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Google Takes Down Artstation Android App for Explicit Content
- CamperBob2 8y agoAny sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government. -- Anonymous Or, apparently, from a church.
- gaius 8y agoIt’s very strange wording that they use, they don’t want anything to be sexually “gratifying”. Like if it’s explicit content but you don’t find it “gratifying” they’re OK with that? It’s as if they don’t care about the content itself they just don’t want you to enjoy it.
- Drdrdrq 8y agoIt is strange, agreed. Maybe they are ok with explicit images for educational purposes (anatomy)?
- laumars 8y agoI think the point of that is to distinguish between stuff that is nudity but not of a sexual nature (like Aphrodite of Milos[1]) from stuff that could be deemed as corrupting young kids? But I’m guessing there. As a European I do think the Americans get far to uptight about nudity. There’s nothing inherently wrong with nakedness, it’s not automatically sexual. Yet I’m constantly amazed how much casual violence is in family TV (Simpson’s, Tom and Jerry, etc). I find it weird that cutting a persons limbs off is more acceptable than a naked form. But I guess that’s a cultural thing. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_de_Milo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_de_Milo
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> nudity but not of a sexual nature (like Aphrodite of Milos) Pretty strange to call this "nudity, but not of a sexual nature". She is literally the incarnation of the concept of sex.
- code_duck 8y agoI think what they would say is that the statue was not created nor are photos provided with an aim to ‘appeal to a prurient interest’.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoIt would be hard to defend that claim as to the creation of the statue. It's easier as to the provision of photos today, but opinions still vary.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pmlnr 8y agoEdit: my comment was wrong, ignore it. --- You need to get a bit more in touch with history; that statue has nothing to do with "sexually gratifying". It was in the days when minos culture fashion looked like this: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=minos+culture+fashion&t=ffab&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=minos+culture+fashion&t=ffab&iax=i...
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> It was in the days when minos culture fashion looked like this The Minoan culture is more or less contemporaneous with the Mycenaean Greeks who fell in the 12th century BC, ushering in the Greek Dark Age which lasted about 400 years. Wikipedia dates the Venus de Milo to the late second century BC. Aphrodite is not even attested in Mycenaean records. You're off by over a thousand years. As such, I'll respectfully reject your suggestion that I need to get more in touch with history.
- pmlnr 8y agoMy memory tricked me. You are correct. I'm sorry.
- 8y ago
- rdiddly 8y agoNot only is nudity not automatically sexual, sex is not automatically (or even remotely) evil. It's good and wholesome.
- distances 8y ago> As a European I do think the Americans get far to uptight about nudity. There’s nothing inherently wrong with nakedness, it’s not automatically sexual. Yet I’m constantly amazed how much casual violence is in family TV (Simpson’s, Tom and Jerry, etc). And random acts of violence in even light comedy shows that shun everything sexual. Really grates me when they're celebrated instead of prosecuted for an assault.
- diminish 8y agoApple or Google don't ban URLs or websites on their Safari or Chrome browsers. Is that due to historical reasons or are there any laws regarding this?
- mike22223333 8y agoIt should be illegal to do that.
- tehbeard 8y agoI think it's due to how they cultivated the image of their walled garden app stores as curated and moderated against "bad stuff" like adware etc and now you have people with a puritan/sex-regressive stance leaning on that image and sesta / fosta bills to "protect us all". With the recent push for PWAs, it will be interesting to see if communities like artstation use these instead.
- simion314 8y agoI am wondering why are not just tagging this apps, then by default not allow you to install unless you confirm on an alert box and put your password. Seems a win-win, you keep both camps happy and probably spend less on attempting to filter your content so not to trip over AIs detection algorithms and bad moderation from the stores.
- paraditedc 8y agoPlay Store/App Store => ISP Android OS/iOS => Chrome/Safari You are confused between the distribution platform and the client. It's ISP/Play Store/App Store's job to do filtering.
- morsch 8y agoIt's not an outright ban, but it's not far off: https://safebrowsing.google.com/ https://safebrowsing.google.com/ They could add editorial policies to those criteria whenever they wanted. Or change a line of code to turn a drastic warning into a full block.
- gpm 8y ago
- gaius 8y agoI wonder why the other app showing identical content didn’t get banned, maybe it is a bigger revenue earner for Google? And yes, there is far more of this on Insta.
