Slashdot Mirror
Google Knocks Explicit Adult Content On Blogger From Public View
Ellie K writes As of 23 March 2015, Google will remove blogs on its Blogger platform that don't conform to its new anti-adult policies. This is an abrupt reversal of policy. Until today, Google allowed "images or videos that contain nudity or sexual activity," and stated that "Censoring this content is contrary to a service that bases itself on freedom of expression." The linked article quotes the message which has been sent to Blogger users thus: (...) In the coming weeks, we'll no longer allow blogs that contain sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video. We'll still allow nudity presented in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts, or presented where there are other substantial benefits to the public from not taking action on the content.
The new policy will go into effect on the 23rd of March 2015. After this policy goes into effect, Google will restrict access to any blog identified as being in violation of our revised policy. No content will be deleted, but only blog authors and those with whom they have expressly shared the blog will be able to see the content we've made private.
NOW where am I going to go for my sexual content?
Google owns these servers and the web address and may do what they want with them.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Good thing that the definition of "evil" is sooooo malleable.
That is all.
...to their "do no evil" policy?
Yeah yeah I know, it's those damn terrorist pedophiles we need protection against.
your body is evil.
I know there will be a lot of hue and cry over Google's evil censorship, but so what?
Porn is not some scarce resource. On Blogger it's probably mostly copyright infringement anyway.
For each footstep we go back we will never recover from.
Yes there service is free so to speak and yes they can do what they want but should they? At time there needs to be places not liked or images not wanted to be seen, that is what keeps a society vibrant and able to question.
(.)-(.)
I wonder if this isn't motivated at least in substantial part by copyright concerns. A huge portion of adult content posted is in violation of copyright, and if Google was seeing that they were getting DMCA notices for adult content on Blogger at rates that far exceed the overall average, and the cost/effort of responding to those notices was outstripping the ad revenue from the adult blogs, then maybe they just decided it's not worth it.
Purely speculation on my part, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Google's usual spin to try to sound equitable and egalitarian. They're anything but. Remember the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill? Remember when Google took payments from BP to redirect search queries to results that pointed to pro BP (PR agency) websites and religated real journalism and articles about public concern to the back pages of search results that rarely, if ever get seen? Isn't that efectively censorship that's against the public interest?
Google is well known for making abrupt changes without
asking or notifying its user base.
Anyone who trusts Google with ANYTHING these days
deserves what he or she gets.
FUCK Google with a rusty CRE-encrusted meathook.
The full quote is Voltaire's, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
I'm unimpressed by Google's position: in other countries they push back against restriction on free speech. It seem incongrous to impose speech limitations in the US, which actually has the right to free speech as part of their constitution.
davecb@spamcop.net
Did someone at Google decide that they could make more in ad revenue if they could participate in more restrictive regional markets?
"anti-adult policies" should be "anti pornography policies". At least call things by their name.
There are fewer pieces of more obvious Newspeak than so-called "adult" content. When did "this is adult content" become synonymous with "for juveniles only" ?
David Anderson
Google's war on blogs continues, this time on their own properties. What they want is clear: move adult content onto some other host, and pay them to drive traffic to it since it won't show up in organic search anymore.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
It seem incongrous to impose speech limitations in the US, which actually has the right to free speech as part of their constitution.
The US constitution limits powers of Congress, it does not regulate private entities. Your right to free speech does not depend on Google willing to host that speech on Blogger.
"The full quote is Voltaire's, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.""
To quote Google. "But I do not have to pay for you to say it."
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The reality is we do. Next time you ask “Isn't Tor only used by criminals?” you can confident say no. Major companies like Google, Apple, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and Microsoft don't respect our constitutionally protected rights either and as they are in control of the larger internet we need Tor.
Google became evil a long time ago.
This is only a natural manifestation of that transformation.
Hmm, that sounds familiar....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
So, they're not removing the content, they're just making it private. Blogs will become invite only and unsearchable, so nobody can accidentally stumble across some blogger's KP stash. How very nice of Google!
I'm unimpressed by Google's position: in other countries they push back against restriction on free speech. It seem incongrous to impose speech limitations in the US, which actually has the right to free speech as part of their constitution.
No offense, but like most non-lawyers you fail to understand what "part of the constitution" really means in reality. Your right to free speech or for that matter anything is not infinite. SCOTUS judges Thomas and Scalia, both as conservative as they come, stated a few years ago in a 2nd amendment case that the 2nd amendment didn't mean that there could never be any restrictions on guns at all. Your right to free speech is not infinite either, with the classic example that you certainly don't have the right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire, cause a panic and maybe get some people killed, and then say that nothing can be done to you because you have a free speech right to do that.
