Google has announced that from 23 March it will no longer allow people to share pornography on Blogger, its blogging platform.
The ban on sharing Porn extends to "images and video that are sexually explicit or show graphic nudity", according to Google. Nudity will still be allowed, it adds, if the content has "substantial public benefit", meaning if it is artistic, educational or scientific.
The search giant said no content would be deleted but Blogs containing pornographic content would be made private. As a result, only the blog's owner and people invited to see it will be able to view the blog.
To avoid having your blog made private you can remove the offending images or export your blog as a .xml file and find another service that will host it.
The obvious problem with this new policy is that it can be difficult to define the boundaries of what is sexually explicit and what nudity is "graphic". While Blogger's content policy isn't much help in defining these boundaries -- beyond no child sexual abuse imagery or promotion of paedophilia -- it does provide clues as to why this policy is being introduced.
It's clear that what Google does not want Blogger sites to host any actual pornography or to drive traffic to commercial pornography sites -- not because it is necessarily illegal, but because it has decided it doesn't want it on its platform. Meanwhile, it seems that blogs can still host "non-sexually explicit content that is still adult in nature", but they will need to be marked as "adult". Google said it would be checking blogs to see if they were correctly labelled.
"All blogs marked as 'adult' will be placed behind an 'adult content' warning interstitial. If your blog has a warning interstitial, please do not attempt to circumvent or disable the interstitial -- it is for everyone's protection," the company's policy states.
No comments:
Post a Comment