Mourning Porn on Imgur, Mourning Trans & Kinky History

Porn isn’t frivolous or dangerous. It’s essential to understanding art, history, and human liberation.

Porn is art is history. A Greek tondo from approximately 480 BC, depicting two men having sex. Image courtesy of Wikimedia commons.

As of May 15th, image sharing platform Imgur will be purging its site of all not-safe-for-work and anonymously posted content. As part of the site’s new terms of service agreement, Imgur’s definition of “not safe for work” is concerningly broad: it will be removing not only every upload deemed to be pornography or sexually explicit content, but all depictions of nudity (no matter how artistic or educational they are in nature) as well.

Imgur was created in 2009, and has remained one of the most popular image hosting sites on the internet for decades. Its 300 million active users access content on the platform over 60 billion times per month. Compared to other image hosting sites of the early 2000s, such as Photobucket, Imgur has a reputation for being a place to host niche, originally created works, including memes, personal artwork, image macros, fan art, and yes, highly specific porn and fetish content that caters to small yet passionate communities.

Until 2016, the only way to share images on Reddit was by passing them through Imgur first. If you didn’t already have an Imgur account when you were making a Reddit post, you mostly likely uploaded it without bothering to create one, so your image files were posted anonymously. But Imgur is now mass-deleting all images that can’t be linked to an existing account. This means that the vast majority of image posts on Reddit that predate 2016 will be completely broken after Imgur’s new terms of service are adopted. That’s not just posts with pornography or nude photographs that are getting removed, which would be a sizeable data loss itself, but nearly eleven years worth of digital history.

The impact this mass deletion will have can’t be overstated. Reddit has been a crucial hub of information sharing, social networking, and documentation for approaching twenty years now. Over 1.6 billion individual people have made their mark on the site in one way or another — sharing their home renovation projects, posting tattered photographs of long-dead relatives and asking for assistance in getting them restored, pooling together genealogical records…