I’ve heard people say certain doujin artists trace CP multiple times, but I’ve never seen a shred of proof. And it makes me wonder how the fuck do people even know? There’s a metric fuckton of CP out there, and most of it’s buried on the so-called ‘dark web.’
So how the did these people figure out that lolicon artists are tracing CP? When someone makes that accusation, they’re basically admitting they’ve spent way too much time swimming through piles of CP themselves.
Unless the artist straight-up admits to it but like I said, I’ve never seen proof, just a bunch of baseless accusations.
Mildly related, I can't recall his name but I know a few years ago a well known furry artist was outed for using kids posing in bikini pics as art reference. It was well known that search engines like Bing were pedo hotspots for a while because they had literally no blocking of pics of naked kids - Pedos were literally commenting on peoples blogs from years ago, innocent family blogs were people shared a couple bathtime or potty training pics, simply because bing was keeping them as pretty high results. It was stupidly easy for these people to find content without needing to resort to the deepweb. (I Believe this is fixed now, thank god, but who knows how many other smaller search engines haven't bothered to put these precautions in place)
Russian sites that host images similar to photobucket/imageshacks setup have been known to host 'non-nude' pics of the style that the furry artist referenced, but users of those sites often share actual cp behind password protected albums. Russia has a weird history of promoting borderline cp content under the guise of them being 'fashion models' and what not, but it's very, very clear what the intentional audience is. It's not far out to think the artists could be drawing over pics like that but adding the nudity themselves, yuck. Now that I think about, several weirdos on deviantart I recall back in the day were blasted by the community for uploading creepy pics of young kids, claiming it's meant for people to use as art references - Stuff like boys feet or whatever, that they can pretend is innocent and sfw. Of course, we all know users like that will upload such things generally to signal to others they're safe to contact and associate with on other more private platforms to see the stuff they
don't upload.
It's unfortunately a lot more widespread than people want to believe, and finding it in places like family blogs gives these creeps a chance to try and wave it away as nothing bad. "It's public, nobody cares, it's just family pics" kinda deal. But you're right, in order to actually recognize those pics being traced, someone would have to have come across those themselves, and nobody really wants to admit to that. Unless someone throws self-preservation to the air, denounces past things they've done and willingly tries to out others from the inside of these circles, many will not bother endangering themselves.
