Recently Flickr has come to the attention of web users all over the world for it's aggressive usage of censors on content uploaded to the Flickr website in Germany, or rather, to German users. Many articles published over the web and countless more discussions over it later, and Flickr has stepped down slightly, allowing 'moderate' content to be viewed, one level up from the basic and default 'safe', and one level down from 'restricted', which German users aren't able to view.
Sounds great right? There's just one problem. Many users didn't even bother to notice that Germany used to be in the same category as 3 other countries, and that category is the 'sorry mate, you're only allowed to view images flagged as safe'. Those three countries are South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong (well alright, 2 countries since Hong Kong is a SAR). So while Germany is allowed to view images marked moderate, Singapore, a country that employs censorship on a MUCH SMALLER scale than Germany still can't view those moderate and restricted images. Consider that in Germany video games aren't allowed to have red colour blood, and many, many games are blocked from even entering the country in the first place, nevermind having to be modified to have blue or yellow blood in-game.
It wouldn't be so bad if you only couldn't view images that were really unsavory, except that isn't the case. A quick venture into the Flickr forums and the numerous threads on censorship that flood the place and you'll quickly realise that the Flickr team is all too quick to flag photos, even photos without actual PEOPLE in it to be committing the sexual acts the pictures are flagged unsafe for. And that's not the only problem. Accounts with a thousand 'safe' photos and just one unsafe photo will be completely unviewable to Singaporean users, so it's not just a case of not being able to see just one picture in that person's account.
I've raised the issue at the official Flickr forums and you can read it here:
http://flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/52019/
Sadly, no one seems to give a ****.
Sounds great right? There's just one problem. Many users didn't even bother to notice that Germany used to be in the same category as 3 other countries, and that category is the 'sorry mate, you're only allowed to view images flagged as safe'. Those three countries are South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong (well alright, 2 countries since Hong Kong is a SAR). So while Germany is allowed to view images marked moderate, Singapore, a country that employs censorship on a MUCH SMALLER scale than Germany still can't view those moderate and restricted images. Consider that in Germany video games aren't allowed to have red colour blood, and many, many games are blocked from even entering the country in the first place, nevermind having to be modified to have blue or yellow blood in-game.
It wouldn't be so bad if you only couldn't view images that were really unsavory, except that isn't the case. A quick venture into the Flickr forums and the numerous threads on censorship that flood the place and you'll quickly realise that the Flickr team is all too quick to flag photos, even photos without actual PEOPLE in it to be committing the sexual acts the pictures are flagged unsafe for. And that's not the only problem. Accounts with a thousand 'safe' photos and just one unsafe photo will be completely unviewable to Singaporean users, so it's not just a case of not being able to see just one picture in that person's account.
I've raised the issue at the official Flickr forums and you can read it here:
http://flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/52019/
Sadly, no one seems to give a ****.