- manfredo 8y agoThere's a growing class of apps that are clearly intended to be used as image boards, but don't actually advertise themselves as being intended for any specific website. One common pattern are apps that require that the user type in a certain domain in order for them to work. Most *chan browser apps in this way. You manually specify a domain and board code, and only then does the app function. I can see this type of scheme increasing, as it puts a degree of indirection between the app itself and the objectionable content. There's a stronger element of deniability: the user is the one that's navigating to a separate website that hosts objectionable content. The app itself is "clean" so to speak (even though it's obviously not the case in practice).
- ReptileMan 8y agoHmm... Isn't this app called web browser? There is not much more than it is needed when it is for consuming content.
- grenoire 8y agoReminds me more of a Gopher (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)) kind of web in this case, given the stricter structuring.
- manfredo 8y agoYeah, it's a web browser in essence. But the UI, scrolling behavior, etc. are all handled by the app rather than the website. The result is often a much cleaner experience, especially compared to the average website's mobile web experience. There's also often extended functionality, like saving entire galleries of images, saving threads, etc. What I'd imagine Artstation doing is releasing a "generic art showcase app" (or exposing APIs to let 3rd parties do so themselves), where users can manually specify www.artstation.com. The app would provide all the features that the Artstation app did.
- ndnxhs 8y ago4chan works really well on mobile. The only thing an app did for me was presaving content so I could view it offline.
- fulafel 8y agoThere's a lot of Wikipedia content that would match forbidden content in this policy too.
- kyriakos 8y agoHow about giving users a choice? Proof of age maybe? They could allow apps with questionable content after being warned and proving the users age.
- atticmanatee 8y agoThese companies should already have that info. Just filter the apps for underage users, that simple.
- MountainJack 8y agoThe same rules obviously do not apply to all players. As there are only two mobile platforms, maybe we need antitrust governance.
- seniorivn 8y agoMaybe you shouldn't use programs, devices and platforms that don't meet you criteria?
- idle_zealot 8y agoThat only works if there's a reasonable alternative. If you want to make a mobile app and the content gets you kicked from the Apple and Google stores, you're SoL.
- akiselev 8y agoOh yeah, no problem. If you don't like these tangerines over here, why don't you try a mandarin? Ok, fine then, don't like those - how about a valencia orange? No? How about just a regular orange? Oh you're allergic to citrus? Too bad then.
- ReptileMan 8y agoThe users can at least sideload it. Unlike appstore.
- pmlnr 8y agoThat is if you find the .apk from a source you trust, and this is not a simple trick.
- askvictor 8y agoF-droid is generally trustworthy, and has put a lot of effort into this.
- qwertay 8y agoFdroid is the only 3rd party source of APKs I trust.
- ReptileMan 8y agoIf putting it on the main company side is good enough for threema and whatsapp I think it will be good enough for Artstation.
- pram 8y agoSerious question: why is Twitter left unscathed? There’s tons of pornography and illicit activity on it. Is it ignored simply because of its size and clout? This feels unjust because the enforcement is seemingly completely arbitrary. Why has Google/Apple decided to be puritanical with some things and not others.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoThis question is raised in the post, just using reddit and instagram as the examples instead of twitter.
- cft 8y agoIt's not arbitrary. Below certain size (i.e. negative PR potential) you are at the mercy of Google as a software company if you choose apps versus web sites.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago> Why has Google/Apple decided to be puritanical with some things and not others. Good question. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=learn+colors+syringe https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=learn+colors+sy... What I want to know, is there a timeline of public statements by YouTube about ElsaGate? Last time I heard the first and last thing they said was to pat themselves on the back in advance over how thoroughly and trustworthily they will deal with this, and Disney said they'll work closely with them to make it all awesome, and then... nothing? Did I miss something, other than still being able to find EG videos in 5 seconds, over a year later?
- buboard 8y agoSerious answer: they will be, probably soon. There doesnt seem to be a reversal of the trend towards Victorianism, so every tech is going to graduate to its "Professional" self. It probably signifies the end of an era for expressive media and a lot of progressive users are going to call them out for what they are:dinosaurs .
- pmlnr 8y agoDear corporations, As an european adult, I'm ok with adult and explicit content. Leave art alone.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Freak_NL 8y agoA good part of their customer base (i.e., the advertisers) are not okay with explicit content, for a variety of reasons. Fear of their brand being associated with sex, puritan principles (their own or those of their customers), or just plain convinced that advertisements don't have the same impact when the content it is served with is arousing. That is to say, the corporations don't care, and will grant you a scant allowance of nipples only in imagery of breastfeeding and classical paintings if and when enough high-profile people complain about it vocally to warrant some leniency.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoConsider this yet another example why advertising is a cancer on society. (I'm gonna start collecting these in a list.) Creators want to do it, their users want to get it, but because it rubs the ad revenue charts the wrong way, the platform will not allow it.
