Flickr is dealing with a lot of censorship fuzz lately, some legit and some not imo.
For instance in this case where the sex blogger Violet Blue got her pictures censored because her account didn’t make it through the adult filter is kinda shitty. Her account wasn’t packed with porn or anything, but as someone who blogs on the subject of fornication (funny word isn’t it) and all that has to do with it, there are some pics in there showing some skin, and (OMGWTF!) perhaps even a nipple or two.
So her account got suspended and censored, so she got rather pissed about it, which she has the right to of course. In the end everything turned out alright. The Flickr guys apologized to her, which is nice, and the naughty pics are now marked as such so they don’t show up in peoples safe searches.
The idea behind the filtering Flickr does is simple, and a good one. They want people to be in control of what pictures they want to see turning up in their search results. As is the case with Google and Yahoo, safe search filters the NSFW pictures for you. But as has been proven countless times before on the internet, filtering isn’t an easy task, so mistakes happen.
People get pissed of rather quickly with these kind of mistakes though, and in some cases, web 2.0 has enabled the mobs to start spamming their ass off with “flickr sucks” statements all over the intahweb.
For instance in the case where Flickr censors pictures for users from Germany (here). The problem here is that Flickr is forced to do this to apply to German law, and didn’t just apply this policy because they don’t like bratwurst und sauerkraut.
However, tons of Flickr users are now posting and reposting pictures telling Flickr to stop their censoring activities, which they can’t really do anything about without risking a big fat lawsuit. Flickr users who may or may not know at all what the deal is about anyway, judging from some of the comments posted on the support forums…
Mob 2.0?