My personal opinion differs somewhat from my professional one. As a librarian, I don’t want to censor anyone’s information–you can do what you want in your stream as long as you’re within the laws of whatever country you occupy–but as a mother and woman, I personally don’t want to be confronted with what I consider porn while using flickr.

My profile states that I block people whose content I find offensive and that my decisions are totally arbitrary. My grandmother and daughter both enjoy looking at photos on flickr, and due to flickr’s very nature, it’s up to me to keep them from running across what *I* judge to be questionable content for both of them by blocking people who have porn in their streams *or in their favorites.* This goes a step beyond the perhaps obvious blocking for stream content, but I have felt it necessary: on more than one occasion, someone has added one of my photos to their favorites, and so I click to view them all, only to see my precious little girl’s face next to somebody’s hoo-hah. Yeah, yeah, block block block. The world keeps turning.

Do you recommend the contact as a resource? If not, then there is nothing stopping you from blocking them. You are not keeping people from reading that resource, you are keeping your organization from appearing to condone the resource. Two totally different things. There are certain things we do not allow on our bulletin boards, there are certain things we do not buy for our collections, and there are many things we ask folks to stop viewing because they are inappropriate in a public space.

And frankly, it’s SPAM. You wouldn’t let spam hang on your blog comments, why would you on your Flickr account?

I do not think it is censorship. You are a single government web site removing a single link. You are not suppressing the material there nor anywhere else. It is still freely available and the government is not suppressing it.

Further, government resources are to be used for certain purposes. I’ll bet providing access to such material is not one of those purposes. There may even be a law that may be violated by providing such access.

Let’s think more. Often such web sites containing such material are loaded with computer spyware and viruses that will expose the user to serious concerns of information theft and other serious vandalism. Government computers should not be exposed to such dangers voluntarily. Indeed various countries have developed branches of the military devoted to infiltrating our government computers. Preventing access to potentially harmful web sites from a computer security point of view cannot possibly be considered censorship.

I just do not see this as censorship.

• I think that definitely it is censorship. So someone who enjoys images which you do not enjoy or condone as an organization isn’t allowed to also enjoy images which you present to the audience enough to mark them as a favorite? That doesn’t seem right to me.

• Anyone who has a flickr account makes the decision, as did the viewer of the link initially, to choose to view the stream which is clearly labeled as outside of your safe search restrictons. Anyone without a Flickr account isn’t able to see the images anyway. Therefore, if you are an aware Flickr user who has your safe search restrictions set, wouldn’t the impulse be to click ‘no’ when presented a stream which is outside of those? And if you click yes even though the stream is clearly marked outside of your safe search filter, isn’t it then on you that you saw images which you do not condone or enjoy?

If presented with the option of limiting what you see to only images which you are comfortable with or approve of, and the user clearly has their images marked appropriately, and the likelihood of someone who would be insulted by this user’s images very low due to Flickr settings and safe search filters, why then take the extra step of blocking someone who enjoys your content?

This year has brought the advent of a lot of features on Flickr which allow each user to surf within their comfort range, so as long as users are appropriately marking their content, I don’t understand the issue. Now, if the user hadn’t had a stream prefaced by the ‘outside of safe search filter’ warning, the response would make more (not total, but more) sense to me.