The fear of litigation, takedown notices, and web server shutdowns are what keeps this going. Another major issue is the willingness to sit there and accept while prudes everywhere opine that "sex is dirty", "sex is bad", "think of the children" and people just accept it. Sex is not dirty or bad, and childproofing the world at the expense of adults destroys art, culture, and happiness. Getting offended never did kill anyone; if you don't like it, don't look.

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Frank Zappa was so right about censorship. Do some research and you´ll see why.

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Any software which looks for specific words to censor email or web sites will fail.

Would the "Breast" example quoted have censored a recipe for chicken breast? Would the words "Cock" or "Ass" censor articles about farming? Would "Pussy" censor communication among cat lovers?

This stuff is both petty and insane.

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Susie, I agree with most of your baseline views in this article. But you're missing at least part of the story. The electronics involved in monitoring NSFW are only as smart as we've made them. I'm sure that when AOL blocked "breast" that they had no intention of interrupting the breast cancer awareness discussion. The problem is that the softwares only understand "breast" and not the context.

I run a large network. It happens to be a U.S. government-owned network. We use spam filters for email, content filters for internet surfing, and firewalls to prevent malicious attacks. I have run into many situations where our machines have been less than flexible.

Consider the case of an email user on our network with the last name "Dyke"...a woman no less. When she came aboard and was set up with an account, she quickly found that she couldn't send or receive email because the spam filter grabbed all of her mail. That was as embarrasssing for me as it was for her. We quickly remedied the situation.

Removing the spam filter is not an option, however. Current statistics show 50% of the incoming email traffic is spam and therefore is blocked. Removing that spam filter would flood my users' inbox with ads for offshore drug offers, phishing scams, money scams, and other types of email traffic that, in some cases, would be harmful to the network. So we live with our filter. We "tune" it to the best of our ability.

On internet surf content filtering, I wonder how you would feel about members of my entity, who are paid with our tax dollars, spending hours and days surfing pornographic or hate-mongering sites. That is exactly the situation we had before instituting the filter. Yes, I set policies on our filter that block most of these sites, whether it is Playboy.com or some racist or gang-related site. Unfortunately, that means it would probably also block sites that would be considered legitimate.

With internet traffic we also have the issue of limited bandwidth availability. We have a certain amount of work-related traffic that must take place to get the work of the organization completed. Before we instituted filtering, we were often critically short of bandwidth for that function because we had huge amounts of non-work related traffic. So now we filter the traffic. We also force our users to use their work email rather than gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail or otherwise. The alternative is to ask for more $ (your tax dollars) to provide more bandwidth, so that our users can waste that $ surfing non-work related, and many times pornographic, racist or other sites.

So we filter traffic. Unfortunately, that means yet another piece of gear that we have to "tune". And that means choices about what to block and what to let pass. We rarely block specific sites. Instead we block categories. But like all of life, some things are not easily categorized. Some things get blocked that probably shouldn't be blocked. And some things pass that should be blocked. But we certainly aren't in the business of playing "nanny".

There is the phenomenon of legitimate sites that happen to be hosted on networks that also host sites that originate malicious code. If your blog happens to be hosted on a network that also has someone else hosted who produces harmful virus or spyware, then you will find that we block that network. It isn't because we don't like your site or your politics (even if that happens to be true). We must protect this network from attacks that might shut it down. Its the price of doing our business.

I could go on about the nuances of managing the types of traffic on a network. Sometimes it means using a bulldozer where a shovel would suffice. My point is that you shouldn't assume that blocks to your blog (and those like it that straddle the "prudish" line) are due to nannyism.

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Being a retired person unaware of the lastest workplace happenings, I googled “NSFW” and learned substantially nothing about the tag’s administration.

Who sets the standards? Who decides what words or links deserve NSFW identification?

Apparently the same people who voted George W. into office.

Hugh E. Scott, editor of King-George.biz -- the only website with irrefutable, hardcopy proof of White House corruption.

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Normally I agree with Ms. Bright even when I disagree with her. This time, however, I agree with her (the NSFW tag does come across, from a certain perspective, as silly) but I disagree with her.

If Ms. Bright is talking about tagging posts in blogs with the text "NSFW" then that isn't censorship at all, not in any rational definition of censorship.

Instead the "NSFW" is a courtesy, letting someone know (as the link text and URL may be ambiguous) that they may get in trouble at work if they have the link open in a browser window.

It seems really odd that I would have to explain that, by the way.

And yes, I would expect the New Yorker, Vogue and Vanity Fair articles to all be flagged as NSFW, certainly I've seen similar posts on metafilter flagged that way. So I'm not sure the whole class argument works for me.

There are many, many workplaces were having a "NSFW" website open in your browser window will mean some kind of disciplinary action -- all the way up to being fired. You may disagree with that, but that doesn't change the fact that the NSFW tag serves a useful purpose for many people.

The same thing would apply to magazines or books being brought into the workplace, by the way. Although for reasons I would think would be obvious, we aren't tagging physical books with "NSFW" on the Internet. So I don't buy into the "Internet getto" argument.

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I recently heard an unattributed quote, that without preaching a sermon I submit for readers' consideration.

Sex without God is pornography,
God without sex is puritanism.

Robert Chapman
Lansing, NY

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The "W" in NSFW seems to imply that the "workplace" is an environment where all must be defended against impropriety and loss of efficiency.

Bear in mind that someone having certain sites on his computer could be construed as creating a hostile work environment if passers-by (and many cubicles are set up with low, if any, walls and with the screen facing the hallways, etc.) are offended by anything explicit.

