A Question Of Morality

I suppose, given the amount of time I spend on Flickr, that sooner or later I would find something I thought was distasteful. I remember being added as a contact (and I think I still am) for a guy who used Photoshop to create pictures of women with more or less than their natural amount of limbs. It was a very disturbing portfolio and one I haven't gone back to look at since.

But yesterday I was made a contact by a used on Flickr who had a group of even more nauseating photos. When I receive a contact email on Flickr, I normally check out the photos of the person adding me. If their portfolio is genuine, interesting or even if its just full of family shots, I'll add them back. If there's no pictures in there, then I won't.

This contact request came from a guy whose profile identified him as American, divorced and 32 years of age. As usual I took a look at his pictures.

There's no doubt in my mind that when faced with child pornography, my reaction would be one of utter disgust. And that's not far off what I felt when hitting the first page of these photos. These pictures weren't nude or sexual active photos, but there were of young female girls, aged around their early teens in what could be described as provocative positions and outfits.

So just to repeat, no nudity, no sexual activity, but with a clear message behind the pictures.

So what do you do?

Flickr is an open-deposit for millions and millions of photos from around the world. Anywhere between 2000 and 3000 photos are uploaded every minute. There is no way that the administration of the site can monitor every photo uploaded, so the public using Flickr has to become self-policing.

Which is the option I chose, and wrote to Flickr alerting them of the account in question, blocked his contact and made sure he couldn't contact me. Flickr sent me a note this morning thanking me for alerting them, but it was a standard email so I wouldn't know whether they have done anything about his account, and I certainly don't want to go back and check.