Category Archives: Rule 5

A blogger friend whose blog is, coincidentally, on Blogger recently got an email from Blogger boss Google warning of a change in policy as of March 23. The email read, in part:

“In the coming weeks, we’ll no longer allow blogs that contain sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video. We’ll still allow nudity presented in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts, or where there are other substantial benefits to the public from not taking action on the content.”

Well, I’d say female nudity is uplifting (in more ways than one) whatever the context about 99 percent of the time. Anyhow, Google backed down a few days later, as reported by Drudge and others, citing “a ton of feedback” complaints.

However, Google now requires: “If your blog contains adult content, please mark it as ‘adult’ in your Blogger settings. We may also mark blogs with adult content where the owners have not.”

The funny thing about all this is that you can use Google to look up all the images of nude women and men (cheesecake, soft-porn, even hard-core porn of people f**king) you can stand. If you can do that, why should Google attempt to muzzle blogs that might use the images? Or make them add “adult” tags? Their having procured (ha!) the images from Google in the first place?