Google Takes Down Artstation Android App for Explicit Content(magazine.artstation.com) |
Google Takes Down Artstation Android App for Explicit Content(magazine.artstation.com) |
And yes, there is far more of this on Insta.
This is just one example from a growing list of questionable moral behaviour and outright abuse of monopoly power.
The political reality is that Google has serious trust and credibility issues on many fronts.
The more this kind of thing happens, the more likely they are to turn into antitrust issues.
But yeah... Civ cultural victory, and all that...
In EU there's already been complaints about Google only allowing their Play Store and hampering 3rd party stores, and Google lost that lawsuit.
Google Play is like a shopping mall, a privately owned public space.
There will be standards.
If you put up some questionable ads in your local mall, you'll get asked to have them taken down.
Those spaces are not intellectual zones, or bastions of expression. They are public/common areas and subject to some kind of basic rules of expression.
Your local library has some rules.
So does your school.
So does your University.
There are infinitely url's that you can use to access content according to a different set of norms, you're free to use them at any time.
This thread exhibits one of the failing aspects of intellectual idealism, in that it so often fails to take into consideration the community - you know - 'other people's opinions'.
There seem to be these possible answers: a) Everyone agrees to one narrative and moral standard. b) Everyone sticks to their little bit of the world and guards it with walls c) Live and let live and do not feed the trolls, cause haters will hate. So be it.
Any one of a) or b) put to extremes wouldn't make a nice world to live in.
It would either come with a global harmonization effort that will feel opressive. (This is what you are feeling in this instance)
Or it would be a world comprised of iron curtains. With whatever harmonization and opression going on within each region.
In any way, c) seems to me the most favorable outcome. But I have no idea how to get there since a) and b) appear to be the popular choices nowadays.
If you resolve to stop it, then you have to deal with that problem that everyone thinks different things are harmful.
Some people honestly believe that porn is harmful to society and the individuals within it. It's not enough to just say "it's not harmful" because they believe it.
And I can't even say that it's not. Promiscuous sex transmits diseases that absolutely do harm people, and there are psychological aspects that I'm not even knowledgeable enough to start giving an opinion on.
how is reducing ourselves to animals running around naked with no impulse control "progress"? Is pleasure your only goal in life? The hard work and years of effort to make scientific breakthroughs sure as hell isn't fun, but the results are beneficial
>If we want to transition from a society of repression and suffering to one of liberation and bliss
"repression" is what makes society possible. If every one is free to do what they want and seek their own pleasure with no societal control, your only rule is might makes right.
Pretty much every religious rule you're criticizing was for the benefit of the weak. The strongest can just crack your skull and do as they please without any rules holding them back
Edit: Reading further, it's saying that public topless-ness was common in Japan until the American occupation after WWII, so there's a more recent example as well.
Going back to the nudity example, have you ever been to a topless beach? As an American who grew up in the religious south, my first trip to a topless beach in Europe was interesting for a bit but then just became normal. There was not any growing 'sexual tension'.
I have friends who are nudists and they say the same thing. It becomes normal quickly, and then it's not even a thing.
Your position is nice, but it's academic.
We could even disagree on the academic points, but it would be futile: topless women and men with their dongle's hanging out are not going to be in Google Play, just like you won't see them on street signs or in shopping malls in the US, Germany, or most other places frankly.
I don't buy any of the historical (i.e. religious) or national (i.e. USA) arguments: in the UK and Sweden, they are banning scantily clad women in ads on the basis of 'sexism' for god's sake. And even if they weren't, you're not going to find men with their dongle's in your Taxi ad anytime soon either - anywhere on earth basically.
In reality, there will always have to be a line drawn somewhere.
Tumblr became a porn haven, and for whatever reason, they didn't want that, so they moved it.
If there were no recourse, then I think there'd be an issue here, but there are basically infinity recourses. All you hav to do is type a url into your browser to get your 'Heavy Metal' avatar.
