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Vagina Museum

Today in The Struggle Of Existing As A Vagina Museum In The Digital World: Google have flagged a learning resource as "sexually explicit". As a small charity, we use Google Drive for many tasks, including hosting resources, as it's an affordable solution.

Screenshot of an email from Google:
Your file may violate Google Drive's Terms of Service
'1.jpg' contains content that may violate Google Drive's Sexually Explicit Material policy. Some features related to this file may have been restricted. If you think that this is an error and would like the Trust & Safety team to review this file, request a review below.
34 comments
Carolyn

@vagina_museum Could you zip files before uploading to help bypass this?

Triss (the t stands for tired)

@CStamp @vagina_museum iirc they do scan zips, unless they're really large. (also that's of little use when you need to embed it in a website)

Carolyn

@sys64738 @vagina_museum Thanks. Well, I hope you're able to talk to them and get a vagina exemption. I remember Dr. Jen Gunter and her publisher having a lot of problems promoting her Vagina Bible. Twitter allows penis, but vagina is a banning offence, or was at the time.

sonja dolinsek

@vagina_museum Leave Google, if you can. More materials might disappear

Diane 🕵

@sonjdol @vagina_museum

For what it's worth nextcloud is available in both self hosted and cloud hosted versions and can do a lot of what google drive & docs can do.

nextcloud.com/compare/

Vagina Museum

Here's the image in question, which Google thinks is sexually explicit.

It's the panel from a comic about the "discovery" of the clitoris by Anita Zaramella!

Three panels of a comic.

Panel 1: A picture of a white, bald, bearded man with long hair at the back. Although his hairstyle is old-fashioned, he is wearing sunglasses and smirking sassily. "Meet Realdo Colombo. In 1559, this Italian anatomist claimed to have discovered the clitoris! Then promptly died. For unrelated reasons."

Panel 2: Illustration of a frowning white woman pointing at a large floating vulva. Other hands surround the vulva, also pointing at it. Little emphasis lines highlight the clitoris. "We'll start by saying obviously Colombo didn't discover the clitoris. Anyone with one probably noticed it was there since it was right there."

Panel 3: Three people, one in ancient Greek dress, one in ancient Persian dress, and one in historic Arabic dress all scowl and point upwards at panel 2, in the direction of the vulva diagram. "It also wasn't like Colombo was the first anatomist to point out the clitoris - it was known about since antiquity among Greek, Persian and Arabic anatomists, on account of it being RIGHT THERE.
Lulu Helle :partyparrot:

@vagina_museum Google being a prude

Vagina Museum

We don't know whether Google has taken to using some utterly useless automated tools to detect "sexually explicit" content, or the image was maliciously reported - these are both struggles that we've had in the past. And once again, we wearily have to sigh "oh come ON" and request a manual review.

:manjaro: The Dweller of the Threshold

@vagina_museum that beard, and those sunglasses, together with that Italian family name, is smth utterly pornographic…

Vagina Museum

If your interest is piqued and you'd like to read the rest of the comic, you can find the other three pages over in our resources section, because Google hasn't taken *those* down. vaginamuseum.co.uk/learning/re

DELETED

@vagina_museum I once posted a link to a Guardian article on an American weight loss site and it was reported and deleted because there was a photo - taken from the side - of a naked woman in the article.

I was very irritated by this.

Giovanni

@vagina_museum you could also be more explicit and trustworthy than this.
it's been the admins or alleged equivalents, not the bots. There are evidences that if in at least 2015 you wrote any kind of phrase on the Mozilla search bar you'd have had unwanted and arbitrary feedbacks over the internet. Do you need someone to tell you what are we talking about?

Rachel Rawlings

@giovi69 @vagina_museum

Mansplaining to the vagina museum in a thread about censorship of the clitoris.

Achievement get! Blocked!

suldrew 🚲🏳️‍🌈

@vagina_museum TIL!

Andromeda Yelton

@vagina_museum “For unrelated reasons” 😂

(((o))) Acoustic Mirror

@vagina_museum "for unrelated reasons" 😂 😂 😂

Ellie

@vagina_museum I wonder whether $goog is upset about the text in the left frame more than the anatomy in the right frames.

Alexander The 1st

@vagina_museum Now I'm half wondering how much you need to Barbie Doll Anatomy it to have it not be flagged, because that's...not very distinctively the thing they're flagging.

Like, this is probably immature of me, but I can't help thinking they'd flag a Magatama from Ace Attorney ( aceattorney.fandom.com/wiki/Ma ) placed against skin tone.

(Also, I thought Colombo was Columbus, and had to double take on the panel.)

nafri :gaming_heart:

@vagina_museum it’s crazy how Google just looking at people’s stuff

cassowarypolitics

@vagina_museum I mean, Google funds anti-abortion lawmakers, so this isn't surprising to me. Hopefully this is corrected, but honestly I don't trust them either way.

Adrian

@vagina_museum I suggest you avoid Google entirely. Their services are replaceable at similar (sometimes no) cost by other providers. Regarding a replacement for Google Drive, have a look at this list:
websiterating.com/cloud-storag
To which I would add Proton Drive:
proton.me/drive/free

Kinetix
@vagina_museum
I guess that depends on your definition of 'affordable'. Think you could find someone to donate you a nextcloud instance?
lj·rk

@vagina_museum Hey, would you accept help with migrating off of Google to some servers run by activist volunteers? E.g., from
riseup.net/en/security/resourc

There are a lot of collectives who'd probably be willing to help <3

DELETED

@vagina_museum leave google drive and make your own server. Find a way more trustworthy file sharing service if necessary.

Steffen Christensen

@vagina_museum We should point out this is partly Congress's fault, not exclusively Google's. While Google was censorious and anti-sex before, they went into overdrive due after the Senate passed FOSTA/SESTA in 2018. That's when sex workers started losing their content on Google Drive.

engadget.com/2019-01-31-sex-ce

Syd 🔜 GodotCon

@vagina_museum we should really set you up a nextcloud instance. I just won't be able to guarrantee you a long running one.

Erotic Mythology (hire me) 💖

@vagina_museum Leave Google. There are several European options that won't report you to authorities for sending a photo of your sick child to the doctor (yes, this happened).

@protonmail (Swiss) and @ViOffice (German) are two options I can think of right now but there are many more.

Hraban (fiëé visuëlle)

@AimeeMaroux @vagina_museum
For cloud services, just use a cheap hosted service instead of data krakens.
e.g. hetzner.com/storage/storage-sh
(Sorry for advertising, but that’s the best option I found for myself.)

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