Imgur To Ban Nudity Or Sexually Explicit Content Next Month 60
Online image hosting service Imgur is updating its Terms of Service on May 15th to prohibit nudity and sexually explicit content, among other things. The news arrived in an email sent to "Imgurians". The changes have since been outlined on the company's "Community Rules" page, which reads: Imgur welcomes a diverse audience. We don't want to create a bad experience for someone that might stumble across explicit images, nor is it in our company ethos to support explicit content, so some lascivious or sexualized posts are not allowed. This may include content containing:
- the gratuitous or explicit display of breasts, butts, and sexual organs intended to stimulate erotic feelings
- full or partial nudity
- any depiction of sexual activity, explicit or implied (drawings, print, animated, human, or otherwise)
- any image taken of or from someone without their knowledge or consent for the purpose of sexualization
- solicitation (the uninvited act of directly requesting sexual content from another person, or selling/offering explicit content and/or adult services)
Content that might be taken down may includes: see-thru clothing, exposed or clearly defined genitalia, some images of female nipples/areolas, spread eagle poses, butts in thongs or partially exposed buttocks, close-ups, upskirts, strip teases, cam shows, sexual fluids, private photos from a social media page, or linking to sexually explicit content. Sexually explicit comments that don't include images may also be removed.
Artistic, scientific or educational nude images shared with educational context may be okay here. We don't try to define art or judge the artistic merit of particular content. Instead, we focus on context and intent, as well as what might make content too explicit for the general community. Any content found to be sexualizing and exploiting minors will be removed and, if necessary, reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). This applies to photos, videos, animated imagery, descriptions and sexual jokes concerning children. The company is also prohibiting hate speech, abuse or harassment, content that condones illegal or violent activity, gore or shock content, spam or prohibited behavior, content that shares personal information, and posts in general that violate Imgur's terms of service. Meanwhile, "provocative, inflammatory, unsettling, or suggestive content should be marked as Mature," says Imgur.
- the gratuitous or explicit display of breasts, butts, and sexual organs intended to stimulate erotic feelings
- full or partial nudity
- any depiction of sexual activity, explicit or implied (drawings, print, animated, human, or otherwise)
- any image taken of or from someone without their knowledge or consent for the purpose of sexualization
- solicitation (the uninvited act of directly requesting sexual content from another person, or selling/offering explicit content and/or adult services)
Content that might be taken down may includes: see-thru clothing, exposed or clearly defined genitalia, some images of female nipples/areolas, spread eagle poses, butts in thongs or partially exposed buttocks, close-ups, upskirts, strip teases, cam shows, sexual fluids, private photos from a social media page, or linking to sexually explicit content. Sexually explicit comments that don't include images may also be removed.
Artistic, scientific or educational nude images shared with educational context may be okay here. We don't try to define art or judge the artistic merit of particular content. Instead, we focus on context and intent, as well as what might make content too explicit for the general community. Any content found to be sexualizing and exploiting minors will be removed and, if necessary, reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). This applies to photos, videos, animated imagery, descriptions and sexual jokes concerning children. The company is also prohibiting hate speech, abuse or harassment, content that condones illegal or violent activity, gore or shock content, spam or prohibited behavior, content that shares personal information, and posts in general that violate Imgur's terms of service. Meanwhile, "provocative, inflammatory, unsettling, or suggestive content should be marked as Mature," says Imgur.
Re:Not Imgur's Fault (Score:5, Informative)
That is, at this time, completely false. Section 230 specifically allows sites to moderate content any non-illegal content as they see fit. There is no "you missed this post so now you're going to jail" gotcha in it.
There are some very vocal politicians who dearly want to remove that protection because they're tired of their bigotry, white supremacy, election lies, threats and other bullshit being taken down, but so far they haven't succeeded.
And if that last paragraph triggered anyone, I suggest re-reading it and making note of the fact that I didn't identify any political party. You made that connection yourself, so you have only yourself to blame (and maybe you should re-consider who you're voting for since you think so lowly of them).
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Good. (Score:5, Funny)
You're all sinners!
Re:Good. (Score:4, Interesting)
On a side note, I was mildly surprised (and rather amused) that this warranted a Wikipedia article.
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I hate kittens! Where can I join your cult?
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per entrance into the volcano or the virgin?
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Or more seriously every time someone sends a picture of a boob or bum to Imgur an advertiser removes their "family friendly" brands from the revenue stream.
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Aim at feet, open fire. (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess they didn't learn from the downfall of tumblr.
It looks like there will only be three types of sites in the future -- family friendly sites that can get advertisers and keep bank accounts, porn sites that will have to vet everyone and everything (no user submissions) and even then they'll still have to fight their payment processors, and finally there will be the anarchic image boards that cannot be developed into a working business model but manage to scrape by on donations and the resources of the owners. That will be the only place left you can publicly post your dick pics without submitting identification.
