prudes – Techdirt (original) (raw)

As Prudes Drive Social Media Takedowns, Museums Embrace… OnlyFans?

from the didn't-see-that-one-coming dept

Over the last few years, we’ve seen more and more focus on using content moderation efforts to stamp out anything even remotely upsetting to certain loud interest groups. In particular, we’ve seen NCOSE, formerly “Morality in Media,” spending the past few years whipping up a frenzy about “pornography” online. They were one of the key campaigners for FOSTA, which they flat out admitted was step one in their plan to ban all pornography online. Recently, we’ve discussed how MasterCard had put in place ridiculous new rules that were making life difficult for tons of websites. Some of the websites noted that Mastercard told them it was taking direction from… NCOSE. Perhaps not surprisingly, just recently, NCOSE gave MasterCard its “Corporate Leadership Award” and praised the company for cracking down on pornography (which NCOSE considers the same as sex trafficking or child sexual abuse).

Of course, all of this has some real world impact. We’ve talked about how eBay, pressured to remove such content because of FOSTA and its payment processors, has been erasing LGBTQ history (something, it seems, NCOSE is happy about). And, of course, just recently, OnlyFans came close to prohibiting all sexually explicit material following threats from its financial partners — only to eventually work out a deal to make sure it could continue hosting adult content.

But all of this online prudishness has other consequences. Scott Nover, over at Quartz, has an amazing story about how museums in Vienna are finding that images of classic paintings are being removed from all over the internet. Though, they’ve come up with a somewhat creative (and surprising) solution: the museums are setting up OnlyFans accounts, since the company is one of the remaining few which is able to post nude images without running afoul of content moderation rules. Incredibly, the effort is being run by Vienna’s Tourist Board.

The Vienna Tourist Board said its museums have faced a litany of online challenges. After the Natural History Museum Vienna posted images of the Venus of Willendorf, a 25,000-year-old Paleolithic limestone figurine, Facebook deleted the images and called them pornographic. The Albertina Museum had its TikTok account suspended in July for showing nudes from the Japanese artist and photographer ??Nobuyoshi Araki, CNN reported. And the Leopold Museum, which houses modern Austrian art, has struggled to advertise on social media because of the bans on nudity.

Even advertising the new OnlyFans account on other social media proved difficult, the board said. Twitter rejected links to the board?s website because it linked out to the OnlyFans account. (Twitter allows nudity on its platform as long as the account and images are labeled as such.) Facebook and Instagram only allowed ads featuring the Venus of Willendorf and a nude painting by Amedeo Modigliani after the tourist board explained the context to the platforms, but other images by artists Egon Schiele and Peter Paul Rubens were rejected.

This is all kind of ridiculous, but certainly falls into the Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem collection of the impossibility of content moderation at scale. Of course, it also recalls the case in France where Facebook took down an classic 1866 oil painting by Gustave Courbet, in which the court initially ruled that Facebook could not take down the image. Facebook has (for many years now) had exceptions to its nudity rule for “art,” but figuring out how to enforce that kind of thing is notoriously difficult.

And when you have prudish, moralizing busybodies like NCOSE pressuring companies to wipe out any and all nudity, it’s no surprise that this kind of thing is the result. But, really, all of this seems likely to backfire in the end. Cordoning off even artistic nudity into sites like OnlyFans… also means that more and more people may be introduced to OnlyFans “for the paintings,” only to discover what else is available there.

Filed Under: content moderation, museums, nudity, paintings, pornography, prudes, social media, vienna, vienna tourist bouard
Companies: onlyfans

Google Rejects Postal For Google Play Store Due To Violence; GTA Games Still Available For Purchase

from the bang-bang dept

We all know that in the land of mobile applications, Apple has long seen itself as the keeper of the moral compass, gently navigating humanity towards the City upon a Hill one rejected phone-game at a time. The reasons for refusal have varied, from the inclusion of fictional narcotics, to the slight chance somebody somewhere might see a breast or a penis, all the way up to a moral stance against comic books, because this is apparently the nineteen-twenties. And through it all, those of us that use Android devices have held up Google’s Play store as a nanny-free alternative, free of censorship and hypocrisy.

Well, no more. Google, it appears, has rejected a mobile version of the infamous game Postal over the violent content within the game.

Postal won’t be making it to Android devices. Why? Because apparently it has been rejected from the Google Play Store because it contains “GRATUITOUS VIOLENCE.”

Oh, dear. It appears a second nanny has entered the game, as though we poor gamers were somehow caught in between a vice constructed of Mrs. Doubtfire and Mr. Belvedere, each pressing in on us for the high crime of simply wanting to play a damned game. We’re adults, after all, or at least many of us gamers are these days. Thirty-five or so, that’s the average age of a gamer today. We don’t need to be coddled and protected from gaming violence, it’s what we want. Or, again, some of us do, but that’s a choice for the consumer, not the platform.

And specifically not for a platform whose decision plunges it into the depths of hypocrisy. As the original forum post over at Running With Scissors notes, it’s not as though keeping Postal out of Google Play preserves some violence-free app-Utopia.

“We know many of you have been excited that POSTAL is going to be made available on Android devices, but it seems we have hit a bit of a snag. Unfortunately it appears POSTAL has been rejected from Google Play due to it containing “GRATUITOUS VIOLENCE”. Sadly this means it won’t be welcomed alongside the Grand Theft Auto series, Carmageddon and horde of Zombie games on Google Play.”

It’s a point well-made and a point not designed to take aim at GTA or zombie games. The sights are set on Google’s hypocrisy instead. I imagine the looks of surprise on the faces of the game designers were severe when the rejection notice came. The Play store was our alternative to this kind of nonsense. Perhaps we’ll have to go elsewhere in the future.

Filed Under: google play store, postal, prudes, video games, violence
Companies: google