German Government Initiative: flickr Censorship Exceeds Legal Requirements
When flickr recently stopped showing “moderate” (possibly offensive) and “restricted” (not for children, or your mom) pictures in Germany, people started complaining about arbitrary censorship. Yahoo!/flickr responded, this was due to strong age verification laws in Germany.
Now Friedemann Schindler, head of jugendschutz.net (which is the German government’s initiative for youth protection on the Internet), responded to yahoo’s claims, arguing that yahoo’s “solution” “exceeds the legal requirements”, because as a hosting provider, they are only required to remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. (Which is exactly what I said about the situation in an earlier post).
A while ago, flickr responded to the censorship claims by allowing Germans to remove the “moderate” restriction in the preferences, while “restricted” stays filtered for German accounts. While this is a step into the right direction (at least we can see average vacation photos again!), at times flickr still looks like this (yes, this is a real screenshot):
If flickr wants to be (or become) “family friendly”, I appreciate them banning hard pornography pictures from their platform (this is –really– not what flickr is for). But this is a change that has to happen in the upload policies (and be enforced accordingly) and not by implementing a highly flawed filtering mechanism that relies on the uploaders’ feelings about their own pictures.
After all, while yahoo keeps hiding many entirely harmless pictures from all Germans’ sights, other –legally much more critial– pictures, for example of WW2-nuts reenacting Third Reich scenes, stay unfiltered and readily available for the general public.
I guess you’ve mixed up the restriction levels in the first sentence.
I think what you’re saying is: Flickr needs to create yet a third tag: “moderate”, “restricted”, “banned in Germany”. And instead of relying on users to tag their own images, they should pay somebody to respond to complaints. Or else modify flickr to let users (in aggregate) tag other people’s pictures as potentially illegal.
Is that right?
They might have plans to do just that, but it doesn’t sound like a trivial thing to me.
Aleksej: Thanks, I fixed that.
Jason: Sort of. A “not for Germany” flag would at least work, while the current system does not (or hardly does), because at the moment problematic photos are openly accessible while entirely harmless ones are not.
By the way, flickr already has a feature to flag somebody else’s picture as “needs safety review”.
What I am criticizing here the most is that they are protecting material there that is also illegal to show to minors etc. in quite a bunch of other countries as well. Only there, there’s no way yahoo can get into trouble for not deleting it on request, while in Germany there is.
To make this clear: At first, they have a policy (or no policy at all, for that matter) allowing people to upload basically everything, even scenes of extreme violence or hard pornography and similar material. Then they act utterly surprised how a law somewhere in the world can ban this from public access. Then they try to wipe their hands clean where ever they can (“we are just the hosting provider, we don’t know about the content on our page”), and if this doesn’t work, they put over-restrictive filters into place that are prone to failure (in both ways: false positives and negatives).
Instead of solving the problem, for example with a proper upload policy, they just try to hide it and cover it up, resulting in more issues than gain.
This blog entry causes two invalid-certificate dialogs in Firefox, even in its syndicated form on planet.mozilla.org. And I have to *accept* an invalid-certificate dialog in order to submit a comment!?
Jesse: Oops, looks like I posted a https picture again. Sorry! Fixed it.
It’s actually not an invalid certificate; you may want to import the root certs from cacert.org to avoid this on my and a bunch of other pages.
Anyways, sorry for the inconvenience.
[…] sites like Flickr what are and aren’t acceptable photos? Unthinkable you might say, but this scenario has already happened in Germany, where in its haste to ‘protect’, the government encouraged outright (and pointless) […]