People wonder why 4chan and the like stick around. This is a big part of the reason why.
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We don't want to create a bad experience for someone that might stumble across explicit images
Taking steak away from Mark Twain because an infant can't chew it.
our company ethos
is pure unadulterated profit. If advertisers (not even that - some management group that says "we did an email yes-no survey* showing clients prefer Z" making second-hand demands) say to pull the plug, it gets pulled. "Users" are a distant double-dodeca-tertiary priority as always, like every other PR claim in the history of human finance.
*a survey giving no indication that "I like my ads to only be shown on good christian pages" means compro
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yeah, that's what I was thinking.
Only thing that might save Imgur is how prevalent they are for hosting memes. But even then, I'm not sure how they've kept the lights on to begin with, given that embedding images in someone else's web page doesn't seem to do anything but cost bandwidth and storage.
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It looks like there will only be three types of sites in the future -- family friendly sites that can get advertisers and keep bank accounts, porn sites that will have to vet everyone and everything (no user submissions) and even then they'll still have to fight their payment processors, and finally there will be the anarchic image boards that cannot be developed into a working business model but manage to scrape by on donations and the resources of the owners.
I don't disagree, but... is that even a bad thing?
I guess they didn't learn from the downfall of tumblr.
I spent several years reading imgur several times a day. The vast majority of what there is on there, the discussion and engagement, will be unaffected by this rules change. I don't think it'll be similar to tumblr.
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I guess they didn't learn from the downfall of tumblr.
They have nothing to learn from Tumblr. Imgur has barely any nudity on it. On Tumblr sex made up some 50% of the platform. You may as well say your local Bank of America branch learnt nothing from Tumblr because they don't let you drop your pants in the waiting room. It's something that isn't really that relevant to their business.
People wonder why 4chan and the like stick around. This is a big part of the reason why.
4chan in 2023 is absolutely nothing like 4chan of 2003 or 2013. The site exists by name, but it has massively changed in content over the years as well. Right now it seems to be n
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Er, hasn't 4chan been a refuge for hentai fanatics that were kicked off the SA forums?
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> People wonder why 4chan and the like stick around.
I can't figure how to search the *chan's smoothly. Is there a secret search engine called "fight club" or something that's only word of mouth?
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And this is why we only deal with offshore sites.
Remember kids, the writ of the USA is not universal. With a VPN, you can essentially tell the moralistic whingers to fuck right the hell off.
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you're going to miss us when we are gone, I promise. I'll also admit it sure looks like that is way things are headed at times too.
I would suggest to you that if you look carefully, at the 20th century, most of its horrors are where an when us "moralistic whingers" got pushed to the side... Satlinism, Maosim, Nazi-ism, all happened before; there are more actual salves now than at any point in history, never mind we have a United Nations council on human rights... When your only guiding principle is 'affirm
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Stalin, Mao, and Hitler were themselves moralistic whingers, they just had 'different' morals and tended to push harder than the others. You could argue and I might well agree that they themselves were amoral and just used the moralistic whinging as a smokescreen, but there's still their followers who fell for it.
Alas, a policy of anything goes doesn't tend to work out well either.
This just in... (Score:5, Funny)
Imgur to close doors month after next, all remaining non-nude traffic can fit on a mac-mini in a closet somewhere.
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Came here to make this post. Nicely Done!
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I think I have a 30MB RLL hard drive from an XT sitting around somewhere, if they need storage capacity.
Re:This just in... (Score:4, Informative)
It's as good of a joke as any, but Imgur actually banned most pornographic content 8 years ago and it's still doing just fine.
"Imgur welcomes a diverse audience." (Score:1)
So what's this, they banned the banned stuff again? That doesn't work.
Maybe the earlier ban didn't work, so they're trying a stronger stance maybe? Let's see what they're saying.
There's a simple fix for that: An "NSFW" flag on the image and the same on your stumble/search/browse/whatever interface. Most of the time people will respect that. So most of the time, that works fine.
They're not doing this. Notice furt
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That's how H got into trouble. (That is after murdering 200 people using the S0r0s space laser, and stealing their pizza.)
That should save them some money! (Score:4, Funny)
Since they will get less traffic to their site!
So what happened (or changed)? (Score:2)
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or did the original ownership just have a change of heart
No change of heart. "We've always had rules against obscene and NSFW content and comments, and these guidelines have been in place for years" That is a quote from 2015.
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In that case the revised question is why did they rather suddenly decide to enforce?
