Just days after Google announced that it would ban nude images and explicit content on Blogger, its blogging platform, and faced flak for it, the company has done a u-turn. It has now said that it won't ban nude photos on Blogger and will allow people to post whatever they want to post until it is clearly labelled as adult content.
"This week, we announced a change to Blogger's porn policy. We've had a ton of feedback, particularly about the introduction of a retroactive change (some people have had accounts for 10+ years), but also about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities," Jessica Pelegio, social product support manager at Google, wrote of the product forums.
"So rather than implement this change, we've decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn. Blog owners should continue to mark any blogs containing sexually explicit content as 'adult' so that they can be placed behind an 'adult content' warning page," added Pelegio.
However, as it is clear from Google's statement, the company will probably step up its crackdown on Blogger users who post commercially available (and hence copyrighted) porn material on their blogs and earn money through it.
This no doubt is a more sensible policy. Earlier Google had announced that it would ban all the nude photos and explicit content, unless there was something that could be considered "art". The move was slammed by web activists and users. Sunil Abraham, director of Centre for Internet and Society, called it a move against user rights.
"According to US and Indian law they 'can' censor as per their own terms of use which is based on contract law," explains Abraham. "Unfortunately, most of the networked public sphere has been privatized by near monopolies. They are able to use contract law to clamp down on human rights."