Google has steadily been cutting down on adult-oriented material hosted on Blogger, its blogging platform, over the last few years. Previously, bloggers could freely post “images or videos that contain nudity or sexual activity,” albeit behind an warning screen that Blogger implemented in 2013.

Then, Blogger said “censoring this content is contrary to a service that bases itself on freedom of expression”, so bloggers rightly assumed that they would be free to continue to post adult content.



But in a huge U-turn, Google has changed its position and decided that as of 23 March, there will be no explicit material allowed on Blogger unless it offers “public benefit, for example in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts” – all which will be determined by Google. Quite how they will do that has not been made clear.

Anything else that does not fall into this category will be restricted to private-only viewing, where only people who have been invited by the blog’s creator will be able to see them; it won’t appear in search results.



This is like having a public library where all the shelves are empty and all the books imperceptible to readers, and authors are required to stand there in person, handing out copies of their work to those hoping to read it. What Google is doing, in reality, is making these blogs invisible. It effectively kills them off.



Some people might read this and think: “Well, Google just doesn’t want to host porn for free any more, that’s why it’s bringing in these restrictions, what’s wrong with that?” To some extent, they’d have a point, because other blog platforms are available and if a users’ sole intent is to make money, then they’re a business and should pay for hosting, not expect to get it for free.



But this new policy has more far-reaching and long-term implications than just censorship and a loss of profit for those posting explicit content, and here’s an example of why: it breaks the internet.



My own personal blog (no explicit images, but graphic descriptions of sex) has had more than 8m readers over 11 years of being hosted on Blogger. If I was forced to make it private and invitation-only, there is no conceivable way that I could contact every single one of those readers and send them a password link to access it.



When I joined Blogger in 2004, I did more than just sign up to publishing a sex blog, I joined a community of people: other erotic writers, non-erotic writers, sex educators, feminist porn-makers, memoirists, political activists, journalists, photographers, news-sharers, comedians, artists, comic creators and more. A disparate bunch of people joined together by one thing in common: we all posted stuff on the internet and then shared it.

This network – indeed the Internet itself – is made up of links. You find a link, click through, and expect to arrive at a page containing some form of content, whether that be text, images, video, or audio files. From its inception, blogging has been about people sharing links; indeed, one of the UK’s first well-known blogs back in 1999 was the link-sharing LinkMachineGo.



By forcing blogs – any blogs, regardless of their content – to become private, it means the link to that blog will no longer work: people clicking through without a password would arrive on a non-existent page. Thousands of other bloggers and websites may have shared that blog’s link over some years, and as a result of this policy change, that link would effectively be dead. In essence, what this means is that a long-standing, interactive, supportive community will be killed off overnight.



There is no justification for this. The fact that these blogs feature nudity (so?) is irrelevant. What Google are doing here goes against the very ethics of the web and their own motto, Don’t Be Evil.



Google itself has previously said: “Blogger increases the availability of information, encourages healthy debate, and makes possible new connections between people”, but this new policy completely undermines that and rather than forge connections, it is cutting them off.

Forcing millions of blogs to become private is not just a free-speech issue, or one about making adult content harder to find (Google’s own search tool makes that argument redundant), but boils down to Google sabotaging the integrity of the web – and how it functions – and it is for this reason that we need to oppose this narrow-minded and short-sighted policy.

