content is essentially furry loli content. The characters portrayed in cub art are specifically underage; many point to the depiction of characters in the My Little Pony fandom, which karridan stated was misattributed as “cub” content.
For the most part, regardless of how Discord users personally feel about the overall loli ban, there is an outcry that banning one type underage erotica and not another is hypocrisy.
We’ve reached out to Discord for comment regarding its policy on cub content and the resultant blowback, and we’ll update accordingly.
Correction (Jan. 30): We were informed via anonymous tip that a previous claim about a Discord staff member was issued by a misleading source, and have thus removed it above.
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