TECH NEWS – New Terms of Service will soon be introduced on Imgur, and in addition to sexual content, long-available images, and GIFs will also disappear from the internet.

Here is the Imgur announcement, slightly truncated: “We recently announced some changes to our Terms of Service that will be effective May 15, 2023. We will focus on removing old, unused, and inactive content not tied to a user account from our platform as well as nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content. You must download/save any images you wish to save if they no longer adhere to these Terms. Most notably, this would include explicit/pornographic content. We will not change our Community Rules, meaning content in the public gallery will not change. However, we must employ automated detection software to identify explicit content. We are aware of the limitations and issues with using automatic detection means exclusively, so we will continue to use human moderators alongside automated detection. All content submitted to the public gallery will continue to be subject to human review – as always. With a mix of automatic detection and human review, we hope to minimize this change’s negative impacts on the Imgur community.

Explicit/Pornographic content was previously permitted to be on Imgur but not when submitted as a comment or gallery submission. This caused frustration with users who received content violations for the content they had seen posted elsewhere off-site. Aligning our Terms of Service more closely with our Community Rules should help clearly define what is and isn’t permitted on Imgur. Explicit and illegal content have historically posed a risk to Imgur’s community and its business; disallowing explicit content will allow Imgur to address these risks and protect the future of the Imgur community. Artistic nudity will continue to be permitted, as it was allowed under the Rules previously. However, since we’re calibrating automated detection in these early stages, some content that may have been permitted under “artistic exceptions” once may not apply here. We will not be issuing any warnings, account suspensions, or bans concerning these automated flags – but this may impact what is allowed to be submitted or uploaded.

To make this as clear to Imgurians as possible, we’ll outline exactly how these changes will go into effect. If you are signed in to your account and upload content detected as violating our Terms, you will be notified of this, and it will be automatically deleted soon after. Once the content has been removed, it will no longer be visible with a direct link and will not be visible in the post you’ve created. If the flagged content is part of a post with other content that is not flagged, only the flagged content will be removed. We understand that these changes may disrupt Imgurians who have used Imgur to store their images and artwork. These changes are an essential step in Imgur’s continued efforts to remain a safe and fun space on the internet,” Imgur wrote.

Imgur was created in 2009 to store and share images from other social platforms. Initially, it was also where Reddit’s images ended up before the site started its custom image-sharing solution. However, it still has 300 million unique monthly visitors and billions of page loads. Ten years ago, Fast Company reported that the site had accumulated 650 million images in four years. Imgur banned the uploading of NSFW content linked to Reddit communities in 2019.

Previously, Tumblr had also banned NSFW content (which it regretted, as the site’s value and user base had dwindled significantly, and automatic moderation didn’t help them…), and OnlyFans had tried to do the same, but as it’s primarily a pornographic site, the move was quickly dropped. Deleting old content on Imgur will also affect forum posts, but we don’t know how far back in time they go. Just don’t follow the example of ImageShack (advertisements replaced the deleted images…)

The internet must be preserved. But not like this.

Source: PCGamer