image hosting platform Imgur is set to ban explicit images on its platform starting May 15. The company updated its terms of service and said it will focus on removing “nudity, pornography, and sexually explicit content” from the site later this month.
The Medialab-owned company said that explicit content posed a risk to Imgur’s “community and your business” and that banning such content “will protect the future of the Imgur community.”
The image hosting platform said it will still allow artistic nudity, but as it is switching to a mix of automatic and human moderation, there could be issues loading certain content.
“Artistic nudity will continue to be permitted, as was previously permitted in the Rules; however, as we’re calibrating auto-detection in these early stages, some content that may have previously been allowed under “artistic exceptions” may not apply here. We will not issue warnings, account suspensions or bans in connection with these automatic flags, but this may affect what is allowed to be sent or uploaded,” Imgur said in its post. blog post.
Like Christian Selig, the developer behind the Reddit client Apollo, he pointed, this change could affect several NSFW subreddits that rely on Imgur for explicit image hosting. Many Reddit users are familiar with Imgur because Reddit didn’t support uploading images at first. Users would rely on Imgur to upload images and then share them on Reddit.
In 2018, Imgur stopped displaying images and search queries related to NSFW Reddit communities on the Imgur website. At the time, the company said that explicit images were still allowed, but needed to be marked as “hidden.”
The same year, Tumblr famously banned porn from their platform to comply with the rules of the Apple App Store. Last year, the company introduced a “Community Tags” feature to allow users to easily filter sensitive content.
In addition to explicit images, Imgur is also removing old and unused photos that aren’t linked to an account. As one Twitter user pointed out, Imgur has been used for years to upload photos without an account and post links to different kinds of sites. Deleting those images can result in many dead links on the internet.
We’ve asked the company to specify what the definition of an “old and unused” photo is, and we’ll update the story if we hear back.
Notably, in 2017, another hosting service called Photobucket changed its terms and required users to get a $40 per month subscription to enable third-party hosting. This resulted in several broken links on many sites.