Imgur is doing a purge.
Effective May 15, website will rub pornographic images, along with other inactive content not associated with the account, from its archive. The popular image, GIF, and meme service is encouraging people to save images if they don’t want them to disappear forever from the web. But this change is likely to result in mass removals of content on the platforms where Imgur’s posts appear—including amateur pornography, which is more likely to focus on body, gender gender and gender diversity than content on mainstream pornography sites. And it marks another site’s step toward censorship—but this time the site responsible for hosting widely shared content on the web.
“It’s definitely going to have a big ripple effect,” said Jillian York, director of international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on civil liberties online. . “Sexual expression is very important. Nudity expression is another important level. I still don’t feel like we, in America, have a broad perspective of what the human body might look like.”
The disappearance of pornography on Imgur could exacerbate that. The site’s move was sudden and its reasons were vague, but it follows the same policies as at Instagram, link treeand most notably Tumblr, porn is forbidden in 2018. There was a major effort to comply with the US Online Sex Trafficking and Prevention Act (or FOSTA-SESTA) and although it did not explicitly cite the initiatives. In that regard, Imgur noted that obscene content “poses a risk to Imgur’s community and its business” in its statement of the change. Removing it, the site added, protects against those risks. Imgur did not respond to a request for comment on how much of its massive content library includes pornography and, as it calls them, “inactive” images. But its announcement did say that content it deemed “artistic” nudity could still be maintained.
The distinction between those will be difficult. The site says it will use automated software and operators to detect pornography. Tumblr used artificial intelligence to moderate content when it introduced a ban on porn in 2018, but it didn’t start welland non-pornographic images are often flagged, seemingly at random. The ban is followed by a cliff drop number of visitors and finally in 2022, Tumblr move back its limitations to allow nudity and sexual themes. It still bans posts about sex.
Some experts see Imgur as another platform that is under political pressure. Phoenix Calida, communications director for the American Sex Worker Outreach Project, an advocacy group focused on ending stigma and violence against sex workers, said: “Really? There is concern that this is part of a larger political agenda to eliminate sex workers everywhere. Calida noted that some people’s pictures were uploaded to Imgur against their will, so their removal would be positive. But it also meant the end of the hosting platform for prostitutes that hosted their libraries there. “That creates a lot of anxiety and fear, because we’re in this sociopolitical environment where there’s a lot more censorship over anything that’s considered sexual,” Calida said.
Child exploitation and revenge porn are big problems on social networking sites. But policies aimed at cutting down on sexual exploitation material often push online sex workers away from social media. Maggie MacDonald, a doctoral candidate studying pornography platforms at the University of Toronto, says the trend is based on “a framework that links sex to risk and harm”. “The framework of this is supposed to be, No one panics, this is all for the greater good,” MacDonald said. “But I don’t believe that censorship of sexual expression is in the public interest.”
