Imgur bans sexis, nude expression, sexuality, and sexuality: the message of freedom and censorship for the public good
Pornography will be scrubbed from the site on May 15th, along with other inactive content from its archive. The meme service is encouraging people to save images if they want them to remain on the web forever. But the change is likely to result in the mass erasure of content across platforms where Imgur posts appear—including amateur pornographic content, which may be more likely to focus on diverse bodies, genders, and sexualities than content on mainstream porn sites. And it marks yet another site’s move toward censorship—but this time one that is responsible for hosting content shared widely across the web.
According to the director of international freedom of expression at Electronic Frontier Foundation, it is definitely going to have a big effect. “Sexual expression is very important. Nude expression is a whole other level of important. I still don’t feel like we have, in the US, a wide perspective on what human bodies can look like.”
There are issues with child exploitation and revenge porn on social media sites. But the policies meant to cut back on sexual exploitation material have often pushed online sex workers out of social media. MacDonald, a PhD candidate researching pornography platforms in Toronto, says the trend is because it associates sex with risks and harms. MacDonald says the framing of the event is that it’s all for the greater good. I do not believe incensoring sexual expression to serve the public good.
Differentiating between those will be tough. The site says it will use automated software and human moderators to detect pornographic content. Tumblr employed artificial intelligence to moderate content when it instituted its porn ban in 2018, but it didn’t start out well, and non-pornographic images were often flagged, seemingly at random. It was followed by a cliff drop and, finally, in 2022, Tumblr relented and allowed nudity and sexual themes. It continues to ban posts of sex.