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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
And yes, there is far more of this on Insta.
