Medium updates rules to suppress harassment and revenge porn

Medium is the latest blogging platform to start curbing content.

Medium has updated its rules to prevent bloggers publishing revenge porn, sensitive personal information about another individual, or posts that publicly shame. Medium already had a policy in place against posts containing threats of violence, bullying, and hateful slurs. Here are a few illustrations of additional behavior the company will no longer tolerate:

• Posts that shame specific individuals, including images or altered images

• Posts with altered or unaltered copies of private communications posted without the explicit consent of a party to the communication

• Posts with non-public, personal information intended to target, blackmail, or harass people

• Repeated personally insulting notes, responses, story requests, or writer requests

• Intimate or explicit images taken or posted without the subject’s explicit consent (including revenge porn)

Medium joins a growing list of companies that are trying to prevent bullying on their social platforms. Earlier this year, Twitter announced changes to its rules in order to suppress revenge porn tweets. More recently, Reddit’s new CEO Steve Huffman detailed the ways in which Reddit posts would soon be limited to restrain threats of violence, revenge porn, and other harmful content.

For a long time Internet forums have been regarded as bastions of free speech. Unfortunately, that freedom has allowed certain individuals and online communities to promote hateful ideas, encourage violence, and engage in harassment. What’s worse, social platforms by and large haven’t taken steps to quell these kinds of posts — until now.

As Reddit, Twitter, Medium, and others grow they’ll need to attract a wider audience to increase ad sales. To do that, they’re likely to make site content more palatable to a broader spectrum of people by imposing rules (or else hide the most unsettling posts, as Reddit’s Huffman suggested). Of course, there is a tension here between reducing abusive behavior and preserving freedom of expression. While implementing more stringent rules for content will undoubtedly make the masses feel more comfortable, it may also spark outrage among those devoted to the ideology of free speech.