imgur is doing a purge
As of May 15, the site will scrub pornographic images, along with other inactive content that is not linked to an account, from your archive. The popular image, GIF and meme service encourages people to save images if they don’t want them to disappear from the web forever. But the change is likely to result in the mass removal of content on all platforms where Imgur posts appear, including amateur pornographic content, which is more likely to focus on diverse bodies, genders, and sexualities than content from top porn sites And it marks another site’s move toward censorship, but this time, on one that is responsible for hosting widely shared content across the web.
“It’s definitely going to have a huge ripple effect,” says Jillian York, director of international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on online civil liberties. “Sexual expression is very important. The naked expression is another level of importance. I still don’t feel like we have, in the US, a broad perspective on what human bodies can look like.”
The disappearance of porn on Imgur could exacerbate that. The site’s movement is sudden and its reasoning vague, but it follows policies like those of instagram, link treeand, above all, Tumblr, which forbidden porn in 2018. There is a strong effort to comply with the US Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Sex Trafficking Act (or FOSTA-SESTA for short), and while he did not cite those initiatives explicitly , Imgur noted that explicit content “posed a risk to the Imgur community and its business” in its statement about the change. Throwing it away, the site added, protects against those risks. Imgur did not respond to a request for comment on what proportion of its massive content library includes pornographic images and, as it calls them, “inactive” images. But her announcement did say that content that she deems “artistic” nudity can remain.
Differentiating between them will be difficult. The site says it will use automated software to detect pornographic content along with human moderators. Tumblr used artificial intelligence to moderate content when it instituted a porn ban in 2018, but it didn’t start well, and non-pornographic images were often flagged, seemingly randomly. The ban was followed by a cliff drop in visitors and ultimately in 2022, Tumblr receded its restrictions to allow nudity and sexual themes. It still bans sex posts.
Some pundits view Imgur as another platform that bows down to political pressure. “There really is concern that this is part of a larger political agenda to remove sex workers everywhere,” says Phoenix Calida, communications director for the Sex Workers Outreach Project USA, an advocacy group focused on ending sex. stigma and violence against sex workers. Calida points out that the images of some people have been uploaded to Imgur against their will, so their deletion will be positive. But it also means the end of a hosting platform for sex workers who have stored their libraries there. “It is creating a lot of anxiety and fear, because we are in a sociopolitical climate where there is much more censorship of everything that is perceived as sexual,” says Calida.
Child exploitation content and revenge pornography are major issues on social networking sites. But policies aimed at reducing sexually exploitative material have often driven online sex workers off social media. The trend is based on a “framework that falsely associates sex with risk and harm,” says Maggie MacDonald, a PhD candidate researching pornography platforms at the University of Toronto. “The framing of this is supposed to be, Don’t panic, this is all for the good of all.says McDonald. “But I don’t think the public good is served by censorship of sexual expression.”