Google Reverses Ban On Blogger Porn

(RTTNews) - Search giant Google, Inc. (GOOG, GOOGL) has reversed its decision to ban sexually explicit adult content on its blog-publishing service Blogger. A post by the Blogger team said, "So rather than implement this change, we've decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn."

Google was forced to change its new policy decision after it received tons of feedback on the retroactive effect of the change as some of the bloggers have had accounts for more than a decade.

The feedbacks also revealed concerns of bloggers about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities.

Google said it has now decided to tweak the old policy itself by adding better enforcement around the existing policy of prohibiting the display of sexual content that is for the sole purpose of commercialization.

"Blog owners should continue to mark any blogs containing sexually explicit content as "adult" so that they can be placed behind an "adult content" warning page. Bloggers whose content is consistent with this and other policies do not need to make any changes to their blogs," the Blogger team wrote in its post on the company's product forums.

The move comes just three days after Google changed its current adult content policy on Blogger that allowed nudity and sexual explicit materials as long as the blog is marked "adult." Google imposed a blanket ban and made it clear then that it will not allow sexually explicit materials on Blogger.

Google told its Blogger users on February 23 that they would not be able to publicly share images and video that are sexually explicit or show graphic nudity on Blogger starting March 23, 2015.

Google had asked existing Bloggers to either remove sexually explicit or graphic nude materials from their blog or make it private. Otherwise, Google warned blogs that contain porn "will be made private" after March 23.

Meanwhile, Google said it still allows nudity if the content offers a substantial public benefit, for example in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts.