Purge the Urge: Google Crackdowns

It's an American Election Year, and you know what that means! Enjoyers of Culture can go fuck themselves, and not in the fun way! Censorship Crackdowns are coming down hard on the big platforms once again. Gumroad, for example, has already axed all their erotic content overnight, and Patreon and Amazon are doing another big push to suppress adult content.

Today, though, I've heard through the grapevine that erotica authors using Google Docs to share their content with beta readers are suddenly getting their accounts locked down and their files erased, due to Google deciding to update and actually bother to enforce some new policies in regards to the sharing of explicit content, as well as extreme violence content, regardless of the medium. Pictures, writing, spreadsheets, whatever.

So far, this seems to mainly apply to Google's "office suite" of programs, such as Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Drive. So far, it is explicitly ruling against using these services to share content, even with just a handful of people, however, it can apparently be overlooked in the case of just using them for personal storage.

Where this effects me in this regard is that I have been using Google Drive to host my comic, game, video, and audio files. I'm not sure how many people were relying on my Drive to get such content, so I am sorry for anyone this inconveniences, but as a precaution, I have already deleted the content in my GDrive.

Now, most of the content will still be accessible. All of the Comics are still hosted here on my Caption Blog in full. The recent Animations are still hosted here in full. Unfortunately, you will just have to settle for the lower-quality versions. I'm sorry about that, but there are hard limits to file size for Blogspot to host things, and I don't know of any adult website where I could post the better quality files without behind-the-scenes problems occurring. My Games are still hosted on Itch.io.

So what we're mainly losing here is the Audio stuff, including story readings, script readings, and the commentary I made for my games. Unfortunately, Blogspot does not host audio files themselves, so if I want to use my blogs to host directly, I'll have to convert them to some kind of video format, probably. However, I will probably just hold off for now, just because I want to see how this all unfolds. There is a chance there might be another huge push back that resets things, and I can put stuff back on GDrive again. Unfortunately, at this point, I just don't trust any file hosting service to not be getting scoured for explicit content right now.

UPDATE: Having slept on it and talked with a few people, there is also a high chance this will turn out to be a false alarm, of sorts. It's quite likely the people who's accounts were banned were actually flagged for "particularly objectionable content", if you catch my meaning, and are now painting this as an attack on authors to obfuscate the situation. Just as likely, the people who got flagged might have been false-flagged by bots or a reader misreading the content, and will get their data back with an appeal. Also as likely, this is all legit, but Google's just going to push their rules in the short term as a PR stunt, and then go back to not caring.

The truth is, we never know the real story behind these things, and can't always predict where things are going to fall in the aftermath. But the truth is, all of us adult content creators are operating within gaze-range of the Eye of Temael Sauron Big Tech, and Google, Meta, Amazon, Paypal, and the rest really could just go Scorched Earth on us at any time if they wanted to, so better safe than sorry.

I will wait it out for a bit to see how things unfold, and if it turns out to be a big scare that's a lot of hot air, I'll probably re-upload everything again.