- pmlnr 8y ago> Fear of their brand being associated with sex I'll never understand this. They won't. This is some US bsht, somebody somewhere came up with this thought and people just blindly applying it like it was true.
- pjc50 8y agoIt's interesting to compare this with how much pressure you have to put on advertisers to get them to dissociate from far-right content. Seemingly brands are happy to appear alongside articles demanding that refugees be murdered at sea.
- village-idiot 8y ago
- buboard 8y agoI can't imagine how harsh it is to take down the entire app because of this. Adsense will also sometimes find sexually suggestive CGI stuff in our website (they re good with virtual nipples!), but they will allow you to appeal and fix it. Tying your entire livelihood in their walled garden has gotten dangerous.
- laser 8y agoThe suppression of the viewing of the human body in its natural form, especially in art, is one of the deepest perversions of society. It seems so intrinsically tied to the suppression and control of pleasure by institutions seeking dominance over human life. When you control access to the natural pleasures of life, you have control over the motivations and operations of that life. In prior times, when religions were the most powerful rulers of society, taboo ensured obedience to a system that enabled the powerful to rule, while as we so frequently see- violating the taboos beyond reason in far more perverse ways than unrestrained impulse motivates. Now that corporations have so strongly supplanted religion in the ruling of society, the suppression has moved from a place of religious principle, to one of purely pragmatic continuance of the dogma that maintains the status quo. Because why should Google have any philosophical position about the progression of society at all? It has under the conditions of the status quo become dominant, and so perhaps believes that its best interest lies in passively supporting the current system, no matter how fundamentally perverse it may be. But, this is a mistake. I know that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as half of Google, run around naked in the Nevada desert every year, enjoying the beauty and freedom of the human body. So, to command the most powerful corporation in the world, and to know that our natural liberty is better than upholding millennia of repression, yet maintain it for a convenient profit without controversy, is if not evil, at least extraordinarily cowardly. If we want to transition from a society of repression and suffering to one of liberation and bliss, there are fewer more fundamental places to start than in the acceptance of our own natural bodies and the pleasurable practices in which they engage.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoI don't think sex is particularly messianic, but I also don't see why censoring and policing nominally adult content should be Google's business - literally or metaphorically. This is just one example from a growing list of questionable moral behaviour and outright abuse of monopoly power. The political reality is that Google has serious trust and credibility issues on many fronts. The more this kind of thing happens, the more likely they are to turn into antitrust issues.
- Fnoord 8y ago
- RedPandaTronics 8y agoThey are crazy at Google. They banned my game TrumpTweetTrumps, because they said it was pornographic. It contained a mini-game called 'Make Ivanka Come', the objective of that mini game was to ring a bell and make Ivanka come to the desk, so her father can get his daughters advise on making policy. Just a comment on the nepotism seen in the current US government, nothing pornographic. Apple are even worse though, they censored like half of the game's content on the AppStore, including an actual tweet from Trump. A tweet he sent out on an app he downloaded from the AppStore, i.e. Twitter. And that is accessible through an app promoted in their AppStore, i.e. Twitter. Grab-a-pussy mini-game was also banned and many more, I think on AppStore like half of the 8 mini-games in the App had to be removed or completely changed. I could go on complaining about this forever, but I can't be asked to type it all up again, there's so many messages being sent back and forth between me and Apple employees on their stupid resolution centre. To sum up, fk Google and Apple, your thoughtless policies are not applied consistently (basically if you profit from an app, anything is allowed for that app) and they have a bad impact on society as a whole. Satire can have powerful impacts on people and drive them to do good things. Satire is essential!
- thinkingemote 8y agoLet's hope that this story reaches someone at that company who can actually do something about it, as it seems as if the organization has grown so large that only a few higher managers can affect things.
- pmlnr 8y agoIn the Tumblr ban threads, people mentioned that all of these companies should simply make their progressive web apps and give the finger to the puritan idiots calling these decisions. I agree. The questions, however, are: how much growth can be achieved without play store/ios app? Is it viable? If yes, how? Can art be more important for a site (and it's investors), than immediate, quick growth?
