Remember the OCS/Heart Transplant post? Imageshack didn’t approve.
After returning from my hiatus from the blog, it came to my attention that one of my (few) posts was displaying a nasty 403 error where an image ought to be. It had apparently been pulled for violating the ToS, meaning either the site’d done a sweep and zeroed in on it, or some outstanding Samaritan had taken it upon themselves to report it. My problem, though: the image broke no rules.
I’m going to traipse on out on the proverbial limb here and say that some squeamish civ saw the image here, browsing tumblr, or shuffling through milesian’s* responses and on a knee-jerk moment of ‘ew’ decided to report the image back to the website (which, notably, would take a lot more time than merely scrolling down or navigating away.)
I sent a complaint ImageShacks way and reuploaded the image so my content would not be compromised.
An image I uploaded for use on my blog was pulled and deleted apparently due to the content being inappropriate or reported as Harassment. The image contained photos related to heart transplants and was being used to explain and educate on the medical practice of heart transplantation and the variations therein. There was nothing inappropriate about the image, nor was it being used to harass the squeamish, and in no way could the image be construed as pornographic; The image was for academic consumption and its removal was uncalled for.
Because I have reread the ImageShack’s ToS and am positive that I am in full accordance with the rules, I’ve reuploaded the image. I hope it will not be deleted again, because otherwise I will need to move to another image host as I will continue to upload similar content as the medical and crime fields are a central focus of my work.
—AP
My hope is that ImageShack will respond fairly, or at least let the matter drop entirely. It is too often that useful information, and things that can indeed be perceived as beautiful, are censored under false pretenses.
For some reason the squeamish do an awfully good job of ‘protecting’ the masses from medical and other educational and interesting content under the idea that such things shouldn’t be easily accessible for public consumption. That’s ridiculous. A trigger warning should suffice and the squeamish should be responsible to curate what they see, rather than the mass limiting of everyone’s view.
Tumblr does a fantastic job at being a supportive and non-judgemental content hoster for millions, and I hope that other websites will follow suit. Censorship, executed responsibly, is not meant to keep people from seeing things some may not want to see, but to protect the majority from content that is universally considered distasteful and wrong. Which, looked at logically, seems something awkward and difficult to define, because what we normally associate with censorship (porn, swearing, political radicals) does not always fall safely into those definitions. It’s time people understand the rating and reporting systems of the websites they use and begin to utilize them correctly, and it’s time websites stand by their rules and remember that upholding them only means something if those are actually the rules. I don’t read ToS to find out later that there’re some arcane hidden rules on triggering and subjectively ‘gross’ content. Let’s all work on being a bit more responsible. Or at least not assholes—
—because to me, this is pretty damn beautiful.
*if they did come from milesian, however, this image is hardly the most triggering thing floating around on that blog.
