Monday, August 5, 2019

pinterest cracks down mercilessly...

I recently wrote about Pinterest threatening to remove one of my boards. They deleted one yesterday and sent an infuriating email- it claims that the board contained many pictures that violated sexual and pornographic policy.
Let me tell you why this irritates me so much. First of all, Pinterest doesn’t allow such imagery and if you try to search for it, it doesn’t exist or at least it doesn’t provide search results. Second, the board that was deleted was a secret board with 10k pins of a wide array of topics and categories ranging from anime to zoology. Sure I had pretty girls, both drawn and real life, but they weren’t engaging in sexual acts or depicting penetration or displaying sexual fluids. I also had wild animals, space images, flowers, gems and minerals, cooking, pets, cg art, illustrations and designs, cocktails and more. Whenever Pinterest becomes aware of questionable content, they remove the pin from all boards and notify users. This time they went too far!
This time they deleted an entire board that was definitely not entirely questionable. This board had 10k pins and in the time since they last wrote vaguely stating that they MAY REMOVE ONE OF my boards I have been coming through it attempting to save what I could that mattered most to me. This has not been sufficient time to review every single pin, considering the sheer quantity. Even if I had nothing else to do during this time, but I do since I am also my mother’s caretaker and I have various chores and things to do otherwise, too. Another problem is trying to keep the board at the same place because over time it likes to periodically refresh and take me back to the top of the board or to the main page, which is extremely counter productive and means frequently trying to relocate where I was in he middle of my board, not to mention that it has trouble loading pins further on down the board and sometimes freezes or crashes. These obstacles are frustrating and hinder my efforts.
The email I received yesterday especially infuriated me because I had to discover first hand that my board was missing before I went coming through my emails. My mother uses Pinterest and frequently sends pins to me that she thinks I would enjoy or find useful. I had to tell her that almost everything she sent me was just deleted by Pinterest because most of what she sent me was in the secret board that they just deleted because of objectionable content. Not every pin of the 10k pins that I saved could have possibly been questionable, yet they just saw fit to delete the entire board rather than the individual pins. I am livid! The email said I could appeal this action, so I click the link and it thanks me for my appeal- I didn’t get to say anything and I don’t consider that I was allowed to make an appeal. That that action did was flag them to look again because I disagreed- hardly an appeal.
I can tell you this: I will not make a new board on Pinterest. I most likely will not search for images that once appealed to me. And I am not sure I want to use pinterest any further. I may even further protest and boycott Pinterest because I have concluded from personal experience that they are frighteningly unreliable. Even if they restore my board, which I doubt they will even though I want it back, they have done enough damage that I have little to no faith that they won’t do this again. I have even warned my mother that her boards may just as easily be at risk for excuses like copyright. She actually has public boards, organized and carefully compiled. She spent a lot of time on them as a labor of love and I know she would be hurt if her efforts were unceremoniously deleted without a second thought like mine were.