Newgon

Newgon logo from 2007

Newgon is a pro-contact map organization that calls itself an information center for the map movement. Its website is a MediaWiki-based site archiving talking points and arguments for pro-contact maps.

This article is a general description of Newgon, their affiliations, and activities. For more detailed evidence of claims presented here, see Newgon/Records.

History

Newgon was co-founded in 2007 by the pro-contact map activists Daniel Lièvre and Jillium after Google started censorship of small blogging sites. Their biggest early project was a magazine titled Uncommon Sense, coming out in 2009-2010. In 2014 the site was disabled, with the ISP requesting the administrator for contact. Soon, the site's domain expired and the site went fully offline.

In 2021 Newgon returned, relaunching by "previous associates of Newgon.com and its network of activists" and resuming editing of the Newgon Wiki with the domain newgon.net. In May 2022, an official Newgon Twitter account appeared. In June 2024, the site was altered so that newgon.net links redirect to wiki.yesmap.net. In addition to that, they now run a pro-contact activist group chat and have made several attempts to host a fediverse instance (childlove.space, childlove.su, which have been suspended for illegal content, and fedi.yesmap.net, the most recent one, which is currently active).

Prominent members

• The Strategist. This is the current main admin of Newgon. He is also known as John Holt, Jim Burton, and Jamal Ross.
• Hina (HinamizawaShokogun22). This is a mod at some Newgon projects, such as PCMA and childlove.space and its continuations.

Affiliations

Newgon, as a wiki, is closely affiliated with a number of other sites and social spaces. The administration and userbase of those heavily overlaps, and many of the actions, while done on behalf of different brand names, are directed by the same circle of people. For the sake of this article, next names might be used interchangeably with Newgon:

• Yesmap.net: one of their main domains that also holds wiki.yesmap.net and fedi.yesmap.net.
• Fstube.net: a video blog site advertized as a backup of a previosuly existing site FreeSpeechTube.org, funded by Newgon.
• PCMA ("Pro-c MAP Activism"): a Matrix chat consisting of several channels, previosuly hosted on yesmap.net, currently hosted on needsmo.re and nekos.cafe.
• Nekos.cafe: an element server and a fediverse instance, moderated by Hina, an active Newgon project participant.
• Map-union.org: an informatiomal site and a forum, moderated by the main Newgon admin.
• Childlove.space (now suspended) and its continuations childlove.su (now suspended), childlove.top (currently active): fediverse instances, known for accepting nazis and hosting CSEM.

Political stances

Contact stances

Newgon is a pro-contact organisation. Its stated goals are mostly related to destigmatization of youth attractions and sexual contact down to hebe age range (from 11 and above), as well as legalization of sex and marriage of adults with youth within this range. It promotes biologically and culturally essentialist view of hebephilia and ephebophilia, heavily leaning on the notion that girls are the most attractive and the most reproductively potent in the teen age range, and therefore it is "natural" for adult men to be primarily seeking them as sexual partners.

Many of the materials on the NewgonWiki heavily suggest much wider spectrum of supported or tolerated views, such as "naturalness" of adult sexual contact with infants, rape apologism.

Newgon is known for its extreme and often conspiratorial viewpoints, suggesting that anti-contact people, among others, are "sex fascists", control the contact stances of major governments, and take part of a "child abuse industry" or "CSA-industrial complex". It is also opposed to equal treatment of many parts of the map community, such as people primarily attracted to children younger than the hebe age range (pedophiles, nepiophiles and infantophiles), people with violent attractions towards youth (sadists, biastophiles, etc)​​​​​​​, and other paraphiliacs​​​​​​​.

Newgon also has been criticized for bigotry, such as misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, fatphobia, mapmisia, as well as ethnonationalist views, perpetuated on the wiki and in personal communication (see [Newgon/Records]).

Activities and strategies

Wiki

Newgon collects information, including studies, quotes, opinion pieces, memes, and infographics. Some of the content they collected has been identified as bigoted, intentionally misleading, or promoting various types of abuse​​​​​​​.

Trolling campaigns

One of the active strategies Newgon uses is trolling, "visibility campaining" or "tactical operations", mostly done through disingenuous tactics such as fabricating credentials or other significant information, impersonating antis, impersonating anti-contact map activists (especially those who were visible opponents of Newgon) to attack or delegitimize them, spreading "ironic" bigoted rhetoric, arguing for stances they did not actually believe in, claiming certain opinions or events were far more common than they actually were, spreading false information, recycling pre-written lines while passing them off as organic and spontaneous, and pretending to be engaged in entirely independent activism efforts rather than encouraged and backed by and working for an entire organization.

Early post-revival Newgon activities included spreading links to their wiki on Twitter while pretending to be reasearchers, sometimes specifically CSA researchers. Efforts such as these are designed to boost Newgon and pro-contact visibility as much as possible thorugh negative attention from public. Newgon members mainly targeted Twitter for these campaigns, but some also tried to do such activism) on other sites.

• PCMA discussion on Twitter trolling
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The "Yesmap" Matrix server and its "Pro-c MAP Activist" ("PCMA") workgroup have been used to share choices of targets and coordinate such activity, along with distributing anonymous, cryptocurrency-bought Twitter accounts to members. The server is also used to coordinate attacks on and harassment campaigns of anti-contact maps on the fediverse. Newgon claims that "In 2023, PCMA and the Yesmap server, having achieved most of its publicity goals via the prior strategy, each moved independently towards a model of increasing visibility via community-building efforts such as expansion of the Fediverse".

