Google has decided to drop its plan of banning porn on Blogger after users bombarded the idea with major criticisms.
The search engine giant announced three days ago that it would block pornographic materials from its blogging service beginning March 23. The move is part of the company's plan to shift Blogger to support artistic, educational, and scientific contents only. Blogs of users who would not comply with the new rule would be set to private or shut down.
"We've had a ton of feedback, in particular about the introduction of a retroactive change (some people have had accounts for 10+ years), but also about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities. So rather than implement this change, we've decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn," the company wrote on a product forum on Friday.
Now that bloggers are still free to post porn contents on the site, Google is requiring users to mark them as "adult" so that it would be displayed only in the said category.
"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," the company added.
Google clarified that it did not originally intend to crack down on porn content, but rather screen it from people who are not comfortable seeing such content.