Everything about this story is just so fundamentally wrongheaded. They're enforcing a deeply misguided policy in a way which is both inconsistent and unfair, yet also inept. There's just so much wrong here, it's hard to even know where to start. They're looking for stuff they shouldn't, in the wrong places, and doing a horrible job of it. There's no reason they should be cracking down on the scourge of random cartoon nipples, but even if there were, they should give content providers who are making good faith efforts to flag content the benefit of the doubt, which clearly they did not for ArtStation. Meanwhile they're incorrectly flagging content, but even worse, they're not applying this policy to, you know, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram or, you know, Google themselves. Even if we needed to protect people from occasional nudity (and again, we don't), this isn't even achieving that. It's like deciding you need to do something drastic to prevent yourself from starving, so you set your couch on fire, while having a fridge full of food.
It's all downside; it makes the world a worse place, helps no one, and Google will pay (effectively) no penalty for it.
Merry Christmas to us all.
The questions, however, are: how much growth can be achieved without play store/ios app? Is it viable? If yes, how? Can art be more important for a site (and it's investors), than immediate, quick growth?
This feels unjust because the enforcement is seemingly completely arbitrary. Why has Google/Apple decided to be puritanical with some things and not others.
Good question.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=learn+colors+sy...
What I want to know, is there a timeline of public statements by YouTube about ElsaGate? Last time I heard the first and last thing they said was to pat themselves on the back in advance over how thoroughly and trustworthily they will deal with this, and Disney said they'll work closely with them to make it all awesome, and then... nothing? Did I miss something, other than still being able to find EG videos in 5 seconds, over a year later?
Should also probably be applied to Messenger, Hangouts, Skype, Duo, WhatsApp, etc. since I'm pretty sure there's nudity and sexual content on those as well, and you can likely find it pretty easily.
For that matter, I'm pretty sure I can find explicitly sexual content in Chrome running on Android. Has Google considered what a potential disaster this could be for them? Perhaps they should remove Chrome and other general-purpose web browsing apps, or define what it is that makes those applications different from the ones they do ban.
On a different note, can this be applied to reverse some annoying things? Does Reddit allow access to "adult" areas in the mobile app and if not do they play the annoying "wouldn't you like to use the app instead" in those areas on mobile browsers? Can you bypass that by marking your subreddit as "adult" if you don't have a significant volume of under-18 readers?
Edit: "Google Android: Like AOL, but with less porn! And we have Candy Crush!"
As an european adult, I'm ok with adult and explicit content.
Leave art alone.
I think this is just google enforcing US cultural norms, but it would be great if there was some kind of US public framework companies could use instead of having to make these calls on their own.
Disclosure: male google employee in an unrelated part of the company with no insider info. My opinions are my own.
Oh you're allergic to citrus? Too bad then.
We have used AWS's Rekognition API for moderation in our dating platform for over 200,000 images per month. As far as nudity detection is concerned; Rekognition performs optimally.
I tested it against the Hell Girl image by TB Choi & it detects the nudity[1] & also detects the weapons under general Object/scene detection[2].
But I would warn against using Rekognition for anything related to gender as it is very biased and would behave indifferently towards people with colored skin. I have raised concerns about the bias in the Rekognition data set with AWS team & also other media outlets have covered it at length.
With that being said, I feel sad that we are in a state where such beautiful art should be moderated where as applications exploiting children are being given a free run.
[1]:https://imgur.com/a/FyJ5V56 [2]:https://imgur.com/a/LlfS7wO
On topic - dumb decision, nothing new, not very surprising, waiting for PWAs to get to a point where arbitrary Apple/Google rules don't matter anymore.
And Mozilla's boneheaded policy of not allowing unsigned extensions, and apparently continuously breaking an addon that tried to automate signing extensions [0] means there is no easy way to install the chrome one.
[0] https://github.com/Noitidart/Chrome-Store-Foxified/issues/12...
Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/artstation-discove...
I can see this type of scheme increasing, as it puts a degree of indirection between the app itself and the objectionable content. There's a stronger element of deniability: the user is the one that's navigating to a separate website that hosts objectionable content. The app itself is "clean" so to speak (even though it's obviously not the case in practice).
What I'd imagine Artstation doing is releasing a "generic art showcase app" (or exposing APIs to let 3rd parties do so themselves), where users can manually specify www.artstation.com. The app would provide all the features that the Artstation app did.