- brian-armstrong 8y agoI don't think they'll want to, if they're ad supported. Adblockers don't run on native apps, and in general apps have better access to relevant ad sell info. A lot of ad supported companies are giving up on the web.
- krn 8y agoI take this as the best explanation why Reddit is pushing its app so hard, even though it has a one of the most visited websites in the world. It's not about user engagement with content. It's about user engagement with ads.
- pjc50 8y agoIndeed. A lot of work has been put into degrading the mobile experience with banners and prompts and delays to force users onto the app. Sensible people use BaconReader, but I wonder how long that will be allowed to continue.
- dsamarin 8y agoSomething to note: Reddit is rated M and Instagram is rated T for teen. What was Artstation rated as?
- pmlnr 8y ago> Instagram is rated T for teen Because people in barely any clothing are never sexually suggestive? Ah, sorry, the word is gratifying.
- rayalez 8y agoSomewhat unrelated - ArtStation has a browser extension that randomly opens a random artwork every time you open a new tab, and I highly recommend it, it's one of my favorite extensions and a great way to see some stunning artworks, it always brightens my day. On topic - dumb decision, nothing new, not very surprising, waiting for PWAs to get to a point where arbitrary Apple/Google rules don't matter anymore.
- gpm 8y agoHmm, for some reason that extension doesn't exist for Firefox. And Mozilla's boneheaded policy of not allowing unsigned extensions, and apparently continuously breaking an addon that tried to automate signing extensions [0] means there is no easy way to install the chrome one. [0] https://github.com/Noitidart/Chrome-Store-Foxified/issues/122 https://github.com/Noitidart/Chrome-Store-Foxified/issues/12...
- Tempest1981 8y agoThe extension sounds cool. Have you found it SFW?
- rayalez 8y agoAbout as SFW as the front page of ArtStation, which is, in my opinion, very. Though who knows, I guess you might see an occasional elf boob or something.
- therealdrag0 8y agoGreat idea! Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/artstation-discover/ghkbedmkakkdhfkhchadmkhlflnafocm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/artstation-discove...
- scoot_718 8y agoThey better take down every camera app and internet browser app.
- qwertay 8y agoI can picture a future android release scanning the galleries on phones and deleting photos that violate Googles ToS.
- pjc50 8y agoI can see this being driven by some combination of moral panic over teen sexting and FOSTA. Or the creepy version: photo app "oversight" that automatically notifies someone else (parent, abusive controlling partner) if nudity is detected in a camera photo.
- ccnafr 8y agoThey're making a good point about the comparison to the Reddit app. Their app is harmless.
- Lectem 8y agoLooks like ArtStation didn't bribe Google like the rest of the big apps like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter... I'm surprised people forget that Google now IS evil and corrupt, and are just squashing "small" companies in favor of buying or destroying them
- KMag 8y agoI didn't downvote you, but I think with better tone and a bit more detail, you could have made a well-received comment out of this thought.
- Waterluvian 8y agoI love that they call out Google's BS. Especially the AI that simply doesn't work.
- balibebas 8y agoLet's get that F-Droid version open sourced and published, fast. And let this be a lesson to the sheeple never to put all your tissue in a box near your bed.
- Abishek_Muthian 8y ago>Google’s Vision API doesn’t even flag one of the images as violating We have used AWS's Rekognition API for moderation in our dating platform for over 200,000 images per month. As far as nudity detection is concerned; Rekognition performs optimally. I tested it against the Hell Girl image by TB Choi & it detects the nudity[1] & also detects the weapons under general Object/scene detection[2]. But I would warn against using Rekognition for anything related to gender as it is very biased and would behave indifferently towards people with colored skin. I have raised concerns about the bias in the Rekognition data set with AWS team & also other media outlets have covered it at length. With that being said, I feel sad that we are in a state where such beautiful art should be moderated where as applications exploiting children are being given a free run. [1]:https://imgur.com/a/FyJ5V56 https://imgur.com/a/FyJ5V56 [2]:https://imgur.com/a/LlfS7wO https://imgur.com/a/LlfS7wO
- ashleyn 8y agoI advise Google stop pissing off both conservatives and liberals, or antitrust action will rain down pretty easily.
- nottorp 8y agoHmm looks to me that besides Google spying on us, it's even more dangerous that the only two platforms for mobile apps are censored by people with Disney morals. Or American puritan morals, whatever you call them. There are tons of people now whose only internet device is a censored cell phone... looks like we need a third option that is not based in the US.
