Child-smoking ban highlights Flickr's 'unwritten rules.'

I've seen a lot of strange, salacious and disturbing things on the Flickr photo-sharing site. So it seemed weird to me that such a kerfuffle would be started by a picture of a young boy smoking.

Here's a recent news report on a Dutch photographer's shot that was pulled from Flickr last year for violating "an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking."

Like many longtime Flickr users, I was surprised by this random enforcement of an unwritten rule. I tried to find the bit of legalese that's mentioned in the AP story, but it's not in the Flickr community guidelines. So I checked the Flickr terms of service. Not there either. In fact, it's in Yahoo's general terms of service, which I had to find via Google.

Aside from this byzantine maze of rules and regs, it's also baffling that Yahoo! would drop the hammer on such a singular case instead of being consistent and asking all users to remove photos of minors smoking.

In the end, of course, it's wrong to think of this as a free-speech case. Flickr is a private venue that can establish its own rules.

But it would be nice if you were told the rules before being accused of breaking them.

Big thanks to Marc at the Osocio blog for passing along this story.

Comments

[KB]

Flickr's not the only place with an odd and inconsistent sense of morality. When working on a freelance project for a regional whiskey manufacturer a few years ago I was surprised to discover that Google does not allow search ads for most forms of alcohol within the United States.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=guidelines.cs&topic=9271&subtopic=9279

But fear not, you can still advertise for the term 'butt plugs'

http://www.google.com/search?q=butt+plugs