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I subscribed for awhile to a site that sent vegetarian recipes once a week. Once they had an unusual apology. They explained there had been trouble with profanity filters blocking a previous week's recipe, because it included the phrase "Prick the squash..."

They sent it again with a space: P rick the squash.

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On page C2 of today's New York Times Business Day, you will find a pretty stupid example of censorship by the largest paper in the US. You will see an advertisement for a business book by Robert Sutton entitled, "The No [BLANK] Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't." The book's real title is "The No Asshole Rule", which doesn't fit within the motto, "All the news that's fit to print" for this champion of the first amendment. Yet this book is a national bestseller on the Times's extended list that they will not even print in their Sunday Book Review Section. One can see the list, although without the offending "Asshole" on the Times's website. I wish we could find out who the assholes are who are censoring so much in our culture.

DD
New York

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Your post only proves the need to free the internet and abolish filters based on words in a database. Images are another story. But why suppress free speech to such an extent that accepted speech is also interupted?

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The overwhelming majority of American workers are not allowed to use the internet for personal use, period, there is no such thing as “Safe for Work”.

Keep in mind that just because a company’s software lets you reach a website like the New York Times doesn’t mean you are allowed to be reading the news while you are working.

In fact I would be very surprised if any large employers in this country allow, as a matter of policy, their employees to surf the internet for non-job related things on company time. I am sure there are bosses that look the other way but that is different.

Of course unlike some previous posters are suggesting this has nothing to do with potential lawsuits but with productivity. Most employers take the position that you are paid to work not read the news, be it the newspaper, a newspapers website or Alternet.

The only reason porn and sites with certain words are filtered out is because they can be. There is no way for software to filter out all non-work related sites, like most news sites. Though I am sure as soon as someone figures out how to do it companies will start.

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NSFW was a total breakthrough at my place of employment. In the old no HR department dot com days, the tech boys would pass around bizarre nineteen fifties mysognist jokes, spend four to eight hours a day clicking on the "am I hot" web pages, men would make leering jokes when they went to women's cubicles, etc. The environment that created was not sex positive, it wasn't the Santa Cruz faculty it was a poisonous atmosphere, where the best qualified women applicants were routinely passed over, where women were laid off first, and the only women hired were in subservient admin positions.

Then it got corporate, and they couldn't do that shit any longer. Suddenly there are women and people of color on my work team. It's better. If they sent around those emails they'd get their ass shitcanned. This is a substantial improvement.

In actual practice I usually have something up on my screen that involves a political aspect of sexuality, and that is not a problem. But it's true, I've traded looking at pictures of dominent women and naked men on my work time, in exchange for not having stupid het porn starting me in the face all the time. It's a good trade.

And even if in some magical world, you could take a world of corporate tech men and make them into people truly tolerant and celebratory of sexual diversity, is that exactly what I want from work? Work almost by definition is a place you have to go hang out with people you don't have much in common with. I mean, I'm a curmudgeonly member of a small sexual minority (bi, sm sub to women), and I'm unlikely to find other people's sex positivity positive to me, nor viceversa. Why should I? Sex can be open, but still be esoteric, not a good thing for the commons.

One of the few ways porn restrictions in my workplace impact me is instructive. I'm a moderator on an SM site, and because it's plastered with porny pictures I can't moderate or post at work. This is a lot of my social-sexual-political community. But... I'm more pissed off at the admins of this site, who think it's necessary for me to see a fake dominatrix dressed in latex in order to have, say conversations about relationships or politics that have to do with sex with actual dommes. In actual practice, at work, I can expect to be generally respected despite my sexual orientation, that they all know about, and if woman hating slips into the discourse I can call them on it. In the world of latex dommes I'm not allowed to see at work, I'd guess half of posts are men attacking women, top men spewing mysogynist trash against dommes, usually.

All power to NSFW, its reach needs to go further, for the sake of sexual freedom, hot kink action, and being able to get through the work day without irritation.

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As I said before in almost all workplaces employees are NOT allowed to use the internet for personal use.

In the real world where most men and women work and live, getting a personal email from someone at work will get you fired, regardless if it contains the word breast or not, even if it is to inform you of a family illness. Personal IMing at work about sex, (gay, straight, or other) or anything else will get you fired. Spending 10% of your work day doing anything other than working will get you fired.

In large areas of the south in this country women and men form unions just to enforce their right to go to the bathroom on company time. I am going to repeat that, because I think it needs repeating. In large areas of the south in this country men and women form unions just to enforce their right to go to the bathroom on company time.

I recently sat a grievance where management tried to argue that a single occurrence of a worker misusing 23 seconds of company time was fraud, and this is in a union workplace. Another grievance is pending because a member went to the employee lounge on 5 min of company time because he needed to take medication and the medication required he eat something with it. They docked him an hours pay.

While all this is going on some people here are bitching about internet use on company time. If you are ever forced to get a job in the real world you are in for a rude awakening.

I am a liberal, a progressive, a union member, and a union steward. I lobby elected officials at all levels of government on behalf of workers rights. Even with this background, I have to say this is one of the few times that I can't sympathize with the "workers’" position on this one.

The more I think about it the more I am convinced that complaints like this one only reinforce, in the mind of the average working class American, the "ivory tower liberal" label the right throws around all the time.

I would even go so far as to say that complaints like this actually hurt the average worker by making it easier for employers to ignore or dismiss legitimate complaints.

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