Thomas Hawk has news of a bizarre decision from Yahoo! over at Flickr regarding the theft of Rebekkas work
So what’s got me pissed today? What’s got me pissed today is that according to Rebekka, Flickr has removed her image from their site. That’s right. Not only did they remove and kill her image and her *non-violent* words of protest, but they censored each and every one of us who commented on her photograph, who offered support to Rebekka, who shared in her frustration by wiping every single one of our comments off the face of the internet forever.
According to Rebekka, Flickr’s explanation?
“Flickr is not a venue for to you harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. If we receive a valid complaint about your conduct, we will send you a warning or
terminate your account.”WTF?!?
So a flickr photographer gets ripped off. Dares to complain about it. Has an outpouring of support on the internet over it and Yahoo decides censorship is the way to handle this? This is the worst I’ve seen from Yahoo yet.
Many of us worried when Yahoo! took over Flickr. It seems some of those worries might be well founded.
Popular photographers like Thomas and Rebekka are people who built Flickr into the community it is (yes community, not just a picture hosting site). Even if they were not known at all, Yahoo! should be helping them not silencing them. To pour injustice on injustice is …. well, regardless of right and wrong, it’s bad for business.
3 Comments
As Honou said, one of the flickr co-founders has apologized over the incident. His post about it is here:
http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/40074/page3/#reply213196
It was a mistake to delete the photo and Flickr has apologized to Rebekka for that already. According to what I’ve read from Flickr admins, action was taken because of the inflammatory and harassing comments that were made by other people towards the accused party. Like it or not, Flickr has to police the community and take action when harassment is reported and verified; no matter what the cause or who it affects.
A better course of action might have been to delete the offending comments and lock the photo from discussion, perhaps, if Rebekka or other Flickr admins couldn’t keep up with removing abusive speech from the thread but what’s done is done. There can be no community when the mob mentality takes over like that.
It’s good that they have apologised but simple curtesy would have required they speak to her *first*