>>97528828'Obscene material' is one of the few things that does not enjoy full first amendment protections. The Miller test, which speech must fail to be considered 'obscene' has three parts.
1) It must depict or describe 'patently offensive' sexual conduct or excretory functions
2) It must 'appeal to the prurient interest' when applying average, local community standards
3) It must have no 'serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value'
Only if the given speech fails all three tests can it be considered obscene. Not saying everything that fails these is automatically obscene, just that it can be legally classified as such and laws can be made restricting or banning it.
Even then obscene material does enjoy some protections. Laws against it must be narrow and specific in their scope and intention, no casting wide nets. And simple possession of obscene material is constitutionally protected (Stanley v Georgia, 1969).
Now all this is in contrast to Child Pornography laws, which are an entirely separate thing and often get mixed into the discussion around lolicon material. In fact, the US Supreme Court has straight-up said that CP is not automatically obscene, and some of it actually passes the Miller test. Thus they created the Ferber standard (New York v Ferber, 1982) which sets the legal definition of CP in the US. I don't recall the exact wording, but under the Ferber standard content must be actual photo/video content of a real-life child or be visually indistinguishable from such content - it was worded this way to close any loopholes around photo manipulation, etc. In my (not a legal professional) opinion the Ferber standard was clearly meant to be restricted to real recordings of real children, but as stated it probably applies to CGI/AI generated photorealistic content as well; it's a legal gray (very dark gray) area that I believe will end up in the courts sometime in the next decade.
This is all moot when it comes to lolicon - clearly fictional drawn or animated content is absolutely well outside the Ferber standard and thus doesn't fall under CP laws. That's actually a big part of what Ashcroft v Free Speech (2002) was about - in 1996 Congress tried to add fictional drawn/animated/etc content to the legal definition of CP, and the US Supreme Court said 'lol no'. The Protect Act (2003), and basically all similar legislation since then, has tried to get around this by labeling such content as 'obscene' and banning it that way, but as stated obscene material does still enjoy some first amendment protections, and laws regulating it must be narrow in scope and intention.
>>97529772That falls clearly under CP laws and is really a whole other issue, as said above. If they weren't training on actual illegal content or using real kids heads then it's a pretty solid grey area up to interpretation; but with those two I'd say it clearly falls under Ferber.