With the recent push for PWAs, it will be interesting to see if communities like artstation use these instead.
They could add editorial policies to those criteria whenever they wanted. Or change a line of code to turn a drastic warning into a full block.
Android OS/iOS => Chrome/Safari
You are confused between the distribution platform and the client. It's ISP/Play Store/App Store's job to do filtering.
Or, apparently, from a church.
As a European I do think the Americans get far to uptight about nudity. There’s nothing inherently wrong with nakedness, it’s not automatically sexual. Yet I’m constantly amazed how much casual violence is in family TV (Simpson’s, Tom and Jerry, etc). I find it weird that cutting a persons limbs off is more acceptable than a naked form. But I guess that’s a cultural thing.
Because people in barely any clothing are never sexually suggestive? Ah, sorry, the word is gratifying.
Or the creepy version: photo app "oversight" that automatically notifies someone else (parent, abusive controlling partner) if nudity is detected in a camera photo.
There are tons of people now whose only internet device is a censored cell phone... looks like we need a third option that is not based in the US.
> There is a uniquely annoying feeling you get when you see someone powerful being utterly obtuse and wrong in a way that is damaging to others, but can't readily be challenged.
I think it comes back to the power structure in place. The enormous money machine that is Google has so few competitors that there is no incentive to treat its customers well. What is Teo going to do? They're already in the App Store. Their appeal was denied.
The part of this that makes me angriest is that Artstation will now have to start paying Google to use their Vision API to implement the censorship requirements Google has imposed on them. My more conspiratorial instincts suggest that this is no more a coincidence than an old school protection racket would be a coincidence.
Just like in many governments, it's significantly easier to address the immediate concerns of a few powerful entities and just the outcome of elections of the masses, except when they organize.
Google, for good or I'll, has truly become a model virtual nation.
Similar comments could be made about Tumblr, which has implemented similarly wrong headed policies in a similarly incompetent way, and has also done a ton of damage, although it's less frustrating watching a single site do it. Ultimately Verizon owns Tumblr, and they can ruin it if they like, and the damage will be somewhat limited because it can't really spread beyond Tumblr.
Google and Apple have vastly more power over vastly more of our digital lives.
As a libertarian, I reflexively resist suggestions of regulation, but actions like this (or on a somewhat different vein, Facebook's) make that position harder and harder to support. It's hard to overstate the power that running the dominant Android app store gives Google, and thus the responsibility they have to use that power wisely.
Unfortunately, even if we wanted to try the regulation option, the current political climate makes that a non-starter; the neo-Victorian sexual panic is firmly entrenched in Congress (see, eg, SESTA/FOSTA). We're screwed.
My question is, are PWAs a way for platforms to promote websites with less privacy and adblocking? Similar to how an electron based app which just runs a website (like Discord) can also get around user added blocking extensions.
That's not "puritan idiots", that's people who are aware of the harm caused by the distribution of images of child sexual abuse to the survivors of that abuse and to their business from law enforcement activity.
A good amount of advertisers don't like porn, so you can't monetize Tumblr as effective. Tumblr's investors want a return on investment, and the former approach allowing any legally permitted content didn't work for them, so they resorted to this. They surely did their research, and are betting that the ban on erotic material is the most effective way of increasing the revenue of Tumblr.
The irony is that you will a lot of those "explicit content" hanging or being displayed in Catholic Churches all over Europe so it has nothing to do with religion but only extreme (American) puritanism.
That is to say, the corporations don't care, and will grant you a scant allowance of nipples only in imagery of breastfeeding and classical paintings if and when enough high-profile people complain about it vocally to warrant some leniency.
I'll never understand this. They won't. This is some US bsht, somebody somewhere came up with this thought and people just blindly applying it like it was true.
I remember back in the 1990s lots and lots of pearl clutching about various companies using sex to sell their products, especially beer. The idea that now advertisers are afraid of sex doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me.
What I really think it is is that most adults are pretty meh on the whole thing one way or another. Most of us look at some porn, but aren’t heavy users. There are however a very vocal minority who hate all adult content, and I think they’re being very successful in pressuring companies to take it down.
