Google has taken a massive U-turn over banning porn on Blogger

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Flickr/japharl Google has reversed its decision to impose a blanket ban on adult content on Blogger. Earlier this week Google announced plans to change its content policy on Blogger. In a statement posted online, the company said that from March 23 this year users "won't be able to publicly share images and video that are sexually explicit or show graphic nudity."

But Google has changed its mind, Engadget reports.

Google came under fire from some bloggers over the proposed measures. The move could even have seen a mass exodus from the platform. That meant Google had to take the negative responses into account.

Jessica Pelegio, social product support manager at Google told Engadget:

This week, we announced a change to Blogger's porn policy. 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. 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.

Google told users of its blogging platform that existing sites that feature explicit material would be made private — so they wouldn't have shown up in public searches. It would have meant that private content would have only been available to view by the owner, admins, or the people they share their page(s) with. But Pelegio's statement to Engadget shows that Google is making a U-turn, and porn won't be banned after all.

Nudity would have been allowed if "content offers a substantial public benefit, for example in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts," Google explained. But instead of the concrete, blanket ban, Google said it will instead crack down even harder on publishing explicit material intended for commercial gain. The company banned this from Blogger in 2013.

Despite Google's U-turn, other mainstream hosting platforms have been cutting down on explicit material. Video-sharing app Vine recently changed its policy to hide pornographic and sexual footage. It did so in March last year, the Verge reports.

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