Image-hosting website Imgur has announced sweeping changes that will remove explicit and pornographic content from its platform.
The update to the site’s Terms of Service will take effect on May 15, and will see the company remove huge amounts of images through a combination of human and automated moderation.
Nudity, pornography, and sexually explicit content will be removed, as will old or inactive uploads that are not tied to an Imgur user account.
“We understand that these changes may be disruptive to Imgurians who have used Imgur to store their images and artwork,” Imgur said in an update to users. “These changes are an important step in Imgur’s continued efforts to remain a safe and fun space on the internet.”
Imgur is well-known to users of forum sites, especially Reddit, who use it to host images and link to them as part of discussions. These include porn-sharing communities, but links could also be to memes, screenshots, or any other type of image.
It is the latest change likely to impact Reddit’s users, coming just days after the site changed its design to make a separate feed for videos, in a move that looks to mimic the success of TikTok and other short-form videos.
While Imgur will still permit artistic nudity, it conceded that it was still calibrating its automated detection software and that some previously allowed content may be caught up in the moderation.
Imgur urged users to download or save any images they wish to keep if they do not adhere to the new Terms of Service.
In 2019, Imgur made the content uploaded by Reddit’s NSFW (not safe for work) communities less easy to find on its site, leaving it accessible at the original URL but hidden for anyone browsing Imgur itself.
The site’s latest move, which takes the policy one step further by removing all of the sexually explicit content, puts the platform as a whole in line with the community guidelines that had already banned explicit imagery from public posts.
The Evening Standard has contacted representatives for Imgur and Reddit for comment.
The change echoes the infamous 2018 porn purge executed by blogging website Tumblr. That change prompted significant backlash from Tumblr’s user base and its number of active users have declined since then. In December of last year, the site softened its stance to allow nudity but not explicit sex.
The issue of how much or how little nudity should be permitted has long caused a headache for social-media sites.
Meta has faced criticism for years regarding its inconsistent stance on the appearance of nipples on its sites Instagram and Facebook. Campaigners said it represented a double standard between men and women, while suppressing the rights of breast cancer survivors to share their experiences.
In January, the company’s board argued for an end to the ban on bare breasts after two posts by a transgender and non-binary couple were censored.
