Rachel Kramer Bussel Banned from Flickr and Vimeo
by Amelia G : July 22nd, 2008
Rachel Kramer Bussel has a new collection of stories out. This Cleis Press anthology is called Spanked: Red-Cheeked Erotica. Rachel is an extremely accomplished anthologist of erotica and a vocal enthusiast of spanking.
Although Rachel’s books sell well in their category and she generally has a couple of them charting on Amazon, she hoped to increase her visibility and sell more copies of Spanked. So she commissioned an outfit called What That Noise Productions to make her a book promo video. She posted the video to a number of sites and Vimeo and Flickr both removed it. Although the subject matter is a bit naughty perhaps, there is no nudity or anything like that in the video. At the time of this writing, Vimeo had simply responded to her queries by telling her she violated their terms of service. Flickr had not responded at all.
I know, from personal experience, that Flickr seems capricious at best. There is some truly terrible photography on Flickr, of some extremely explicit material, posted purely to promote quite pornographic sites. I spent a lot of time browsing Flickr before making Blue Blood profiles on there. I was very careful to precisely conform to the way other regular posters placed their photographs on Flickr. The BlueBlood.com profile quickly grew to have more than three thousand friends. Flickr sent a warning, but they refused to clarify what exactly Blue Blood was doing that wasn’t fitting with the Flickr community standards. Eventually, after failing to answer multiple emails from us, Flickr deleted the entire BlueBlood.com account, despite the fact that clearly thousands of Flickr members liked what Blue Blood was posting there just fine.
When someone polices unevenly, it is always difficult to discern the reasons for sure. I don’t know if Flickr . . .
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