Sunday evening UPDATE, sent in from a loyal 5FF reader:
“This is one of the few SFW posts ever published on this Tumblr — people could RTWT without seeing any of the regular content, but if they click on the rest of the posts it’s mostly ropedresses, canes, and genitalia.
“Erectus is saying something you’ve been saying about Blogger, Google, Facebook and similar platforms:
In all the years that I’ve been preaching Bacchus’s First Rule (“Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own domain that you control”), I’ll confess that I never considered the power of robots.txt, or what it means to be putting stuff on an internet site where somebody else controls what robots.txt says. Not only do they control your visibility to search engines, they control whether history will remember what you said. That strikes me as a high price to pay for a “free” blogging platform.
“Obviously, that applies to political as well as porn blogs. In fact, from the point of view of corporate censorware, Five Feet of Fury and Erectus are identically forbidden. It’s even possible that you talk about tops, bottoms, and safewords more than they do.”
***
I’ve made this point before, here and here.
Your sensation of “owning the printing presses” is illusory if your “printing press” is Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Blogger — to name a few.
Reminder: This link goes to a NSFW site:
Most media coverage of the Internet focuses on how much privacy we’ve lost. What we sometimes miss is that we’ve also lost public space. The web is almost entirely privatized: the servers, the network cables, the sites themselves are all privately owned. You might have a right to walk and talk on public streets, but your right to do so on the Internet is entirely dependent on those who own the hardware and software running the web. As Pandora Blake found out, even money has been thoroughly privatized on the Internet. The money that we use for transactions on the Web is minted by Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Paypal.
Government censorship becomes redundant in such an entirely privatized environment. The concept of free speech is one that developed alongside the assumption of a public commons, open to all. But while the Internet appears to have expanded the public square — sometimes even to have made it universal — it has in fact shrunk. The hidden nature of speech on the Internet is that even after you publish your ideas, the paper and ink they’re on still belongs to someone else. Journalist A.J. Liebling famously said that “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” In the age of the Internet, who actually owns the printing presses?
It’s a good idea to keep an eye on the internet porn world (both the industry side and the hobbyist side) because they are “sandboxing” a lot of internet issues (payment, security, privacy, ownership) for the rest of us.
For instance –again, this link is from a BDSM site and is NOT SAFE FOR WORK:
I don’t have time today to really blog about this in detail, but fortunately the news is all over the web (along with good advice about what to do if you’re affected). This post is just to amplify the signal in hopes that it will get seen in time by the folks who need to hear about it. Bottom line:
Starting Monday, July 1, any blog on Blogger (the ones with a blogspot.com domain) that has both adult content and any means of monetizing it (including but not limited to affiliate links and banners) is at risk of being deleted by Google.
That’s THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW.
Ultimately everybody affected by this needs to undertake some combination of immediately backing up their blog, pulling monetization links, or moving to self-hosting. The precise mix will vary depending on your situation. But given that it’s a summer weekend, you may only have time to back up your blog. DO THAT NOW.
For all the details and some more helpful links, see Spanking Blog’s post about this: Monetized Blogger Blogs To Be Deleted By Google.
Hopefully this public service announcement will save somebody’s ass. Be careful out there!
Remember: It is Google/Blogger’s right to decide who will use their servers, etc. They have invested hundreds of millions of dollars and incalculable hours into their businesses.
They can kick people out with no explanation and no warning.
This is why I’ve been scolding monied conservatives for investing in yet another “news site” instead of at least trying to come up with alternative, secure, welcoming online platforms.
Any “Tea Party” site naively operating on Blogger or any other platform that they do not control outright is taking a risk and frankly not living up to their own principles of self-sufficiency..
