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Disney Forces Explicit Club Penguin Clones Offline (bbc.com) 23

Posted by BeauHD from the cease-and-desist dept.
"Disney has ordered unauthorized copies of its Club Penguin game to close, after the BBC found children were being exposed to explicit messages," the British publication reports. The social network was shut down by Disney in 2017, causing unofficial clones of the website to launch on private servers using stolen or copied source code. The BBC reports: Visits to fan-run Club Penguin Online (the largest of the social network's unofficial clones) surged during the coronavirus pandemic with more than a million new players. But racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and sexual messages flow freely on the unauthorized platform. Disney said it was "appalled" by the website, and has ordered it to close or face legal action. Club Penguin Online appeared to go offline on Friday afternoon. One man involved in the site has been arrested on suspicion of possessing child abuse images. Detectives say the man from London has been released on bail pending further inquiries.

The BBC set up an account on the English, Spanish and Portuguese versions of Club Penguin Online. It found: content filters designed to remove offensive language had been disabled on several servers, allowing swear words, homophobic slurs, anti-Semitism and racist messages to be posted publicly; moderators were no longer removing racist content; and players were engaging in "penguin e-sex," sending and receiving explicit messages. Disney's original game banned the sharing of personal details, but players on this cloned site are openly sharing Snapchat, Instagram and Discord account details. A Zoom "meet-up" was also advertised and codes and passwords shared openly. Although it is impossible to verify the age of users, many told the BBC they were teenagers, and there were children playing, too.
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Disney Forces Explicit Club Penguin Clones Offline More

Disney Forces Explicit Club Penguin Clones Offline

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  • Let me be the first (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Let me be the first owl to exclaim:

    Hooo cares!

  • "penguin e-sex" (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    As a bachelor who has quarantined for 2 months...I, for one, actually find that somewhat stimulating.

  • Penguin e-sex (Score:3)

    by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Friday May 15, 2020 @09:37PM (#60066062) Journal

    WOAH. Tux was never meant to do that. Keep all that on FurAffinity.

  • Maybe the authorities want to look into this /. poster [slashdot.org] since he seemed intent on making his own version of the site [slashdot.org] when Disney shuttered the official site. The summary didn't mention anything about gambling going on, but all the sex stuff seems to fit.

  • These were not "Explicit Club Penguin Clones" because people use the chat in such a manner any more than The Sims is a sex simulator just because some people treat it as such.

    That's not to say that Disney was wrong to go after them or the authorities were wrong to go after those creeps, but the game itself is not explicit without user intervention.

    • If you're a company that markets itself as a provider of media and entertainment for children, no way in hell would you want anything even remotely associated with your company to get lumped in with something like this. Of course this is the same company that sued daycare centers [chicagotribune.com] over them having wall murals of Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters, so they'd go after these sites even if there wasn't any grooming or other objectionable activities happening on these sites.

    • those creeps

      What creeps? You make it sound as if there's something morally wrong going on.

      • And that is how you know somebody either rapes children in his basement, or would like to but is also too cowardly.

        These theatrical ways of being outraged at "the sinners" (who swear and such), is how they compensate for the perversions that is going on in their heads and behind closed doors, as an integral part of the culture of people who twist their perception of reality as much as these types.

  • From the people who brought you Tux Racer: Tux Racist!

  • The problem with children's social media. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @03:09AM (#60066562)

    You set up your platform. You make it child-safe. You give it cartoon graphics, and market to children. All is well - for a few years.

    But the children grow older, and they do not leave. They have friends by that point - a nice community, all aging together. Too comfortable as things are. So the service that was filled with children is now filled also with teenagers. Eventually it may be filled with young adults. Teenagers really love two things: Sex, and exploring the limits of socially acceptable behavior together.

    And this is why any social media service that is created for children will end up filled with sex and profanity.

  • A Disney property that is erased from official existence. Any clones that survive wil proably move to the dark web and be even more shady.
  • ...as if a exhibitionist clubber penguin belonging to Disney's army had cloned himself online.

    Perhaps verb conjugation isn't that useless after all. :-)

  • Well fuck me silly, but I would love to hear the precise process of physical cause and effect that leads from "explicit" messages to bodily (including mental) harm in a child, and how that harm then manifests...

    Go a head. Give me the full neural explanation treatment.

    Cause this is not the fuckin dark ages, dear Puritan Catholibans, and everybody of us had access to "explicit" messages as kids, and we know for a fact that all it did, was make us think it's funny.

    You know what actually damaged kids though? Re

    • Clearly said by someone who doesn't have kids. It's not about their heads exploding, it's about keeping them from picking up unacceptable behaviors which are then a giant PITA to undo. Parenting is hard enough without me having to explain all the bullshit online to an 8 year old.
      • Sheltering children from the world is a losing battle. The world is far more ubiquitous and persistent than the most overprotective helicopter parent. Instead of keeping them ignorant teach them well and (here's the hard part) trust them to make good decisions.
        If your 8 year old is asking questions, answer them honestly. That answer may well include the phrase "You're not old enough I'll be happy to explain when you are, meantime stay away from that.". If you've been honest and informative to that point the
  • If there's any chance an x-year old has a chance to be abused, I want x-year olds to know all the words they might possibly need in order to be able to describe that. Nobody at all says: "Oh, I heard about sex too young." A majority of those concerned say: "I didn't know how to tell anyone."

  • we're all penguins (Score:3)

    by clovis ( 4684 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @10:24AM (#60067150)

    I may have this wrong, but if I remember correctly, I learned from GWAR that we humans are the result of GWAR's abusing penguins. In my life, GWAR has been the most consistent source of knowledge of our origins.

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