Skip to main content

Troubles with flickr


Last Sunday, flickr suspended my (PRO) account, saying that it included "a large amount of content marked with the incorrect safety level." 

Although I try to moderate my images, I have had messages in the past from flickr telling some of them were wrongly labelled. A list was usually included and the system automatically changed the moderation. Not this time. 

When I asked support why that was the case, how I was supposed to physically review nearly 80,000 images(!), and why I couldn't be given a list, I repeatedly received boilerplate responses copy/pasted from some script that didn't answer my questions at all. 

The representative dealing with my case specifically quoted those two sections of the flickr's Guide to Safety Levels (nothing else):

- Sexually suggestive poses and attire intended to arouse the viewer or that would generally be unacceptable to a general, public audience; 
- Full frontal nudity (exposed or visible genitalia, anus, etc…); 

Some of the examples they sent did include images that matched those descriptions but others were of models in their underwear with a hand in the front of them, or the one above. Another was two fully dressed men holding a fan with the word "Cunt" emblazoned on it. This seemed overly zealous. 

In the end I restricted about 30,000 of my club images, as batches without distinction, and that seem to satisfy them (my account is back on! YAY!) but the email informing me of the fact also states that flickr "may not have reviewed all posts in [my] account." So how did they decide things were suddenly fine, then?! This makes absolutely no sense! It certainly feels highly arbitrary. 

I've been a loyal user of Flickr for nearly 20 years, during about 10 of which I have held a Pro account. Nothing of the kind has happened before (though FB did delete my photopage without warning some years ago).

Is this part of the moral backlash against LGBT+ people currently blowing from the US (this includes LGBT+ club accounts being deleted without warning on IG)? I don't know. The shoddy way in which this matter has been handled by flickr, however, is seriously making me reconsider that loyalty. Be weary this doesn't happen to you too...

As a result all my content will henceforth be marked as "restricted".
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comment here. Note that comments are moderated and only those in French or in English will be published. Thank you for taking the time to read this blog and to leave a thought.

Popular posts from this blog

A Short History of the Elephant and Castle and Its Name

Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at...
19 comments
Read more

Welcome to Towleroad Readers

On Wednesday, Towleroad , the top gay blog, who win all the awards, were kind enough to link to and quote from my post on Football and Homophobia . This has generated quite a bit a traffic in this otherwise desolate region of the blogosphere. So much so that Wednesday was my highest day ever with 132 hits (previous one was 97), this week is already my highest ever with 317 hits so far (previous one was 287) and this month is the highest month ever with already 865 hits (previous one, last month, was 739, thanks to the posts on the Danish cartoons). So thank you again to Towleroad and welcome to their readers. I hope they like what they see and will be back from time to time.
Post a Comment
Read more

As Grace

Another picture reconstruction. This time the victim is Grace Jones and her picture by Jean Paul Goude (explained here ) which was used for the cover of her 1985 compilation album, Island Life . Unlike Ms Jones, though, this is all me posing. No reconstruction other than adding the original background and props in Photoshop. See the making-of picture of my version here . Below is another, more elaborate reconstruction of the pic done with the help of photographers Jasmin Teer (photography) and Dan Bosworth (Photoshop) in July 2009. This pic was "The Awesome" in The Goude, The Bad and The Awesome (March 2010).
10 comments
Read more