The Naked Truth

Things have been a little hectic, so please bear with me while I post with minimal comment this article on Google's latest embarrassment.

Google left blushing after issuing U-turn on Blogger nudity ban

After just three days, Google has rescinded its decision to block almost all public nudity on its Blogger platform after they were inundated with complaints from its users.

On Tuesday Google took to notifying its users and the general public that as of 23 March 2015, no images which contained graphic nudity or sexually explicit material could be published on its Blogger platform, unless it was marked as private or as part of an artistic work.

And now, in a massive turnaround, Google took to its forums to say that alas, public nudity will remain on Blogger, but called on people to mark pages with nudity as private.

That seems reasonable. Let people publish what they want, along with a notice so that no one unexpectedly stumbles across something that mighht upset or offend them.

This comedown will be considered a victory for those who called on the move as a limiting of freedom of expression, with one vocal critic of the move being sex blogger and author Zoe Margolis who said that making blogs private effectively “kills them off”.

...“Forcing millions of blogs to become private is not just a free-speech issue, or one about making adult content harder to find (Google’s own search tool makes that argument redundant), but boils down to Google sabotaging the integrity of the web – and how it functions – and it is for this reason that we need to oppose this narrow-minded and short-sighted policy.”

Now if only the FCC would take the same approach to the Internet.