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TV Tropes Self-Censoring Under Google Pressure
mvdwege writes "The popular wiki TV Tropes, a site dedicated to the discussion of various tropes, clichés and other common devices in fiction has suddenly decided to put various of its pages behind a 'possibly family-unsafe' content warning, apparently due to pressure by Google withdrawing its ads. What puzzles me most is the content that is put behind this warning. TV Tropes features no explicit sexual content, and no explicit violence. It does of course discuss these things, as is its remit, but without actual explicit depictions. In fact, something as relatively innocuous as children being raised by two females, whatever the reason are put behind the content warning, even if the page itself doesn't take a stand on the issue, merely satisfying itself by describing the occurence of this in fiction."
What is the problem? Just open the site with a disclaimer, "This site is not filtered for children or idiots. Enter at your own risk." Now everyone is happy.
Nobody from Google made that judgement; rather, TV Tropes' own users did... though the summary is certainly edited in such a way as to imply otherwise.
That said, the users from TV Tropes are self-censoring conservatively on account of not knowing exactly what Google dinged them for... which is clearly Not Cool.
Google does not run ads on NSFW pages. It violates their TOS. People were editing in NSFW content on some pages, and one of the auditors at Google caught it. Now TVTropes has to make sure that any pages that may have NSFW content do not run Google ads.
Republican family values!
Hey, lets inflict forced proposition-8 divorces on 1000s of californian families because an imaginary diety says so, even if the constitution says govt and religion are forbidden from combining.
Uh, couple != families. Families implies children.
Errm, did you miss the part where married couples without kids got preferential treatment over unmarried couples with kids because of the aforementioned "Republican family values"?
Fandroids hate facts.
Umm, no: porn very much includes the written word. I checked a couple dictionaries just now and it actually lists the written form of porn *first*.
The difference between erotica and pornography is that erotica is thought to have more artistic merit.
I was in the TVTropes IRC channel when all this was going on, and what came out was: the contract for the ads that the tvtropes people signed with Google explicitly stated that no family-unsafe content was allowed. The wiki flew under the radar for a good while, probably because it has nothing explicit and so nobody thought of checking too hard, but ultimately someone did. Now, while the wiki has no porn or anything like it, it's undeniable that some of the arguments might be seen as not suitable for young children. Whether talk about lesbian erotica or massive amounts of profanity harm children or not can be discussed at length, but the matter remains that the contract conditions were clear. I hate censorship as much as the next slashdotter and I hate self-righteous moralization even more, but in this particular case I find all this anti-googlism to be way out of proportion. Especially considering that TVTropes didn't really self-censore anything, they just put the relevant articles behind an "are you really sure" clickthrough barrier; all the content is still there.
If you've ever read anything on tvtropes, you'll realize that that's the standard way of starting an anecdote or personal example, such as "in this troper's experience", "this toper saw/believes/felt" and "this troper read in a fanfic somewhere...".
Yes it has. It's had a message added saying that single sex relationships are potentially unsafe reading for minors. It's a minor change but it's still a change.
You self-censor the word sexual and expect people to take you seriously in a conversation about censorship?
Really?
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
See that, ConceptJunkie, you just bought into the notion that there really is such a thing as the "free market", and further that having such a thing would actually be a good thing?
No, we have the highest unemployment rate in decades because it's good for business.
But that's a different discussion for another day.
You are welcome on my lawn.