People have the choice to install any given app or not. They don't need to be puritanically mothered.
Secondly, the human race will die out pretty fast without sex.
Food may kill you too, yet it's still needed so we can live™.
So clearly this isn't an useful criterion.
Has the choice not already been made with westphalian sovereignty?
For example, Sayyid Qutb - the grandfather of modern Salafism - became radicalized after visiting US in 1940s, and observing its culture. Here's how he describes it in his writings:
"The American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs -- and she shows all this and does not hide it."
"They danced to the tunes of the gramophone, and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire."
It's a bit stronger than that, because not only all successful cultures banned public nudity - also all cultures that tried public nudity failed.
Re: topless beach - going to a topless beach once a while vs living in a society where everybody around you is naked all the time are two different things. Imagine a workplace where your female colleagues (if you're a straight male) are naked. There's a reason why some of the best schools in the world still separate pupils by sex.
I just imagined that - and indeed, you're right that the possibility is quite offensive to my personal taste, and even frankly disquieting. But whereas you might try to explain this as the result of "too much sexual tension", I would instead place the blame on its very opposite. (And the fact that the colleagues might be of the gender I'm occasionally attracted to does not improve things one bit.)
I know an engineer doing well at Amazon for 7 years now, who pays a 3rd party streaming service that sensors violence and sexuality from movies for him.
Musings on it here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo
Pretty strange to call this "nudity, but not of a sexual nature".
She is literally the incarnation of the concept of sex.
It's easier as to the provision of photos today, but opinions still vary.
Re the people who voted me down, I’m curious if you’ve done so because you consider that statue porn or because you don’t consider it art? Are you able to elaborate please :)
And random acts of violence in even light comedy shows that shun everything sexual. Really grates me when they're celebrated instead of prosecuted for an assault.
> Jurors are the judges of contemporary community standards, based upon their knowledge of the norms of the community from which they may come. The juror must also decide whether the "average person" in applying such standards would find that the disputed material appeals to "prurient interest" or is "patently offensive." Experts testimony may be used to testify about the nature of the contemporary community standards,' but such testimony is not constitutionally required.
https://definitions.uslegal.com/c/contemporary-community-sta...
Back in the Dark Twentieth, you could maintain the polite fiction that even broadcast media was bound by these standards, as the FCC would go after local affiliate stations, not the mothership, for violating broadcast regulations. In theory, and, to some extent, in practice, local stations could regulate what got shown, so as to prevent what you mention: Distant townies trying to impose their standards on the locals.
This breaks down in the Internet Era, of course, because, while a website may claim to have Community Standards, a website is not a community. A website cannot have Community Standards, Contemporary or otherwise, because the people it has contributing to it are a pseudo-random mix of some vaguely-defined demographic, and, as you yourself show, can and will differ sharply on precisely the kinds of things Community Standards presume a strong majority in a community can agree on.
The Liberalization of the world has ripped a lot of veils off the cultural standards we used to abide by, and turned polite fictions, the kinds of things all the adults in the room could admit privately were not laws of nature but laws of local social norms, into, at long last, simple fictions, as might be found in a storybook. "Community Standards" is one such polite fiction, and it's been replaced by the standards of the platform owners.
We can remove the platform owners by federating and decentralizing, but "Community Standards", as-was, isn't coming back. Communication is far too important to allow the previous geographic segregation to reassert itself.
Most US pornography is produced in San Fernando Valley - I don't think you can generalize porn/nude art across the US so perhaps you ought to have said "California has pretty liberal standards on pornography and art".
Janet Jackson's Nipplegate wouldn't have been a big deal in any of the European countries you mentioned, but Americans were scandalized.
So this is coming from Google. Their motivation is much harder to discern. Related to advertising? Avoiding store segregation as they expand into e.g. various far more conservative Asian or Islamic nations? Trying to create a 'Disney-Esque' image for Android as opposed to being that naughty back alley alternative to Apple? Maybe it was an algorithm or even human gone awry. Lots of possibilities, and we'll likely never know which it was - even if they choose to respond to this.
