Photo courtesy of Maarten Dors
Did you know Flickr can choose to delete images it deems inappropriate or not in keeping with their “brand”?
An interesting article by AP writer Anick Jesdanun explores the constraints some service providers willingly impose on their sites. One Flickr member found this out when his photo of a Romanian street kid smoking a cigarette was deleted on “grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking.”
Maarten Dors, the photographer said, “I never thought of it as a photo of a smoking kid. It was just of a kid in Romania and how his life is. You can never make a serious documentary if you always have to think about what Flickr will delete.”
The law though is on Flickr owner Yahoo’s side. It’s totally within a content provider’s rights to police its own content, and, Jesdanun writes, their goal is to “protect their brands and foster safe, enjoyable communities – ones where minors may be roaming.”
Pornography is another issue altogether, but a kid smoking? It’s a reality in many parts of the world — why whitewash it? Ultimately Yahoo agreed with that; after a review Yahoo acknowledged their comunity managers may have been overzealous and Dors’ photo was allowed back on the site.
Article from the AP via Wired.com.
boywithgrenade.org 
This is a dangerous policy; whilst there is obviously subject matter that should be relegated to the darker recesses of the internet, supression of legitimate documentary photography is supression of the truth, and that’s something we expect only from extremist regimes. Documentary photography has, from the dawn of photography itself, been relied on to tell difficult truths, whether the effects of napalm in Vietnam or a smoking Romanian kid. To censor such images is to attempt to warp the truth to suit commercial ideals.