You Have Been Flickrd: Flickr censors users in Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea

Now you see us, now you don’t! Together with the new multi-language features announced by Flickr, they have added censorship to Flickr accounts of users in Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea. Users from Austria and Switzerland are also affected. Does Flickr know they just speak “German” but are not Germans..?

Update Jun 15: we made it to the top of flickr.com/explore!

Click on the screenshot to go to the photo detail page on Flickr

Actually, we are still making it…several censored times!

Before I start

Before I start, let me tell you that there are currently but two “Web 2.0″ services for which I pay for: Flickr and LibraryThing. Let me also say that due to my personal background, I might have a very biased view regarding censorship. In short: I do not like it at all.

One of my favorite quotes is from Abraham Lincoln who was – just to stress – American, just like the companies of Flickr and Yahoo:

“Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves;
and, under a just God, can not long retain it.”
– Abraham Lincoln, April 6, 1859, Letter to Henry Pierce

Note: We have added the Flickr legal documents (terms of use, privacy policy, etc.) to our GooDiff project. They are now being actively tracked for changes and modifications.

Background

As you can read in Flickr’s help section about content filters, users – free accounts and paying “Pro” users – in the affected countries cannot disable Flickr’s content filter:

Set your SafeSearch preference (This does not apply if your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong or Korea.)

However, if you check Flickr’s own Terms of Use for Pro accounts (in case the ToS gets changed later, you can read the archived version from today at GooDiff):

9. OBJECTIONABLE MATERIAL
You understand that by using Flickr pro, you may encounter content that may be deemed offensive, indecent, or objectionable, which content may or may not be identified as having explicit subject matter. Nevertheless, you agree to use Flickr pro at your sole risk and that Flickr shall not have any liability to you for content that may be found to be offensive, indecent, or objectionable.

An interesting coincidence is that just recently, the shareholders of Yahoo (the company owning Flickr) have rejected plans for the company to adopt a policy that opposes censorship on the internet based on the recommendation of Yahoo’s board of directors. (you might want to read the full text of the shareholder proposal)

A very good resource with well-grounded research about censorship in the Internet is the OpenNet Initiative. The OpenNet initiative is a collaborative partnership between the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto (Canada), the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School (USA), and the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme, University of Cambridge (USA). They regularly publish reports and information about filtering and censorship in the Internet.

The Flickr community fights against censorship

The support from the Flickr community has been overwhelming in the last days. Users from all over the world help us to show Flickr that we can think and decide for ourselves.

It was already late at night here when I tried to add some of my own ideas to the picture piles. It is not meant as a shameless plug, just consider it as edutainment:

To be honest, there are much better pictures out there. Just have a look at Flickr, at the moment you can’t miss them.

As a German, I have additional problems to understand Flickr’s move as other German photo services such as fotocommunity.de do not need such censorship means in order to comply with German law (some users suspected that the move was due to legal obligations specific to Germany).

Update on June 19, 2007

Flickr user vegitill found some interesting trends on Flickr’s camera pages. As you can see in the picture, the number of uploaded pictures has been descreasing since the censorship issue. By how much? Hard to say as Flickr’s statistics don’t show a legend/scale. As others have pointed out, the trend could also be caused by former Yahoo! Photos users importing pictures without camera information (for example).

I have shamelessly copied the image to have a non-Flickr “backup”. All credits go to vegitill.

What is Flickr’s reaction to the protests?

Well, the first and for now only official response was posted by Stewart (Flickr staff member). As AustinTX put it: “That is the biggest nonstatement I have ever seen from a Flickr representative. You said absolutely nothing. How could you possible have not forseen this reaction?”. True, ’nuff said.

If you are interested, you can check out my replies that I wrote in the Flickr forum: first message, second message, third message, fourth message, fifth message.
There are more, just browse through the thread.

A very important point from my perspective:

[...] one of the critical mistakes you made by your censorship move is – in my opinion – that you are really upsetting the early adapters of Flickr in Germany who have started using Flickr a long time ago. These might be the best marketeers you could bring to the table in order to attract new people (= our friends & families!) to Flickr.

Censorship is a hot discussion point in Germany and for users it’s a big no-no.

Do you [Flickr] really believe that I will recommend a censorship service to any of my friends?