I think this mechanism is the core of why we feel a vague sadness when sites like github get bought by big corps. You tacitly know it's the beginning of the end on some dimension.
The response should have been better filters for illegal content, not cutting off "adult" content. (" because in my opinion, there's nothing adulty in a fantasy artwork from the 70s which, the horror, shows both male and female uncovered breasts.)
The blocks are supposed to be used for individual pages, not the domain. https://www.iwf.org.uk/become-a-member/services-for-members/...
In the past the IWF could only take action when an image was reported to them. Recent changes (2013) mean they are now allowed to search out this content.
Those blocks should take the form of "splash pages" warning that the content is illegal. Some of the splash pages provide links to charities working with potential offenders to reduce their likelihood of offending. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/tackling-illegal-images-n...
But Interpol has a list of "worst of" content where the domain is expected to be blocked: https://www.interpol.int/Crime-areas/Crimes-against-children...
Together this means that a site that has images of child sexual abuse, and which does nothing to proactively stop that content, is likely to face increasing levels of regulations. It's also a pretty poor look for advertisers. I'm not saying that Tumblr's response makes any technical sense. I am saying that it makes sense from a business perspective.
(I believe there was an incident a few years ago where an image of an Iron Maiden album cover on wikipedia got flagged, though)
> According to an account by Pliny the Elder, Praxiteles sculpted both a nude statue and a draped statue of Aphrodite. The city of Kos purchased the draped statue, because they felt the nude version was indecent and reflected poorly on their city, while the city of Knidos purchased the nude statue.
> The statue [...] was so lifelike that it even aroused men sexually, as witnessed by the tradition that a young man broke into the temple at night and attempted to copulate with the statue, leaving a stain on it.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphrodite_of_Knidos )
Just how strongly can we connect the Venus de Milo to the Aphrodite of Knidos? Well, it's a naked Aphrodite in a similar pose. Similar enough that it was originally attributed to Praxiteles. Aphrodite of Knidos is just standing there too, about to take a bath.
Imagine me posting a photo to Facebook showing a woman caught in the act of getting into her bathtub. She's not engaging in sex! Then again, videos of this exact subject matter are common on porn sites.
Imagine arguing that a still of Marilyn Monroe's dress getting blown up around her hips is about art, and not about sexual titillation.
Thus the issue is really more of sensibilities than anything. Nudity isn’t a big thing in Europe like it is in the US. It’s common for women to walk the beaches topless; and frankly they should be allowed to since it’s perfectly natural and men do it too. The whole “the statue is topless so it’s sexually explicit” comment is really weird to read in the context of European attitudes because we differentiate between nudity and sex (as the earlier examples demonstrate). Which is probably also why America needs the “free the nipple” (and similar) campaign if people like yourself consider any form of nudity to be sexually explicit regardless of context. I mean we are all born naked - it’s so weird to read someone say that the form we are born in is indesent and worse imagery than violence. I just can’t fathom that logic. Sorry :-/
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/
This means shitty native apps, walled gardens and DRM.
This was the case before ad-blocking was popular.
Native apps with spyware and malware were the norm before web apps became a viable way to ensure people couldn't copy software.
DRM was around before most people had internet access, for example, CSS on DVDs was introduced in 1996[1].
For a lot of people, their first introduction the internet was through a walled garden[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Scramble_System
[2] AOL's 'Walled Garden' (2000): https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB968104011203980910
I don't believe the ads in the latter category are pulled from an ad server, they're served from the same source as real content. Could be wrong though, I haven't used Reddit in a while.
Only UK ISPs, which translates to "hardly any" in an European context.
The UK is the outlier here. In some other European countries blocking websites may even be illegal unless some court was involved or the website contains outright unlawful content.
NOTE: The image is on the article above the fold.
> On 5 December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a British watchdog group, blacklisted content on the English Wikipedia related to Scorpions' 1976 studio album Virgin Killer, due to the presence of its controversial cover artwork, depicting a young girl posing nude, with a faux glass shatter obscuring her genitalia. The image was deemed to be "potentially illegal content" under English law which forbids the possession or creation of indecent photographs of children. The IWF's blacklist are used in web filtering systems such as Cleanfeed.