According to the Newgon wiki page "PCMA", "PCMA (and some of its predecessors) have been criticized, mainly by anarcho-communist MAPs, for tolerating lively debate (eventually this was moved to a separate space) and controversial opinions. Some members have also sought to mobilize chan culture". This article uses euphemistic terminology to relativize PCMA's common usage of bigotry, harassment, and alt-right tactics, and criticisms of it—throughout 2021 and 2022, Newgon and its associated projects did indeed begin to be heavily criticized by many leftist-aligned map activists, both anti-contact and pro-contact.

Exaggerating own importance

Upon joining the modern map community and map activism, Newgon members perpetuated several false claims regaring own role in the development of the map activism.

We have introduced new writers to NewgonWiki – founded in 2007 – the birthplace of the modern MAP Movement

- Newgon's Strategist on FreeSpeechTube

Founded in 2007, as the information center for the MAP Movement (coining the term and originating a flag concept);

- NewgonWiki as of 4 August 2022

We started the whole "MAP" thing

- NewgonOrg on Twitter, currently suspended

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  Newgon's Twitter account

Both these claims are not true. See: the history of the term "MAP" and the origins of the MAP flag.

Misleading terminology

Other Newgon initiatives include misuse of terms "pro-choice", "anti-choice", "anti-offending".

• Renaming "pro-contact" to "pro-choice" and "pro-consent"

Pro-contact (or simply "pro-c") is a term used to describe a person - often an [sic] MAP or ally, as favoring the permittance of minor-adult physical/sexual relations - at least hypothetically.

- "Pro-c" on NewgonWiki as of 27 September 2021

Pro-c, (pro-consent/choice or contact) is a term used to describe a person - often an [sic] MAP or ally, as favoring the permittance of minor-adult physical/sexual relations - at least hypothetically.

- "Pro-c" on NewgonWiki as of 24 May 2022

On its Twitter accounts NewgonOrg and NewgonOrg2007, Newgon claimed to be "pro-choice" in lieu of labeling itself as "pro-contact."

On the same page with responses to accusations Newgon has claimed: "'Pro choice' (which some of us do use) was an initiative of Allyn Walker, and possibly even the MAPs they were referring to in their book". The book is unambiguously pointing towards maps as the source of this term.

When I asked them about this label during interviews, those who were referred to as pro-contact by anticontact MAPs pushed back against being labeled as such, preferring the term pro-choice.

- Allyn Walker, A Long, Dark Shadow

That claim has also been removed after criticism from the wider community.

• Renaming "anti-contact" to "anti-choice"

This text by JohnHolt refers to anti-contact maps as "anti-choice".

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  JohnHolt's text

• Ambiguous use of "anti-offending"

On its Twitter accounts and "Ethos of Newgon" page, Newgon has claimed to be "anti-offending" to mean being against contact when it breaks the law (although still pro-contact for when it is legal). However, "anti-offending" is typically used in contact discourse synonymously with "anti-contact".

False accusations

Newgon staff and members have repeatedly accused their opponents of various forms of abusive and disruptive behaviors. The following topics were featured:

• Doxxing accusations targeting admins of fediverse instances (Lecter, Kay);
• Implications that other map sites are funded by antis (nnia.space, the Map Wiki);
• Grooming and emotional manipulation accusations (with metaphorical comparisons to castration rituals);
• Plariagism accusations (covered further in the Newgon#Flags section).

In some cases the material for accusations has also been sourced from KiwiFarms.

Enabling CSEM

One of Newgon's affiliate sites, childlove.space, contained multiple accounts posting images of children that failed the Dost test, with full awareness of the site administration. This has resulted in the site's domain being suspended. The admins soon rebuilt it as childlove.su, and its old userbase migrated to the new address. Newgon activists were aware of these problems, since some of them were a part of childlove.space/su staff and others were active on these sites as users. However, NewgonWiki recommended childlove.su as a "generally safe" fediverse instance.

Symbolism

Flags

In 2009 Newgon attempted to hold a contest for a map flag. The contest received several entries, but never reached the voting stage. None of the flags presented for the contest were used till 2021, when Newgon reemerged from the hiatus. On their wiki they made a claim that one of their entries was the original concept the MAP flag was based on and referred to the latter as a "contrast version". After questions and criticism, they reinforced their statement:

Initial tests on the "relative luminance" difference between the two outside blue bands in the 2018 and 2009 flags, reveal those differences to be almost identical (within 0.5-1%) suggesting that the former could be a very slightly darkened and tinted adaptation of the latter, with respect to the blue portion of the graphic.

- The article MAP Flag on NewgonWiki as of 15 Dec 2022

The linkage to the 2018 NOMAP Flag is contested by Map-Wiki, however the rationale given for our 2009 design is eerily similar to the 2018 NOMAP Flag. To say that the probability of the concept being copied/adapted is around 80% would probably be an understatement, but ultimately, we will never know if the flag was copied.

- The article Debate Guide: Newgon's History on NewgonWiki as of 1 Feb 2023

Currently these phrases, as well as the word "version", are removed from NewgonWiki, and the edit history of these two articles is erased (the MAP Flag article in particular has a note that "older edits on this article are being used to make false claims offsite").

Simultaneously with implying plagiarism, Newgon developed a merged edit of their flag and the map flag. Initially titled "yesmap" as a pun on the NOMAP identity, it was renamed to "united map flag" around May 2022.

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  The 2021 "yesmap"/"united" flag

Eventually a separate, exclusively pro c, flag was made for the "yesmap" label.

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  A 2022 "yesmap" flag

Newgon continued promoting their flag under the "united" brand till August 2023, when it was renamed to "2021 version" with a note denying its previous name.

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  This screenshot was taken before the edit history was deleted.

A new flag edit, titled "MAP union", was then posted to NewgonWiki.

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Other symbols

These are logos and variants, seen on different Newgon sites and projects.

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