Remember that Flickr was an English-only online service until now. The existing German Flickr users could cope with that (most of us Germans over there can speak English quite well). The censorship move has now caused a tremendous wave of anger in the German Flickr community, i.e. exactly those people who have been the biggest “fans” and proponents of Flickr in our country so far. If you heard from your friends – all long-term users – that they are absolutely disappointed by an online service and have switched to a different one, would you still start to use it?

A forum reply from Heather (Flickr staff member) told us that the decision to introduce filtering for Germany was required to conform with German law:

The decision to change the Flickr experience in Germany was never about censorship – it was made to try to ensure that Yahoo! Germany was in compliance with local legal restrictions. In fact, we’re all getting really uncomfortable that the words “flickr” and “censorship” are being jammed together with increasing frequency because that is _so far_ from the direction we’re trying to move in.

The central problem is that Germany has much more stringent age verification laws than its neighboring countries and specifies much harsher penalties, including jail time, for those with direct responsibility (in our case, it would be our colleagues in the German offices and we’re not willing to make a call that has that kind of consequence for them).

Up to the point of launch we had been exploring every possible approach which would allow us to do what makes sense while still operating inside the law. Unfortunately, the solutions did not come together in the way we thought they would.

[...]

Update on June 20, 2007

In a German article on Heise, the head of German jugendschutz.net (“protection of underages”), Friedemann Schindler, disagrees with Yahoo’s/Flickr’s description: his department has not influenced Flickr or Yahoo in any way to activate the SafeSearch filter for Germany. According to Schindler, the filtering decision of Yahoo/Flickr goes way beyond what is legally required in Germany. He suspects that the decision was born out of Yahoo’s own interests to present Flickr in a more family-friendly way.

In short: Flickr, ouch!

Update on June 18, 2007

It is not yet confirmed, but there are rumors/hints/you name it that Flickr might have been filtering accounts of users who support the anti-censorship move. To stress it again: this is unconfirmed as yet.

Here’s my own very unscientific test:

Note that this might also be caused by technical reasons such as indexing or caching. I changed my screen name some days ago and added the “[Flickr CENSORED]” tag.

Update on June 15, 2007

Flickr has “cleaned” Explore and Interestingness from our protest.

Stewart (Flickr staff member):
Yep – we started getting complaints from people who actually want to see photographs and since that’s what the feature is for, we’ve removed things that aren’t photos. This is a return what we normally do, by the way: we temporarily stopped so people could let off steam, but it’s not fair to disrupt others’ experience of Flickr to get a point across.

Plainly, not all “traces” of the protest are gone. Your own streams are fair game (and, e.g., I’m happy to leave people’s protest pics in comments on my stream), plenty of groups have been created, there’s plenty of mainstream press and blogging going on, and there is an intensely active thread in these very forums, which is covering this same topic, starting at this point in the thread.

Simply put: Flickr is kind of censoring the protest against censorship now. Might be a good enough measure to hide what’s happening to a superficial examination by lazy reporters or Internet users.

Frequently Asked Questions

Question: I simply cannot believe that! Can you show me an example of filtered photos?

Sure.

The left image shows the unfiltered photo set of user Ioupiote, the right image shows the same set as viewed by people from Germany, Singapore, Korea and Hong Kong. And to make it perfectly clear: Flickr does not only filter “nude” images or act photography (though can you imagine how much fun it is for a professional act photographer with a paid Pro account to see his artistic work censored by Flickr?), among the censored pictures are friends having fun in swimming pools, pictures made by proud parents of their babies, photos from carnival, and what not.

Question: How do I find out if my Flickr account is being censored by Flickr?

You can check it out for yourself and see whether your Flickr account is being censored or not.

Question: How can I help?

There are several ways to support the anti-censorship movement of the Flickr community.

First, spread the word! Blog about it, write comments to newspaper articles, tell Flickr what you think in the forum discussions, join the anti-censorship groups at Flickr and come up with your own photos or images that show you are against censorship on the Internet. Contact Flickr themselves and tell them that you oppose censorship!

