As I mentioned in a prior article, someone calling himself a cybersecurity researcher recently discovered that many of the clearnet MAP sites share a common hosting platform. His technical analysis was correct, relying on public information that can be interpreted by almost anyone vaguely familiar with networking. His inference regarding what that meant about how clearnet MAP sites are organized? Not quite on the mark. His assumption that I'm essentially the king of pedos was quite hilarious.

Unsurprisingly, the man failed to persuade the bulletproof hosting provider to take down our legal content. The best he was able to muster was a French news article and debate on r/Epstein, the laughable lefty version of QAnon. I'm sure the complaints to our host would have been no surprise to them, nor to the NCMEC, as sites such as this receive constant reports both to providers and to law enforcement. Perhaps that says something about the legal status of our sites, and the immutable right to free speech to which a select few still subscribe.

The news article

As for that French news article, it is paywalled, but can be found handily archived and free of charge. Use your preferred translation tool to read the article in English; Google Translate does a pretty decent job. I suggest that you read the article, in full, before perusing my response.

The journalistic 'investigation' into the pedophile network that actually isn't one was reported by Arnaud Wajdzik, who represents France's largest newspaper. This is a man who skulks around Epstein-related subs on Reddit under the handle SatisfactionNew5841, also bizarrely calling himself... wait for it... FrenchEpstein! That doesn't really come across altogether well in English.

Wajdzik's article started off by calling us a pédocriminalité ecosystem. This, crucially, is an accusation of criminality, one which should require a hell of a lot of evidence and in fact has none. Might we start a rumor that Wajdzik is a rapist, perhaps a member of a human trafficking network? It would be no less defamatory. What makes this all worse is that he later explains how clearnet MAP sites are not violating the law, despite them being distinctly unpalatable to many. He lies intentionally to generate clicks. Given that defamation can be a criminal offense under French law, I think it pertinent to ask... who is the actual criminal here? It is not hard to deduce the 'ecosystem' he is talking about.

It is also alleged by Wajdzik that clearnet MAP sites serve as recruitment bases for darknet sites. To anyone who has carefully read both the researcher's article and the French news story, this is quite obviously an embarrassing misunderstanding of what the 'cybersecurity researcher' stated. The researcher claimed that MAP Union (Mu), an organization which I founded with my gay friend Jim Burton, seeks to recruit members from the darknet. That claim would be more or less true. I would very much like to get gooners involved in activism, rather than gooning, so long as it can be done without any criminal liability. Wajdzik, no doubt struggling with the language barrier, flipped this around, calling the clearnet sites an active gateway to the darknet. How utterly amateurish!

Despite the comical incompetency of Wajdzik and his team, they were - due to their status as France's largest newspaper - able to solicit a response from the French government. The "High Commissioner for Children", who was evidently far too lazy to conduct any kind of investigation of her own, took the accusations at face value. The article states, translated to English:

“Your investigation clearly shows that online child sexual abuse is not an accident, it’s an ecosystem,” warns Sarah El Hairy, High Commissioner for Children. The figures she provides are staggering: reports of child sexual abuse material have jumped by 6,000% worldwide in ten years, and 750,000 predators are reportedly active online every day. Faced with this reality, the High Commissioner calls for a “systemic” response, capable of “tracing the entire chain, from the username to the infrastructure.”

It is easy to label these comments an attack on free speech. And they would be, if any claim to competence whatsoever could be assumed. But the lady's response frankly reeks of a disinterested and hapless politician, one who was given bad information by an unscrupulous journalist scraping the sewers for scraps of a story. Still, does being completely fucking useless make such a threat reasonable? A threat of tracking down, and by implication harassing, those participating in lawful discussion on lawful resources? I think not. Knocks on doors could happen if, as we have seen from the French people involved in this story, everyone is too lazy and incompetent to verify anything before acting.

Teens need access to MAP resources

French authorities are in fact launching an attack on MAP resources via their 'digital watchdog', on the grounds that teens are allowed to register without identification on French forum La Garçonnière. I have zero idea what French law says about that, and quite frankly, I don't think webmasters should need to know the laws of every fucking country in the entire world. We've seen similar attempts at censorship via watchdogs in Australia and the UK, and in the latter case, an attempt to apply such laws to foreign nationals and web hosts. It's a scary precedent when every little governor wants to own the internet.

The drama over the French forum is quite ridiculous; the board barely has any members, and quite likely no teen participants at all. There's also a very obvious question of what teenage pedophiles are supposed to do with themselves. I made my MAP activist debut as a minor, and frankly, if I hadn't received counseling from other MAPs at the time, I might well have gone out and hurt someone due to my anger at how MAPs are treated. I was incredibly distressed, not by my sexual orientation but by the extreme and incessant public discourse about it, and I would never have reached out to the 'prevention' organizations that only see MAPs as rape-crazed monsters to be tamed.

Most MAPs realize that they are MAPs as teenagers, are utterly horrified by the stigma, and rightfully don't trust those outside of our community. The purpose of allowing teenagers to register on sites like La Garçonnière is not so that adults can hit on teenagers, but so that teenage pedophiles can actually get some proper support, in countries that offer absolutely nothing. Just across the ocean from France, one teenager - banned from a number of MAP sites for causing trouble - murdered his whole family. His final messages before committing the act were about his obsession with a girl character in a video game. While he was receiving professional counseling, he was likely unwilling to discuss his sexual orientation with anyone who was not a MAP, and understandably so. It's a pity we couldn't get him to somewhere like LifeLine. It's fortunate that he didn't manage to kill dozens of innocent people, as he had planned.

Adults need peer support too

It's not only young people, but also adults of all ages who have a need to discuss their feelings with peers. While many of us would like to be out as MAPs in our local communities, we absolutely cannot be, quite ironically given that lynch mobs foaming at the mouth would absolutely love to know who we are! Being attracted to children is immutable; you cannot change your sexuality, even if it offends someone's delicate sensibilities. Remove the MAP spaces, and leave people with nowhere to vent, and you will have some incredibly angry and frustrated people on your hands. Has France learned nothing from how it has treated Muslims?

Responding to the modern French imperialists

On the one hand, I do rather like French wine and cuisine. Yummy! On the other hand, France has a long and storied history of imperialism and colonialism, and the idea that their modern government has some kind of right to pursue takedowns of entirely lawful foreign websites appears very much in the same vein. The French authorities really need to fuck off entirely when it comes to websites that violate no laws and exist outside of their jurisdiction.

Alas, France has become a terrifyingly authoritarian country, and the targets of their aggression must ultimately take a stand. I know that my response, if targeted by them in person, would be a hell of a long way from peaceful, and I think that proper. What is most likely to happen, of course, is not a cabal of frog-munching Frenchies beating down my door. Rather, I anticipate these sites being blocked in France as the most likely negative outcome.

But I don't have a crystal ball, sadly, nor an ability to read minds. What I will say is this. If a single one of our lawful sites is taken down by France, I will start distributing exactly the kind of articles, in French, that their nasty government would not wish the public to see. This would include articles on working with children, befriending children (not for sexual relationships), and whatever else I can think of that would really make a point. And it would be remiss not to mention that if they somehow figured out a way to have this platform removed or blocked, I would find another one and push back even harder. Any escalation by them will result in an escalation by me. Hell, they could magically persuade every country in the world to criminalize our very existence as MAPs, and then we'd have absolutely nothing left to lose! If they wanna start a war, bring it the fuck on!