So, I just got an email about 10 minutes ago or so, that is warning me of an upcoming policy change that may affect the blog... today.
Great work on getting that warning out ahead of time, guys! So, basically, the new policy goes from having specific restrictions on blogs containing adult content to forbidding adult content outright. There are exceptions for Art, Science, and Education, but that sort of thing is easily open to interpretation.
So, what will this mean for this blog? Well, not much really. While I had marked this blog as NSFW to be safe in the future, there is currently no adult content on the blog. Basically, I'm just going to switch it from a NSFW blog to a normal blog since the upcoming updates won't involve anything NSFW anyway. Eventually, I will need to make a new blog, but thankfully I'm not in an immediate panic to make any major changes in a hurry.
Personally though, I do not like the new policy change at all. It seems as though many corporations have been using the restriction of services to act as the internet's morality police. PayPal, for example, is one of the easiest, and accessible methods of payment on the internet... but cannot be used by the creators of adult content.
What does it matter to PayPal if someone is spending their own money on a chair, or a mature drawing? Adults should be able to make their own decisions, and spend their money however they like, yet companies with an exceedingly large amount of control over the free market make these rules that forbid behavior that is completely legal simply because they do not approve of it.
With Google; why the sudden change in policy? Makers of Adult Content were forbidden already from monetizing their blogs. Not just forbidden from using adsense, but actually forbidden from MONETIZING at all. The warning when entering an NSFW blog were more than sufficient from a legal standpoint. It seems to me like they wanted to get rid of adult content by making it inconvenient, and when that did not work, they decided to simply forbid it.
But, this is a free market. They can restrict their services however they like, and it's legal for them to do so. Ironic, isn't it? They are free to limit our freedom however they like. It's not like they control our laws; they just control the infrastructure which we all depend on.
Goddammit this is why I hate America's prudish bullshit.
ReplyDeleteEurope tends to be a bit more liberal (though really it varies to country for country), and Asia seems to be the only place in the known universe that understands erotic stuff gerared at adults is not the hellspawn of Satan or something.
But here (and when I say America, I'm refering to both the US and Latin America, where I live) it's some kind of weird taboo. I completely agree that a warning and maybe some content restrictions are more than enough to not offend anyone. But people are not content with not seeing stuff they don't like, they want said stuff to cease to exist. It's too stupid, and is a thing I see happening more in American Countries than anywhere else (well, obviously I'm not taking dictatorships and radical muslim states into account for this).