Fame Day: #SafeSearchWrapUp

Alright, so this week’s Fame Day is going to be short, sweet, and, as you’ve probably noticed, late. I unintentionally got behind work last night, and then this morning I had a pseudo-interview. Anyway, the point is that cartoon porn should be kept under wraps.

Really rough segues aside, Bronies Against BullShit is responsible for today’s subject. To be perfectly fair, they’re worthy of a good amount of praise in general, if only because the tumblr exists as “a platform for the brony fandom to call out, critique, support, and analyze itself in a constructive and mature manner.” Places like that need to exist all over the internet, because introspection is a sorely needed quantity around here.

The page, which I’m going to shorten to BAB, and those behind it are the ones who came up with #SafeSearchWrapUp.

 
If you’ve been using an image search engine for any short amount of time I can basically guarantee that you’ve come across something that could be categorized as Rule 34. In essence:

“Generally accepted internet rule that states that pornography or sexually related material exists for any conceivable subject.”

Pornographic imagery of children’s cartoons falls very firmly under this banner. It’s also painfully easy to find. Not too long ago I was searching for that last image of Long John Silver from Disney’s Treasure Planet and had the severe misfortune of stumbling across several compromising drawings of him and young Jim Hawkins. I will not be embedding any such pictures here.

The general idea behind this movement, if I can call it that, is as follows:

“#SafeSearchWrapUp is heavily community driven effort to help make the SafeSearch features on image-search engines such as GoogleImages, Bing, or Youtube be free of NSFW content. Every cartoon from “Avatar: The Last Airbender” to “Young Justice” contains fan made pornographic works referred to as Rule-34. Rule-34 is a catch all term denoting porn of ANYTHING and EVERYTHING, cartoon or not. However searching up images of any animated series will likely turn up these images, even on the first few pages.”

And before people start grabbing nearby 7-Up bottles to make Molotov cocktails [a terrible idea, by the way, since you want glass and not plastic for that] and crying “CENSORSHIP!” I think everyone needs to calm down and let them finish explaining:

“As the teen and adult fans of the show, we have to be considerate of the younger target audience. A lot of parents and their children may be looking up images of their favorite characters to print out and put on their wall or such. As a community we can make image searching safer for the young ones and their parents. No shutting down or deleting things from existence, simply keeping it off SafeSearch as a courtesy for others.”

Which is great. It’s all great. If people want to find cartoon pornography I it is well within their rights to do so, and they can look up “█████ and ██████ ████ing each others’ ███████” and gaze away to their hearts’ content. What’s important is that those of us who don’t want those images burned into our brains be spared that experience.

Again, there’s always going to be porn on the internet and that’s how it’ll stay, for better or for worse. Given this effort all that’s going to change is how easy it is to get at it using image searches. Typing in that extra word isn’t going to hurt anyone.

Having this activity taking place twice every month, on the 7th and 20th, ensures consistent management even if only a few dozen take part. With 32,273 notes on the original post at the time of this writing I think that’s a good minimum. If one one-thousandth of people who liked/reblogged it participate that should be enough.

Art by deviantART user isitlunchyet.

Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable are straight-up some of my favourite characters in fiction, and I have absolutely no problem seeing fanart like that on the right when I peruse Google Images. I can think back to even just a year ago when putting their names together into the search bar would yield images that “raunchy” would be embarrassed to be associated with.

So good job, everyone who participates and supports #SafeSearchWrapUp. You’re doing a good thing.