As of May 15th, image sharing platform Imgur will be purging its site of all not-safe-for-work and anonymously posted content. As part of the site’s new terms of service agreement, Imgur’s definition of “not safe for work” is concerningly broad: it will be removing not only every upload deemed to be pornography or sexually explicit content, but all depictions of nudity (no matter how artistic or educational they are in nature) as well.
Imgur was created in 2009, and has remained one of the most popular image hosting sites on the internet for decades. Its 300 million active users access content on the platform over 60 billion times per month. Compared to other image hosting sites of the early 2000s, such as Photobucket, Imgur has a reputation for being a place to host niche, originally created works, including memes, personal artwork, image macros, fan art, and yes, highly specific porn and fetish content that caters to small yet passionate communities.
Until 2016, the only way to share images on Reddit was by passing them through Imgur first. If you didn’t already have an Imgur account when you were making a Reddit post, you mostly likely uploaded it without bothering to create one, so your image files were posted anonymously. But Imgur is now mass-deleting all images that can’t be linked to an existing account. This means that the vast majority of image posts on Reddit that predate 2016 will be completely broken after Imgur’s new terms of service are adopted. That’s not just posts with pornography or nude photographs that are getting removed, which would be a sizeable data loss itself, but nearly eleven years worth of digital history.
The impact this mass deletion will have can’t be overstated. Reddit has been a crucial hub of information sharing, social networking, and documentation for approaching twenty years now. Over 1.6 billion individual people have made their mark on the site in one way or another — sharing their home renovation projects, posting tattered photographs of long-dead relatives and asking for assistance in getting them restored, pooling together genealogical records, showing off their latest power-washing job, demonstrating how to construct leather harnesses, exchanging theories about their continuity of their favorite German science fiction epics, and far more.
Many of these in-depth Reddit posts are absolutely reliant upon images. And every single one of them that came before 2016 can potentially be ruined following the Imgur purge. Even many posts that were made after 2016 will be destroyed as well, because many Reddit users who upload images to Imgur never create official accounts.
Whenever sexual content is driven from social media, there is little in the way of public mourning. If anything, there is a tepid acknowledgement of the harm that will befall sex workers, alongside outright celebration that at last these sites will be scrubbed of the most unseemly and dangerous sides of human nature, and at last rendered “safe.” But condemning future generations of queer and kinky people to ignorance and loneliness is not saving them. And exposing someone to sexual content too early in life is not the only form of sexual harm. Denying a person a chance at self-recognition can be equally traumatic, and violent.
Those of us who do decry the sanitization and Disney-Worldification of the internet are frequently likened to predators who wish to expose our bodies and proclivities to children. Our mere existence as adult sexual beings with adult bodies is deemed a threat. Paradoxically, we are also mocked for taking the removal of erotic art so seriously. Porn is somehow viewed in our culture as both frivolously pointless, and profoundly terrifying.
But in reality, sex is not dangerous. And sex is not frivolous. It’s a rapturous, inevitable, and an essential force in human life. Sex isn’t for everyone, but it is one of the most precious ways to experience inhabiting a body, and refusing to acknowledge the existence of sex makes it impossible to fully appreciate human history, identity, or any form of art.
Sex’s removal from public discourse and digital record keeping is a hateful, genocidal destruction of one of the most precious aspects of the human experience. We are right to mourn for it. And we are right to fear what comes next, after our bodies are rendered unviewable and our dreams unspeakable.
