Maybe censorship is too strong a word here. The Adult Content label is more of a bothersome extra step to prevent supposedly sensitive eyes from viewing supposedly sensitive content. The "sensitive content" remains viewable on the Bluesky social media site.
I saw and photographed a Patrick Nagel piece at a Heritage Auctions Manhattan preview of the Illustration Art sale last week and subsequently posted it:
Patrick Nagel's illustration on canvas of Tracy Vaccaro in a polka dot dress or wrap is certainly sexy and, I'll even grant, somewhat erotic—it has indisputable partial nudity. So is it adult content? To Bluesky, yes. I personally don't think it would cause harm to innocent minds.
Google, to be sure, certainly has given me no pushback over my posts here on Blogger over these past fifteen years. From each of my blog posts, I go on to create content for a number of social media sites. On X, a post of mine may represent some of the tamer content these days. Pinterest, when the site censors me, eliminates the posts it consider objectionable entirely. That hasn't happened there for the Nagel, at least not yet. Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Tumblr, and Mastodon have pretty much left me to do as I please. The same for Counter Social, which I have avoided using for technical reasons. It is Bluesky that places a warning label on some of my more risque content but does not delete it. That is what the site did here, almost immediately after I posted the Nagel, no doubt via bot.
Clicking on the label leads to the big reveal:
The Adult Content label's wording "Does not include nudity" confuses me a bit. I assume it is chiefly the nudity that makes this Adult Content.
Here it is, the same post, now labeled on Bluesky as "Sexually Suggestive" and, again, "Does not include nudity."
Bluesky allowed me to appeal the Sexually Suggestive label, which I did as a matter of course.
My appeal consisted of just two words. I don't consider artistic nudity to be automatically adult content. But then, it isn't my app.
Is this a contradiction? How did the image change from "Sexually Suggestive" to "Non-sexual?" Did the labels change with my appeal?
Apparently, they did. Artistic nudes are classified as "non-sexual" on the site. That's not strictly correct either but, hey, it's Bluesky's playground.
The Bluesky post in question may be seen here.
But, wait! No sooner did my appeal get heard than the process started over with my Bluesky post of Ronald Searle's City Bird which was on the blog Wednesday of this week.
So here we go again . . .
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