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Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

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Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#111

Post by PurpleRamen »

paxys wrote: post #6

"I keep all my work on Google/Apple/Dropbox/Office" is really the new version of "I kept all my work on my hard drive and didn't back it up". All of these companies have shown repeatedly that they will cut off your access with no notice for any or no reason and with no recourse. Cloud backups used to be a smart thing to do. Now they are a liability.

> All of these companies have shown repeatedly that they will cut off your access with no notice for any or no reason and with no recourse.

The average user isn't aware of this. This kind of stories usually do not emerge in mainstream, or user-exclusive spaces.

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#112

Post by vsnf »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #86
vsnf wrote: post #49

Something related I’ve been wondering about is the change in language catalyzed by social media companies and their morality / fear of advertisers. You see it especially in TikTok videos. When people aren’t straight up censoring themselves with bleeps, dead audio, or cuts, they use euphemisms instead: kill -> unalive, rape -> grape, sex -> seggs. Even more concerning is that what is considered in need of censoring is…

Part of it is feared censoring / demotion in the algorithms; part is hypersensitivity / hyperconsiderate, because some people have indicated they are triggered by certain words, and I'm guessing another part is maximising reach. That is, if you use explicit language, your content may be marked as 12, 16, 18+ content, and half your engagement may drop because people in comment sections seriously underestimate how much…

Yes, those are the the proximate causes. I'm worried about the effect these causes will induce going forward. With enough time, this expanded hypersensitivity will move out of TikTok and into wider culture permanently.

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#113

Post by nickelpro »

margana wrote: post #104
danpalmer wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributing sexually explicit material is subject to many tricky laws around the world. It's illegal in some places, requires age restrictions in others. It's reasonable for any hosting provider to say they are not going to get involved in that legal quagmire.

It is also reasonable for any client to say they are not going to involve themselves with a platform that will freeze their account and cause them to lose data because some faulty heuristic triggered and the company is not even willing to manually review things (even though they sometimes falsely claim they do review things when they didn't).

Yes, both things are reasonable, neither makes the other untrue.

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#114

Post by mrtksn »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #107
mrtksn wrote: post #91

Wow, the state of freedom of speech is probably worse than the soviets ATM, since during the soviet times the speech scanning tech was primitive and the thought control was rudimentary and blunt. Back in the old school totalitarian days at least your writings were banned after they were written. Even 10 years ago it was fine, the worst was about blocking keywords and making printers refuse to print images of money. W…

I'm not sure why you think getting your account blocked is equatable to being sent to the gulags.

You are unsure because you are making both a strawman argument and historical inaccuracy.

You don't go straight to gulags most of the time. Most of the time the officer screams at you and takes your books and notes your name.

I also don't claim that this is the same as being sent to a gulag. This is just suppression of speech and mind control.

It's going to be so much fun when those in power lose power to those they hate. Then they will be introduced to the value of privacy and freedom of speech.

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#115

Post by wredue »

Aerroon wrote: post #50
inetknght wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unshare it and copy to another platform, e.g. directly on discord, for sharing Ahh you think Discord has better policies? You might want to rethink that.

Ironically, I think the users are partly to blame for that. They were definitely complaining about some of the stuff that was on discord and discord then stepped up their enforcement of everything.

I mean. For a time, I couldn’t use discord for game parties cause 99% of the time, it was just man-children yelling n-bombs.

I can very much see why people might’ve wanted some clean up.

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#116

Post by buescher »

kome wrote: post #54

americans-try-not-to-be-puritanical-and-impose-their-bigotted-moral-standards-on the-rest-of-the-world-by-the-means-of-their-techno-feudalist-corporation's challange: impossible.

It's weird and paradoxical isn't it? I have no idea what this lady was writing, but smutty romance novels and horror novels with weird sex scenes have been sufficiently acceptable to "community standards" all over the US to have been available in grocery stores at least as early as the seventies. Not so frequently seen anymore, but that's a death-of-brick-and-mortar-and-print-media problem. You could leave one on your desk at work without a visit from HR (just don't leave it open to a spicy page or read aloud from it). But share similar material from your google drive? I don't know! I really don't.

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#117

Post by ghodith »

polski-g wrote: post #46
giantg2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Cloud backups used to be a smart thing to do. Now they are a liability." If they're actually a backup they can be a good idea. If it's a single source, then yeah, it's asking for trouble. I even backup my GitHub stuff locally because who knows what could happen.

Never forget: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118

It's a little unsettling to see so many people argueing that mass corporate censorship is desirable, especially back in 2015.

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#118

Post by dotnet00 »

Aerroon wrote: post #50
inetknght wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unshare it and copy to another platform, e.g. directly on discord, for sharing Ahh you think Discord has better policies? You might want to rethink that.

Ironically, I think the users are partly to blame for that. They were definitely complaining about some of the stuff that was on discord and discord then stepped up their enforcement of everything.

It was less the users, and more hitpieces from censor-happy journalists.

Kind of forces your hand when journalists are digging up relatively obscure discord "servers" with edgy jokes and racism, or trying to get 'activist' discords they disagree with banned, or finding leaked military documents and framing them all as Discord's fault.

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#119

Post by rsynnott »

aqme28 wrote: post #89
nickelpro wrote: post #62

Misleading title, none of the authors involved are claiming they're locked out of the accounts. The exact quote from the OP's mastadon is "An author lost access to her explicit writing when she shared it with alpha and beta readers." Google says you may not use its services to distribute sexually explicit content. This is a very common and reasonable policy. The authors violated that rule, and while none of them are…

I understand the idea behind banning sexually explicit writing, but that basically means that large large percentage of literature cannot use Google services. Anyone writing a novel basically shouldn’t use docs in case they might someday want to include sex in their writing.

Or, presumably, Office 365 (does Office still have a pure-offline mode?). What's an aspirant writer of Naughty Literature to do? Or, as you say, really any writer who might at some point add a sex scene, which is fairly common.

Re: Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

#120

Post by danpalmer »

margana wrote: post #104
danpalmer wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributing sexually explicit material is subject to many tricky laws around the world. It's illegal in some places, requires age restrictions in others. It's reasonable for any hosting provider to say they are not going to get involved in that legal quagmire.

It is also reasonable for any client to say they are not going to involve themselves with a platform that will freeze their account and cause them to lose data because some faulty heuristic triggered and the company is not even willing to manually review things (even though they sometimes falsely claim they do review things when they didn't).

That's reasonable, but a non-sequitur here surely. The author's account is not suspended, they have not lost data, and any heuristics were clearly correct in that they were publishing sexually explicit material.
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