Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

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What Virtual World Photographers Need to Know About Flickr’s New Policy Changes Around Nudity & Sexual Content

Virtual World SL Flickr policies

Longtime SL blogger Kess Crystal has a good run-down of Flickr's new rules around nudity and sexual content in images. While it's directed at the large Second Life community on Flickr, it applies to most any other virtual world which enables racy avatar images. Short version is, Flickr will no longer be free to anyone who uploads anything other than "Safe" images.

Trouble is, as Kess explains, that's never quite been clearly explained: 

The main issue many Second Life bloggers and photographers have is that that the rules have not been specific enough. For e.g. the description “like bare breasts and bottoms” is vague. What if the breasts have a semi sheer material or lace where if you look closely parts of a nipple can been seen? Most of us have chosen to err on the side of caution after seeing many of our community getting caught out by this rather subjective and vague rule.

Flickr is now withdrawing the option for a free account to use Flickr for anything other than safe photos. While that clarifies the issue for free users of the service it still leaves the difference between a safe, moderate or restricted photo vague for Pro users who can utilise those options.

I feel Kess' pain. New World Notes is regularly hit with notifications from Google, threatening to demonetize posts which  supposedly content nude avatar images, even though they're no more graphic than what you'd see on national television in the US.

In any case, it's looking like the best option for Flickr users is upgrade to a Pro subscriber account. Which brings me to this truly excellent video meme:

 

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Read the rest from Kess here, including her thoughts on whether Flickr is singling out the SL community. (Spoiler: No. Flickr is still the top-visited site in its category, and Second Life users are surely just a small/medium-sized group on the platform.)

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2 responses to “What Virtual World Photographers Need to Know About Flickr’s New Policy Changes Around Nudity & Sexual Content”

  1. Tess Avatar
    Tess

    Rule changes always stoke drama in SL users – but it happens in other online spaces too, where people forecast the end of life as we know it. Internet platforms that don’t grow rich on selling dredged personal data have to build ways of working (aka rules) in order to make money, and not give/do/allow everything for free.
    Myself, I’ve always avoided the trope of ‘sexy female robots’ for personal political reasons – just because it’s in a virtual world doesn’t divorce it from wider human attitudes. In many many years of photography and film in Second Life, I have only once shown my avatar naked, and you’d be hard pushed to notice it in the middle part of a video, heavily overlaid.
    In any case, the shape and appearance of avatars follows fashion trends – enormous hips one year, shiny skin another. So what really is the loss?
    But this article about the film, Ex Machinima, says a lot about my thoughts https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/15/ex-machina-sexy-female-robots-scifi-film-obsession.

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  2. Luther Weymann Avatar
    Luther Weymann

    I had 460+ product photos on Flickr, all vendor texture images of products. The only avatar pictures were of me fully dressed while in the product image. In the description of all 460+ photos, there were no links, no URLs, only the comment that my stores could be found under my name on the SL Marketplace and in Second Life. Flickr sent me a notice that referring to any location was in violation of their terms. I deleted all images then deleted my account, I just didn’t care to put any more work into Flickr.

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