Google is not the government. While the US government has rather severe restrictions on being able to limit your speech because of the constitution, private employers do not have the same restrictions. SCOTUS has ruled on many "free speech" cases and consistently found that employers, schools, etc. have a right to limit speech in a way that would be seen as a violation of the constitution if the government were to do it. I'm not a lawyer but I can tell you that the simple legal argument against your position is that Google is not stopping you from using other blogs which may have completely different policies and thus your rights are not being violated.
The point being that the US culturally values freedom of speech, so it's odd for a US company to champion it less in the US than elsewhere.
"The full quote is Voltaire's, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
So why did they name the unit of electrica potential (Volt) after him?
It's not a free speech issue at all. People were using Blogger to advertise their porn sites by giving away free samples and posting spammy links. Blogger is a commercial service and not at all obliged to provide hosting for porn advertising.
In fact, I'm not sure anything has actually changed. Blogger was always for non-commercial blogs, and very few people make non-commercial porn. It seems like they are just enforcing the existing rules.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So, Google may have claimed that "Censoring this content is contrary to a service that bases itself on freedom of expression."
And that seems true, as far as that goes.
But I doubt that Google has ever been "a service that bases itself on freedom of expression."
Google is in the business of making profits. Altruistic idealism come second.
Google doesn't want to run a porn site. That makes them evil?
I'm sure it IS about the stupid fucking Christians. Why else would Google do it? Fuck Google. It's not a search engine because search engines should be blind to the content.
I don't agree with you posting someone else's dirty pictures, and I won't defend it either.
"The full quote is Voltaire's, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.""
To quote Google. "But I do not have to pay for you to say it."
They continue: "Is there someway we could monetize this?"
but by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, who wrote a biography of Voltaire and used the phrase as an illustration of Voltaire's beliefs. I have no primary sources but you can search around.
So Google now only allows minors on Blogger?
The full quote is, apparently, not Voltaire's but rather his biogropher's (Evelyn Beatrice Hall).
Google isn't saying you can;t run a porn site. They'll even index your porn site and send traffic to it. They just don't want to run a porn site. Blogger is Google's site. They don't want THEIR site to be a porn site.
> benefits to the public from not taking action
Any content left in place continues to benefit its original purpose.
Content isn't meant to benefit the public. It's meant to benefit consumers.
Any content removed will, of course, serve no purpose whatsoever.
So far, these observations extend to any silenced content, not just adult. Mark Twain said "Censorship is telling a man he can't have steak because a baby can't chew it."
That said, Google has the right to censor what they own. Yes, it's "censorship", and it's quite allowed and legal. It might not be "right", but at least in this case we're not losing anything that's very exclusive - to most of us, pr0n is pr0n.
The Feds have been effectively censoring/destroying entire industries by getting banks to withhold services via Operation Choke Point.
Make you wonder what the Feds may have to hold over Google's head.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
US company
I thought they were Irish...
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
The problem with this neo-libertarian glossolalia is that it's based on the fiction (some would call it a "lie") that only governments have the power to censor. In the real world, extra-national corporations can have as much – or even more – power than a government. I can emigrate from a country if I have a problem with its government, but I can't move to many countries where Google is not the dominant search engine.
By providing the "free service" of Blogger, Google has been using a tactic analogous to "embrace, extend, extinguish" (used against open standards): lure people to use it by offering it free of charge, get them dependent on it (long-running blogs indexed by search engines), then pull the rug out from under them with no practical recourse. Saying "then take your blog elsewhere" like a modern-day (apocryphal) Marie-Antoinette deliberately ignores the fact that it isn't that simple.
The fiction (some would call it a "lie") that censorship is "by definition" an act of the government ignores the historical fact that the term "censor" was coined by the church (not the state), and pretends that there have also been countless non-state entities besides churches who have effectively engaged in it: The Hays Code made it impossible for an American filmmaker to "ridicule the clergy" or even to imply homosexuality in film shown to the public, the Comics Code Authority had a stranglehold on the comics distribution system, killing off comics publishers and infantilizing the medium for decades.
I don't agree with you posting someone else's dirty pictures, and I won't defend it either.
What you need is a shit-covered cock shoved into your mouth so you will
quit typing idiotic cretinistic crap which is typical of a Bush voting genetically
inferior loser.
"you certainly don't have the right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire"
I find it extremely ironic how that quote (from the famous decision decision) gets parroted around when in fact the decision upheld the United States' "right" to arrest & jail draft protesters.