If you need help writing a blog post or a comment on Flickr, here is a template for various languages:

Auf Deutsch:
flickr sperrt uns aus! Und auch dich! Seit gestern werden für deutsche Nutzer keine Bilder mehr angezeigt, die als ‘moderate’ oder ‘restricted’ markiert sind! Es gibt keine Moeglichkeit das umzustellen – das ist eine grobe Unverschämtheit und Frechheit von flickr! We are the users – don’t forget that flickr! Deswegen treten wir gemeinsam in Aktion und zeigen allen, das uns das nicht gefällt was flickr mit uns macht! Füge das Bild zu deinen Favoriten hinzu und poste es!

In English:
If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong or Korea, you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service, and therefore won’t be able to turn off SafeSearch. In other words, german users can’t access photos on flickr that are not flaged "safe" … only flowers and landscapes for the germans …

We won’t let this happen! Copy and upload this picture to your account – show flickr who we are.

Espanol:
No sé cuando, pero muy recientemente a las cuentas de Alemania, Hong Kong, Corea y Singapur les han prohibido ver las fotos que están en el Safe Search, las mismas en las que a nosotros nos dan la opcíón de ver o no ver. A ellos simplemente se lo prohiben. Chale no?

Francais:
Si votre compte Yahoo! est basé à Singapour, à Hong Kong, en Corée ou en Allemagne, vous ne pourrez voir que les photos qui n’ont pas été marquées comme ayant un contenu qui peut choquer. Toutes les autres ne vous seront pas accessibles. Vous serez donc condamnés à ne voir que des paysages et des fleurs. Il ne faut pas laisser faire ça. Envoyez cette photo sur votre compte pour montrer à Flickr que nous savons nous mobiliser contre la censure !

Em português:
Se você tem uma Yahoo! ID de Cingapura, Alemanha, Hong Kong ou Coréia você apenas será capaz de ver fotos classificadas como seguras e segundo seu termo de serviços não poderá desligar esta função.

Em outras palavras: alemães, coreanos, cingapurenses e os habitantes de Hong Kong não podem visualizar fotos no flickr que estejam classificadas como restritas ou moderadas…. apenas flores e paisagens para eles. Nós não vamos deixar isto acontecer! Copie e faça upload desta foto – mostre ao flickr quem somos!

Italiano:
Se il tuo ID yahoo è localizzato a Singapore, in Germania oppure ad Hong Kong o in Korea potrai vedere solo foto dal contenuto che è in accordo con il locale accordo dei termini di servizio per cui gli utenti flickr di quelle nazioni non potranno cambiare da SafeSearch on in SafeSearch off.

In altre parole ciò significa che gli utenti tedeschi e delle altre nazioni citate non potranno accedere a foto su flickr che non sono flaggate "safe" e quindi solo fiori e paesaggi per i tedeschi.

Second, if you have a paid Flickr Pro account (like I do), tell Flickr that you will not renew your account if the censorship is not removed (like I do). My Pro account expires in August, and even though I really like Flickr I will never renew my membership under such circumstances.

Question: How can I backup all of my Flickr photos?

Good question. I have not tested the following tools myself, but other users have reported good results:

• Downloadr (Windows only; works with XP and Vista; multiple languages)
  Quote: Downloadr (download here) now supports slideshows, sets, group pools, favorites, explore and authentication! To run downloadr, you need to install the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 (download here).
• FlickrBackup (seems to be unreliable)
  Quote: Flickr Backup is a Java application that allows you do download your photos and back them up to your harddrive or to media. This is useful if your local harddrive goes bad and you don’t have a current backup.
• FlickrDown (requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0); included by suggestion of Thomas Foyth though not tested by him, either – thanks, Thomas!
• Flickr2Ipernity (Firefox browser only) – Greasemonkey plugin developed by Ipernity for importing your Flickr images to Ipernity; requires the Greasemonkey extension/addon for Firefox (see the Flickr2Ipernity web page for more information of what can be imported right now)

Question: Are there any Flickr alternatives?

Yes, there are some services like Flickr. Here’s a short list. I created accounts on each of them to test them out.

• ipernity: full Flickr “clone” based in France; has more features than Flickr (videos, blog, …) and is available in multiple languages (view example picture)
• Smugmug (view example picture; account expires on June 30, 2007)
• Foto Community: known for its rather high percentage of quality photographs; available in multiple languages (view example picture)