You can see from my note how much long-term effect this had on Wikipedia.
You mean: "Most ISPs in the UK".
That is very different from "most ISPs in Europe" or "most ISPs".
(I'm pulling text from subchapter III.2.7, "Aphrodite", but my pulls are not necessarily contiguous in the original.)
> Aphrodite's sphere of activity is immediately and sensibly apparent: the joyous consummation of sexuality. Aphrodisia, aphrodisiazein as a verb, denotes quite simply the act of love, and in the Odyssey, the name of the goddess is already used in the same sense.
> However impious the apotheosis of sexuality may seem in light of the Christian tradition, modern sensibility can nevertheless also appreciate how in the experience of love the loved one and indeed the whole world appears transfigured and joyously intensified, making all else seem insignificant: a tremendous power is revealed, a great deity.
> Behind the figure of Aphrodite there clearly stands the ancient Semitic Goddess of love, Ishtar-Astarte [...the text lists many correspondences between the two deities...] In the process of transmission from East to West a part was probably played by frontal representations of the naked goddess
> Unabashed acceptance of sexuality is, however, not a matter of course even in Greece.
> In the iconography, the naked oriental figure was supplanted as early as the first half of the seventh century by the normal representation of the goddess [emphasis added] with long, sumptuous robes and the high crown of the goddess, polos. Fine attire is Aphrodite's specialty, most notably necklaces and occasionally brightly colored robes intended to give an oriental effect.
> It was not until about 340 that the statue of a naked Aphrodite apparently preparing to take a bath was created for the sanctuary in Cnidos by Praxiteles; for centuries this figure remained the most renowned representation of the goddess of love, the embodiment of all womanly charms. The statue was displayed in the round so that it could be admired from all sides; Greek sources suggest that it excited more voyeurism than piety.
That is the tradition into which the Venus de Milo falls. Let me suggest to you that your ideas of how people can view their religious icons are rather more restricted than historical practice would justify. We're talking about a statue showing the apotheosis of sexuality flaunting her supernatural sex appeal.
Sexual content was routine even outside the context of Aphrodite specifically. For example:
> At the doors of the anaktoron [in Samothrace] two bronze statues of ithyphallic [priapic] Hermes were to be seen. Originally these could have been just phallic boundary markers, but the mythical explanation was that Hermes had got into this state of arousal because he beheld Persephone.
(Subchapter VI.1.3, "The Kabeiroi and Samothrace")
EDIT:
From Wikipedia, on the Aphrodite of Cnidos:
> The statue [...] was so lifelike that it even aroused men sexually, as witnessed by the tradition that a young man broke into the temple at night and attempted to copulate with the statue, leaving a stain on it.
---
You need to get a bit more in touch with history; that statue has nothing to do with "sexually gratifying". It was in the days when minos culture fashion looked like this: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=minos+culture+fashion&t=ffab&iax=i...
The Minoan culture is more or less contemporaneous with the Mycenaean Greeks who fell in the 12th century BC, ushering in the Greek Dark Age which lasted about 400 years.
Wikipedia dates the Venus de Milo to the late second century BC. Aphrodite is not even attested in Mycenaean records.
You're off by over a thousand years.
As such, I'll respectfully reject your suggestion that I need to get more in touch with history.
>>> It would be hard to defend that claim as to the creation of the statue.
On the other hand, I feel fairly confident in claiming that women wearing nothing but a sheet that doesn't quite cover their butt are considered sexy in the modern day too.
Would you believe that, say, souvenir postcards of nude Aphrodites sell better than souvenir postcards of Zeus? Why do you think that might be?
If you want to argue that the Venus de Milo is "nonsexual" nudity because it's historical art, you need to deal with its historical significance, which is as a tawdry sex icon.
If you want to argue that the way the Greeks viewed the statue doesn't matter, you need to deal with the way a statue of a naked woman failing to cover herself with a sheet would be viewed in the modern day, which is... as a tawdry sex icon.
To be honest I think it’s hypocritical to say women should have their chests covered when men don’t have the same rules.
But we are drifting waaaay off topic now.