Public Notice
Due to the abuse of this document by malicious actors, both against supporters of the report and against implicated users, the decision has been made to make the contents of this page private for the time being. Updates will be made available to select trusted individuals.
As some of you may be aware, this document was leaked publicly sometime early April 1st, 2024. In the interest of informing those curious as to what this document was and to clarify some of the misinformation floating about, I will provide some additional information here:
What this document was:
This document was the result of multiple investigations of reports we received about users in a Discord community that I moderate and was prepared and formatted for sharing with trusted owners and moderators of other MLP Discord servers. Put plainly, this document was a summary of Discord users who we were either actively watching or had banned from our server for activity that could expose minors to material of a sexual nature or who themselves engaged with content that sexualized underage characters.
The original purpose of this document was to provide additional information for moderators of MLP Discord communities who may be also investigating or watching for users that may have an elevated chance to post content that may threaten server safety. Discord has strict policies forbidding using their platform for sharing lolicon and foalcon as well as any other forms of material that attempt to normalize sexualizing children, even fictional, and will action both users that post said content and against servers that permit that content.
What this document was not:
This document was never intended to be used as a "hit list". As mentioned above, this was an internal document intended to be used as a resource for other Discord server moderation teams. There was no personally identifying information (PII) listed for any of the users in the report, and as such does not meet the definition of “doxxing”. Additionally, this was never intended to implicate users of other platforms, which is why the information presented from other platforms was sparse. Nor was it intended to serve as an exhaustive exposé on each individual in the report, but rather a part of a discussion on a case-by-case basis. Nor did I intend on using this document to attempt to convince the operators of Fimfiction or Derpibooru to change their policies, especially seeing as both platforms have made policies and financial decisions to protect this content and have staff who actively engage with foalcon and/or lolicon.
History
I have been in the pony fandom since its early days, and if you’re in this fandom for long enough, you will eventually learn about or find foalcon. When I first found out about it, I thought it was a joke. Cartoon CSAM? Clearly that’s satire, no-one would actually be into that, right? So I went along with interacting with the fandom and tolerating its existence without ever truly digging into it, even as far as making jokes about it and also adopting into the FimFetch archive a version of the ‘filter culture’ used by some webservices for dealing with controversial content. My opinion on the matter changed after encountering a group of people while attending Trotcon 2021 who emphatically and enthusiastically talked about how much they enjoyed foalcon.
Soon after, I dug deeper into the foalcon subculture and found that not only were there a few actual pedophiles driving content creation, but that the number of people actively creating and engaging with this content was far greater than I had imagined. Granted, they only represent around 1-2% of the active user accounts on MLP fandom services but even 1% of the active online fandom is still over a thousand people, and this 1% of the fandom represents over 20% of the fandom’s overall online interactions.
Soon after I finished migrating FimFetch to a new webhost, a project I had been working to complete for several years, I finally got around to scanning for and removing all foalcon from the archive. While it is technically not classified as CSAM under US law, after seeing how the foalcon community treats the material and the contents of some of the stories I could no longer see any legitimate reason for this material to be hosted from my archive. While I was working on this, I also removed other types of pornographic sexual content including sexual assault and incest in order to stay compliant with Patreon requirements.
The first draft of this report was formatted for and released to several trusted staff of other MLP Discord servers on March 28th, 2024. The document was leaked to someone on the list after only three days and it was quickly shared with everyone active in the foalcon community. Less than twelve hours later it was posted on 4chan by someone on the list looking to cause trouble.
Fallout
The 4chan MLP community almost immediately went into a vindictive frenzy to do their best to attack the perceived threat to their interests, especially as it seems that a good number of them were on the list for some reason or another. Several attempted to discredit the information in the report, others laughed it off as a silly moral crusade, and at least three Discord accounts are known to have been renamed to cast ridicule upon myself and others who supported this document either for an in-server joke or for screenshots.
However, the most dangerous response was when some people decided to directly attack myself and others who supported or tolerated this document in any way. My personal information was posted publicly and packages were sent to my front door. My photos and pictures of my family were posted in online threads where people fantasized about me committing suicide or being gassed to death. Several threatening messages were sent to me personally. At least one attempt is known to have been made to get police to raid someone’s home. A Derpibooru moderator shared information to get more people harassed. The thread on 4chan got so bad that moderators stepped in and deleted the thread, and their fallback site had to have the site administrator step in multiple times.
As this document was never intended to be made public, and as several uninvolved people are being targeted and harassed for its existence, I have made the decision to make this document and any updates to it private and only shared with trusted individuals.