Except that was not Voltaire, it is instead a writer's summary of Voltaire's belief:
Attributed to Voltaire, but first used by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing under the pseudonym of Stephen G Tallentyre in the book "The Friends of Voltaire" (1906), as a summary of Voltaire's beliefs. Variant: "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
Read more at http://izquotes.com/quote/334856
Uh, maybe PRIVATE schools can have content-based speech restrictions...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Google is free to stop being a search engine and become a children's search engine. I'm also free to use Duck Duck Go. Because I'm not five years old, ddg.gg is for me. I'll be certain to introduce my 5 year old child to Google, though, since it's all nice and filtered for actual pornography (I also don't care if she sees a statue of David). Once she's a few years older, I can graduate her to the search engine adults use, because if I don't, you know she'll figure it out on her own anyways.
Kind of odd, though, because Google doesn't market itself very well in stores like Toys 'R Us, which is where I expect to find "clean" products for children. Also, perhaps Google should drop routing for cars and their whole self driving car project, since not many adults will be letting their 5 year old behind the wheel. Thanks Openstreetmap for adult directions!
Is this evil? Not exactly. Just really stupid. There's a lot more adults out there to sell products to than very young children. You'd think the advertisers would be a bit pissed off with this... ahem... childish move.
We have grown used to using Google to search everything on the Web. If we suddenly are no longer able to google one particular kind of content, someone will offer their own search engine, supported by specialized advertising, for it. Economics will dictate that specialized search engines will not try to compete with Google in general search, so in a fairly short time I can see "googling" be replaced by use of a number of search engines for different kinds of activity. An unintended consequence may be that the half-mystical "deep Web" that Google cannot access will become just another specialized search arena, equal to all the others.
Anyone remember a small startup company whose slogan was "do no harm"?
Uh, maybe PRIVATE schools can have content-based speech restrictions...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
So can public schools. Not politically content-based (i.e. can't allow people to wear "Republicans Suck" t-shirts while prohibiting "Democrats Suck" t-shirts), but public schools can certainly place greater restrictions on speech than would be allowed for the public at large. The federal government can't ban Playboy, but a public school can certainly prohibit students from bringing it to class.
I bet the largest collection of porn in the world is on google's cache servers.
But certainly don't muss up their brand with your lurid dirty sinning.
... Yahoo! groups was a "wild west" place to discuss just about any subject at all, period.
You name it ... it was there.
Some of the group headings got out of hand, like "14 year old boys," "8 year old girls," "gang rape," "snuff," etc.
There was a big bang when parents were finally made aware of these groups and Yahoo!, reluctantly, brought the entire group tree down.
It was a free site, so providing human monitors was out of the question, and the bad press for the Yahoo! brand offset the eyeball count.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Enough with the stupid Fire in a crowded theater quote. It wasn't a decision it was an opinion and that case was overturned anyway
http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-hackneyed-apologia-for-censorship-are-enough/
.
Who's watching pro porn anymore?
The trend in adult content seems to be amateur, whether that means actual amateurs in purloined home-made photos and videos or "prosumer" amateurs where some money changed hands but nobody other than the male/cameraman/site owner (the same guy) is actually trying to make a living at it -- certainly the female talent doesn't seem to be a prototypical porn star.
And even when the content is for sale, the same companies selling it often have all you need to see for free on their own YouPorn channels, whether its pro all the way or the sort of semi-pro stuff.
One of my questions would be why are they even bother producing pro porn. There seems to be so many people willing to get naked and have their picture taken out there that actually paying people to do it seems to be a waste of time.
I mean seriously, does anyone even use blogger?
All the blogger sites I've had to deal with (eg DMCA notice) have been pirated content, and mostly porn.
Well, we know who to blame for that.
Thanks a fucking lot, UK.
Get your own domain name.
Pay for your own hosting.
Post whatever you want.
Move to a new host any time you feel the need.
Problem solved.
IMHO, it's foolish to trust a free service to host something you care about and want to see continue indefinitely.
The key sequence to access my Slashdot bookmark in Firefox is Alt-B-S. I don't believe this is a coincidence.
We aren't saying that Google doesn't have the right to do that, we are saying they are asshats for doing that, which we have the right to say.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
No, a lot of people make non-commercial porn. After any invention, the first question humanity asks themselves is how they can use that technology for sex.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Google can choose to censor content if they want to.
I can choose not to use Google if I want to.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
No, it's not censorship. Censorship is the government controlling your actions by coercion, the threat of using force against you.
This may be a business taking a position that they know better than you what is good for their bottom line; in that case, it most likely represents a balance defined by the clients of the business, with the business betting that more clients will be pleased by this than displeased. Alternatively, it may simply be an artifact of someone powerful relative to the business's control who is imposing their morality upon all of the business's customers. In either case, the affected users can take their business elsewhere to a platform that does not impose moral restrictions upon them.
