Earlier this week, the company announced that Google blogs, which have “blogger” or “blogspot” in their URLs, would have to clean up their act. All graphic images and videos would have to be removed from historic posts, or the blog would be removed from public view and become available by invitation only.
Well, you can guess how well that one went down. Many people had been blogging for years, and faced trawling through thousands of posts to comply. Others, for whom adult content was the entire point, faced trying to invite thousands of subscribers one by one or lose their audience.
Not surprisingly, many users decided that it would be a lot easier - albeit still extremely annoying - to switch to Tumblr and its more liberal policies instead.
Now Google's made a swift about-turn.
"We’ve had a ton of feedback, in particular about the introduction of a retroactive change (some people have had accounts for 10+ years), but also about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities," writes social product support manager Jessica Pelegio on the Blogger product forum.
"So rather than implement this change, we’ve decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn."
This policy was introduced last summer, and prohibits bloggers from monetizing adult content through advertising - very different from banning it altogether, and perfectly reasonable: why should commercial porn sites get hosting for free?
We have to assume that Google wasn't expecting such an outcry about the total porn ban, which seems a little odd. After all, the company's previous policy on the matter was to say: "It is our belief that censoring this content is contrary to a service that bases itself on freedom of expression." The new rules marked quite a change - and, given that adult blogs are already labeled as such, it must have known how many people would be affected.
I suspect the key words in Pelegio's note are "individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities". Blogs affected by the ban would have included many dealing with LGBT issues, sex education and the like - and these would have become unfindable by the people that need them most. The company's saved itself some really bad PR.
