Blogger to end nudity

When I wrote about Charlie Hebdo and freedom of expression (above), I little thought that Google was about to withdraw that very privilege from us on their territory, but that is what they have now announced. 

 

From March 23 explicit nudity and sexual imagery will be banned on Blogger. 

(announcement text)

I can't say I was totally surprised by the announcement, Blogs are completely open to public view and Google's tolerance and defence of of explicit porn over the years has amazed me. However, the writing was on the wall when they started excluding it from search engine results. This storm has been brewing for some time, helped along by irrational feminists, resurgent religious enthusiasts of all flavours and anti-Western extremists who will chortle with glee at this sign of our Society taking up the typical defensive posture of banning everything deemed to be subversive.

The good news is that mitchmen will not disappear! 

Sometime after March 23rd, this blog will become 'private' 

unless I remove the explicit imagery. 

That would mean you would effectively have to join a membership to see it.

Even then I would still only be able to add vanilla content

HOWEVER

• My gateway blog  http://mitchmen2.blogspot.co.uk/ is not affected as I take care to keep it vanilla. It will always signpost you to my work.
• Likewise, if 'mitchmen2' goes down the drain, my domain name http://mitchmen.com will continue directing you to wherever I am
• My Yahoo! Group where I publish most of my own work is also unaffected by this announcement.

If you want to keep in touch with mitchmen, 

make a note of these addresses!

I am still considering my options for continuing the blog. 

These include going vanilla here (a big job of retrospective editing, but it would preserve my search engine rating and public 'face') 

or switching to another platform like tumblr (although, in the hands of Yahoo!, I fear may it go the same way before long). 

A third alternative is reverting to membership format which I suspect will become the new reality before too long. 

Comments and suggestions welcome.

 

Watch this space for announcements.

Meanwhile make a note of the fall-back route for finding me.