When the US government censors, it is almost impossible to stand against it effectively. Particularly as it often is finally determined by non-elected actors, such as the FCC and SCOTUS, both of whom have demonstrated outright contempt for the US constitution.
When a business imposes "mommying", for whatever reason, all you have to do is stop using their product and (a) you have done them a small, but real, bit of actual damage, and (b) you can return to operating as you please via no more effort than selecting a more open platform.
The bottom line is that there is a world of difference between a private entity insisting on bounds within a limited space, real or virtual, that they legitimately control, the maximum end result being that you don't get to use a space you didn't have any rights to in the first place if you insist on your position; and a government enforcing bounds everywhere using violence, where insisting on your position can lead to anything from a monetary fine to your rape and/or death within the prison system.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Voltaire said he'd defend your right to say what you have to say, not that he'd take care of publishing and distributing it for you.
You could prove it by starting your own hosting entity and putting up canary pages about the state's lack of official action thus far. You wouldn't be able to prove that the state has specifically done it to Google, but you could at least prove that the state is doing something.
So people reproducing is bad, but as long as you comment on psychologically damaging videos of people being illegally bloodily murdered that is apparently OK and is not adult!!!!
AKA just stick a bit of text with your murder porn and that's OK
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
I suspect that what worries Google is the malicious and/or unauthorized publication of nude and sexually explicit photographs on its platforms.
The legal and political landscape is changing rapidly and the geek as usual may be a behind the times.
I have little sympathy for the argument that is censorship to block publication of nude photographs that no ethical - professional - artist or photographer would post without the written consent of the subject or their legal guardian.
Is no one at Google old enough to remember George Carlin? There is far more violence out there than sex, and it's far more damaging to our childrens' emotional health.
Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich to be precise.
Create your own service and compete with Youtube.
The full quote is Voltaire's, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
This quote belongs to Evelyn Beatrice Hall from a work published over a century after his death.
In her biography on Voltaire, Hall wrote the phrase: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" (which is often misattributed to Voltaire himself) as an illustration of Voltaire's beliefs.[2] Hall's quotation is often cited to describe the principle of freedom of speech.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
... ...
Google is not the government.
Okay - so what will you be saying 15 years from now, when Google is so powerful that it might as well be the government?
You haven't presented any evidence of this at all. Nor is there any indication that Google is would normally listen to this, given that they would only accept pro-gay marriage ads, just for one example.
There's plenty of evidence, including but not limited to lawsuits, that they deal with a LOT of copyright complaints. For example, remember how Chilling Effects decided to remove themselves from Google? We can safely assume that both of them were pressured on that front and decided it wasn't worth it. Google has also faced the Viacom lawsuits, many lawsuits over Google News, etc. And you don't have to spend more than a few seconds on Chilling Effects to see that porn producers put out a LOT of DMCA notices, including but not limited to that recent, ridiculous one that removed random github pages and other non-infringing content.
So, I'm going to have to ask for your evidence of this before I can believe you. We have lots of circumstantial evidence pointing the other way and you got to +5 Insightful without mentioning anything but an unrelated FCC action from many years ago that doesn't have anything to do with Google at all.
Remember when Apple was forced to remove all porn apps from the App Store? I'm sure it wasn't because they wanted to, but there's a group of dedicated social conservatives who do nothing but complain about anything even remotely explicit.
Apple projects an up-market image of style and sophistication --- in which the porn app simply has no place. The enormous sums of money it banks as profit each quarter says that it is making the right choices.
No, they can't. Some authoritarian judges might have ruled otherwise, but they're simply incorrect.
Mark parent up please. Enough misinformation about already.
Who knew that Google Blogger even existed?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I was commenting on Google's actions being incongrous in the US, where free speech is a social norm. That it was even part of the constitution of the country, unlike many other countries of the day, was an example of the importance it had in the minds of the Colonists.
--dave ...
[ I'm eminently aware of the narrowness of US constitutional law! Apologies for going off-topic, but
It's widely cited in the popular press to excuse unconscionable actions by non-government actors. The assumption seems to be that if the government is prohibited from doing something, everyone else is therefor perfectly free to do it, whether or not it's a good idea. To use a frivolous example from India, it does not follow that if a government is prohibited from strangling random passers-by, that individual devotees of Kali can then take it up as a hobby.]
davecb@spamcop.net
Because they wanted to have electrocuted him?
davecb@spamcop.net
[Belatedly: it was a paraphrase of what he said, as translated to English by his biographer --dave]
davecb@spamcop.net