Imgur is removing porn and old anonymous uploads

The Imgur 2019 announcement: NSFW, porn, sexual, and other artistic nudities are still allowed on the Imgur site

It’s interesting, in retrospect, to go back and read Imgur’s 2019 announcement from when it decided to stop displaying subsections associated with NSFW subreddits. At the time, it was at pains to emphasize that no content would be deleted or moved, that URLs would not break, and that legal NSFW content could still be uploaded so long as it was hidden from Imgur’s public gallery. It was 3 and a half years ago.

“It’s definitely going to have a large ripple effect,” says Jillian York, the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on civil liberties online. Sex is very important. The nude expression is important. I still don’t feel like we have, in the US, a wide perspective on what human bodies can look like.”

The disappearance of porn on Imgur could exacerbate that. It is sudden and its reasoning is unclear, but it is in line with the policies of others. Imgur noted the risk of explicit content to Im, but didn’t mention the initiatives to comply with the Fight Online Sex-Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex-Trafficking Act. It is important to scrap it to protect against the risks. Imgur did not respond to a question about what percentage of its content library includes pornographic and inactive images. The announcement said nudity can remain, but it’s called artistic nudity.

Differentiating between those will be tough. The site says it will use automated software and human moderators to detect pornographic content. Artificial intelligence was used to moderate content when it instituted a porn ban, but it didn’t start out well and many non-pornographic images were flagged. The ban and cliff drop resulted in nudity and sexual themes being allowed on the site. It doesn’t allow posts of sex.