- amelius 8y agoHN title should contain NSFW tag.
- ilrwbwrkhv 8y agolol... the article is lost on you isn't it?
- amelius 8y agoBut what do you see when you type "sexy naked woman" into Google Image Search?
- maxhedrome 8y agoDon’t be evil, we have decided some art is evil, so we have removed it so you don’t have the temptation to be evil. -Google
- fencepost 8y agoThis seems like it could be applied to any app designed to display user-generated content on a single site or family of sites, obviously including Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. since I'm pretty sure it's possible to find nudity on any of those just with some casual browsing. Should also probably be applied to Messenger, Hangouts, Skype, Duo, WhatsApp, etc. since I'm pretty sure there's nudity and sexual content on those as well, and you can likely find it pretty easily. For that matter, I'm pretty sure I can find explicitly sexual content in Chrome running on Android. Has Google considered what a potential disaster this could be for them? Perhaps they should remove Chrome and other general-purpose web browsing apps, or define what it is that makes those applications different from the ones they do ban. On a different note, can this be applied to reverse some annoying things? Does Reddit allow access to "adult" areas in the mobile app and if not do they play the annoying "wouldn't you like to use the app instead" in those areas on mobile browsers? Can you bypass that by marking your subreddit as "adult" if you don't have a significant volume of under-18 readers? Edit: "Google Android: Like AOL, but with less porn! And we have Candy Crush!"
- therealdrag0 8y agoThere's a pretty obvious separation though between public and private media apps. I doubt private chat apps will get heat like this.
- fencepost 8y agoI've never used WhatsApp so I'm not sure how public vs private it is, but apparently it has a child porn problem: https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/whatsapp-pornography/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/whatsapp-pornography/ (also see many results for "whatsapp child porn" with different variations of related info). Would that be one of those private chat apps?
- Lazare 8y agoThere is a uniquely annoying feeling you get when you see someone powerful being utterly obtuse and wrong in a way that is damaging to others, but can't readily be challenged. Everything about this story is just so fundamentally wrongheaded. They're enforcing a deeply misguided policy in a way which is both inconsistent and unfair, yet also inept. There's just so much wrong here, it's hard to even know where to start. They're looking for stuff they shouldn't, in the wrong places, and doing a horrible job of it. There's no reason they should be cracking down on the scourge of random cartoon nipples, but even if there were, they should give content providers who are making good faith efforts to flag content the benefit of the doubt, which clearly they did not for ArtStation. Meanwhile they're incorrectly flagging content, but even worse, they're not applying this policy to, you know, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram or, you know, Google themselves. Even if we needed to protect people from occasional nudity (and again, we don't), this isn't even achieving that. It's like deciding you need to do something drastic to prevent yourself from starving, so you set your couch on fire, while having a fridge full of food. It's all downside; it makes the world a worse place, helps no one, and Google will pay (effectively) no penalty for it. Merry Christmas to us all.
- abvdasker 8y agoWhen something can't be fixed directly I naturally tend to think about how it could have been avoided in the first place. > There is a uniquely annoying feeling you get when you see someone powerful being utterly obtuse and wrong in a way that is damaging to others, but can't readily be challenged. I think it comes back to the power structure in place. The enormous money machine that is Google has so few competitors that there is no incentive to treat its customers well. What is Teo going to do? They're already in the App Store. Their appeal was denied. The part of this that makes me angriest is that Artstation will now have to start paying Google to use their Vision API to implement the censorship requirements Google has imposed on them. My more conspiratorial instincts suggest that this is no more a coincidence than an old school protection racket would be a coincidence.
- odessacubbage 8y agoif there's any bright side to this, there's the hope that the more absurd, restrictive & clearly unfair google's actions become, the more incentive there will be for businesses to move away from these walled gardens entirely. users will only deal with so much inconvenience from centralized providers before they trade it for the inconvenience of uncensorable alternatives. for the free and open internet, this is probably the best thing in the long run.
- mattnewton 8y agoI think it’s messed up as a society that women’s bodies are more taboo than shooting people; people are more squeamish around cartoon pictures of breasts than cartoon pictures of people using rifles, and that’s scary to me. I think this is just google enforcing US cultural norms, but it would be great if there was some kind of US public framework companies could use instead of having to make these calls on their own. Disclosure: male google employee in an unrelated part of the company with no insider info. My opinions are my own.