Personally I don't feel strongly one way or another about the shutdown of creepshots and jailbait, but come on.
"We're not going to shut down distasteful subreddits, except the ones we already did! But no more! Honest!"
I guess I'll believe it when I see it. Reddit has no shortage of content that is just one viral blog post away from a PR shitstorm. This newfound (and if I may say, a bit late) respect for expression will be challenged sooner rather than later.
(I'm asking seriously, expecting to learn something about the situation from your response, not to make a point.)
Right now we all have the same expectation of privacy - that is we have none if in public, and none if its a digitally distributed photo. That expectation does not shift based on one's age.
What if the non-consenting minor is Miley Cyrus? What if a compromising photo of police brutality has a kid in the background - can they force a take-down of my photo? Off the deep end, but I'm just pointing out that we are on a level playing field, and it's likely for the better.
We obviously make many concessions to our rights to protect children, but this is not one of them. E.g., as an adult male, I can't eat my sandwich in some NY parks unless I'm accompanied by a child. I just hope the children are grateful for my sacrifice ...
I do have substantial problems with the content of creepshots and jailbait, but I cannot divine a scheme to separate such content that wouldn't trample over other content I think is legitimate. In all the scenarios I've run in my head, the cure is always worse than the disease.
I can identify legitimate content that is not at all clearly separable from the contents of creepshots (less so jailbait), and this leads me to believe that not only would attempts to eradicate this sort of content lead to suppression of existing, legitimate expression, but also prevent the emergence of new, as of yet non-existent forms of legitimate expression.
That's all very vague and hand-wavy, so what follows will be some specifics. For the sake of clarity I'm going to assume you know nothing about photography as an art form - if you do, well, we'll be covering some familiar ground. I apologize if this is overly verbose or stream-of-consciousness, there's a lot of ground to cover:
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My other main thing outside of creating software is photography - particularly street photography, a genre with a long and colorful history, featuring some of the most well-known photographers of all time (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Elliot Erwitt, Daido Moriyama, etc).
In a nutshell (and with some simplification), street photography is the candid capture of life as it happens. Feel free to Google any of the above names for an example of what I'm talking about.
It is wide celebrated, and may be the next-oldest form of photography after landscapes. Well known examples of street photography hang in the MoMA, Met, Louvre, and beyond. Most "mainstream" street photography is rather mild and inoffensive, but some of it is controversial in its content and the means by which it's obtained.
See for example Bruce Gilden, one of the most prolific contemporary street photographers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc1RrQXidlY
Many photographers despise his methodology, but the results are widely acknowledged to be very good. There is a never-ending ethical battle in the photographic community about the acceptability of it, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that this is legitimate expression.
There are some uncomfortable parallels between creepshots and street photography:
- The subject is frequently unaware. Candidness, after all.
- It is intentionally a (hopefully mild) breach of the subject's privacy. Someone's relaxing in a hammock, someone reading a book, two people conversing in a bar. Nothing that would constitute a legal breach of privacy, but perhaps a colloquial expectation of being unwatched while in public.
- Is is distributed widely mostly without the subject's consent or control. There are celebrated works hanging in the MoMA where the subjects are still unaware they've been photographed.
So, we can't use these criteria to filter creepshots-like content, or we wipe out 100 years of street photography (or be hypocrites), and even a large portion of paintings.
So what are the differences between street photography and creepshots-like content?
Deliberate sexualization of the subjects? Some street photography does this, particularly contemporary street that explores some of the more uncommon themes not seen in classical (pre-60s) street photography.
It's exploitative? Much of photography is also exploitative. See for example the famous Migrant Mother picture, an iconic image of the Great Depression: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson
The children in the image later were extremely offended at perceived exploitation of their image. They were after all, incapable of consenting to the picture - and even if they did they certainly had no say in how it has been displayed and distributed. So sexualization or not, exploitation is both subjective and a poor place to draw the line.
So we've sort of exhausted ourselves here: unaware subjects, breach of social mores re: privacy in public spaces, consent, sexualization of subject, and potential/existing exploitation - all of which are inappropriate places to draw the line as they will all ban substantial existing legitimate content. Not to mention as of yet non-existent content along these lines.
So at the core of it, there does not appear to be an objective measure by which we can identify and eliminate content of creepshots' nature, not without hugely overstepping and eliminating work that both art aficionados and lay appreciators have agreed to be hugely worthwhile and relevant.
The only workable scheme appears to be "we will know bad content when we see it", which I suppose has been Reddit's MO thus far: allow it until enough of a stink is raised, but in general I highly dislike moral stances based around "well, we'll just know". Soft descriptors like "pervy", "creepy", etc, are also unreliable - especially when amateur attempts at street photography frequently (and unintentionally) come across as such.
So yeah, that's why I don't advocate for the banning of this sort of content on Reddit, even though I strongly dislike it. If anything, I may dislike this content more than most, since it makes my future work as a street photographer harder - this is every attractive woman's suspicious nightmare come to life, and content like this means I will face an uphill battle in the future doing my thing.
Hopefully this rambling mess makes some kind of sense.
[edit] Also I have no other aliases on HN ;)
Photography isn't my issue (but bullying, that does get my attention), but my work depends on other privileges that are routinely abused by others.
Thank you, by the way, for writing all this.
But what can you do about it? When I first started shooting street I didn't seek permission from anyone else either, and I'm quite certain I've come off as "the creep with the camera" in my hapless beginner stumbling. We don't have the right to restrict the privileges we need, and even if we had the right we'd have no idea how to implement such a restriction.
Hell, I probably still do. In fact, I know I still do on occasion.
As for privacy - street photography requires at least a little bit of instinctive amorality. Personally - and I've heard other photographers describe the same phenomenon - you train yourself to compose it and shoot it before the other side of your brain kicks in and says "but wait...".
Faster than the speed of your moral compass? :P
I curate very hard, both for my own sake as well as the subjects. Photography is a craft where it's very easy to make untoward implications merely by composing craftily. I scrub all results to make sure crafty composition never comes off negatively on the subject - unless the negative aspect existed as I shot the picture. A man angrily screaming at a police officer? I'll take that. A shot where it looks like someone is eyeing a woman's ass but isn't really? Nope.
I also retain copyright on all street photographs. I do not release any street photographs under any CC licenses - I trust my own judgment on where and how to show these photographs, but not others. It's something of a symbolic gesture though - once a JPEG is in the wild your control over it is limited at best.
The last part is no homeless pictures ever. There's a huge train of thought behind this one for the sake of brevity I won't expand on.