Re:So what happened (or changed)? (Score:5, Informative)
There are two changes (of consequence) that are happening now:
1: The ban on nudity and sexually explicit content is being expanded from just public posts (where it has been around for years) to include private posts as well (i.e.: those that don't appear anywhere in the Imgur navigation system, but which you need to know the URL to get to). Sexually explicit content has been allowed here, but now is not. The stated reason is that "people were getting confused" because they could see a sexually explicit private post, repost it publicly, and then get banned, and were confused about this. Whether this is actually true or not? Who knows. I'm sure there's some trivial number of people who experienced this, but it's unconvincing as a major driver of policy change. Which brings us to...
2: They have announced they will now be using AI and machine algorithms to detect and automatically ban posts with nudity and sexually explicit content. IMHO this is the big one, and seems to be slipping under most peoples' radar. I personally kinda lean toward thinking the entire policy update is just wrapping paper around getting this bit in. Until now, all enforcement has been at the hands of human moderators; prohibited content can go up, and can stay up, sometimes for quite a while (half a day is not unheard of) until a moderator happens to notice, and it gets sent to the bit-bucket. These posts will sometimes garner dozens, or hundreds, of comments in the associated discussion threads, until it all disappears many hours later. (Including no shortage of comments mostly stating "Witnessed!" which is Imgur-ese shorthand for "I saw this post before the moderators deleted it! Ha ha!") My expectation is that (Imgur believes that) using automated tools will enable them to catch posts as they are made, and before they ever make it to the public pages to be seen by others. I think that #2 may be partially driving #1 for technical reasons (public vs. private is just a boolean flag that can be flipped on or off at will at any time - so if you want to catch posts at the time they are created, then they may still be technically "private" posts at that point, that may later be made public). I mean: yeah, there are probably ways of implementing #2 without requiring #1, but from a programming perspective, this is the easy/lazy way.
So yeah, I think this whole thing is just being brought about by Imgur seeing the possibilities that machine learning / image recognition offers, and wanting to give it a try.
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Some of us are old enough to remember when the dude made imgur, almost spur of the moment during a reddit thread conversation, because it was a PITA to post images without creating an account.
I promise you there were no rules against obscene and NSFW content at the beginning, that's some of the very first stuff that was posted.
Imgur forgot it's reason to exist (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Imgur forgot it's reason to exist (Score:4, Funny)
Aside from serving a couple of NSFW subreddits Imgur had barely any nudity / pornographic content on it in the first place. It's reason for existing was sharing pictures. If you think all of reddit is porn, then you really should branch out more into other areas of interest.
Imgur cracked down heavily on porno and nudity over 8 years ago and they are still here today, and still as relevant on reddit as ever.
With Reddit also going paywall soon it seems that there won't be anything worth visiting on the internet.
Jesus, talk about a sad life to think Reddit and porn is the only thing worth visiting on the internet. I think maybe you *should* turn it off for a while.
Re: Imgur forgot it's reason to exist (Score:1)
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Reddit and Imgurl are what makes the Internet "worth visiting"? Young person, you should perhaps reconsider your priorities in life.
Re: Imgur forgot it's reason to exist (Score:1)
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Well, in case you're super-serial, watching porn isn't "completely normal", having friends and sex with some of them is.
Missed porn (Score:2)
Wait, Imgur had nudity? Well shit.
I never get the memo.
Kill the cash cow with the golden teats? (Score:2)
Why don't they spin off the smut to a different company? The executives can optionally keep some stock because the smut is probably the most profitable content anyhow.
Ok wait... (Score:3, Funny)
So like IMGUR has nudie pics and no one spammed my email with it?
This generation has clearly failed us.
imgur always been some kind of righteous (Score:2)
I got a soft ban (apparently for life) for posting a chart depicting the number of black men murdered by whites in a year, vs the number of black men killed by other black people in a year.
And mods will never reply.
Well, I guess they didn't need to be in business. (Score:2)
Unless they stop being a bunch of cowardly little pussies, incorporate and move ops offshore and continue on their merry way.
But they probably won't. They'll keep their noses firmly in the asses of the moralists in the USA's government.
And go bankrupt
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It sounds like these guys are just begging for a competitor to step in and eat their lunch.
Re: Well, I guess they didn't need to be in busine (Score:1)
Bullshit (Score:2)
Which materials have nudity? I have never seen that, a school-book printed in the 1990s with images of real penises was quickly 'banned'. Second-closest would be a 1930s school-book with images of a dissected penis, vagina and uterus. Everything since is diagrams of the sexual organs. I just looked at a few biology books for children and most of them don't mention the penis: Reproduction begins when a sperm enters an egg. The penis and erection, penetration and ejaculation aren't mentioned. "Where di
Completely against this (Score:1)