I strongly suggest not to close the previous discussion too early and furthermore, also not to hide my theme.
In the meantime I got into contact with the curator who has been hiding my observation.
If I understand it correctly some person whom I never will get to know did not like my observations for reasons I also never will know. And I also understood that this curator has been obliged to hide my observation as a curator due to general rules that require the hiding pictures of a human being if somebody flags it. I would like to stress that there has not been the slightest suspetion that I violated any certain rules.
It is correct that my observation is not crucial for the benefit of iNaturalist, but I hate censorship in any case. I strongly suggest that curators discuss among themselves if this rule should not be changed.
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Did the human being give you permission to take their photo?
Did you ask?
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As mentioned in the pervious thread, this topic is really hard to discuss without knowing the specific details of the flag. Such details are not appropriate to share here on the forum per the forum guidelines.
Curators are people and volunteers, and thus can make mistakes. If you truly believe that the curator’s actions were unjust and unreasonable, you can submit a help ticket and have iNat staff assess the situation. But ultimately, it’s their (staff’s) platform and they get to decide what content is and is not allowed. Again, the forum is not the place to share specific details about the flag. As far as censorship goes, freedom of speech is not the same as freedom of platform (meaning you can say what you want, but people aren’t obligated to allow you to use their platform to do so).
Today I flagged an observation (not yours) where the subject was a human that was very obviously trying to avoid having their picture taken. Curators rightly removed the photo. A fair amount of discussion has been provided about this topic in this thread: Human obs used for cyberbullying.
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Curators enforce rules, but cannot make or change rules, only staff can do that
However, anyone can request that staff make changes to iNaturalsit at https://forum.inaturalist.org/c/feature-requests/16
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The pictures showed a person standing in the beautiful Caribbean Sea and was intense speaking into a mobile phone which I found something between absurd and funny. Of course I did not ask the person if she wanted to be pictured by me!
The picture itself is of not importance for iNaturalist.org. That is NOT my point!
The relevant point is that iNaturalist plays a kind of police reacting to some anonymous denounciation. Again I want to stress that no specific reason for flagging was mentioned.
I f somebody does not want to understand what I feel an inpropriate censorship I will have to accept it. The matter is finished for me, anyway.
If I hang posters up in your living room and you take them down, that’s not censorship, because it’s your house and you decide what gets hung up there. If you post a photo to iNat’s website and iNat takes it down, that’s not censorship either, because it’s their website. You can make your own website, and post the picture there, and no one will stop you. Your right to share a picture does not mean that someone else’s website can be required to host it, any more than my right to hang up posters means you are required to let me do so in your house. Posting pictures of people without their permission is against iNat’s rules, so they told you to take your picture elsewhere. I’m not seeing what the issue is.
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As the curator who removed this picture I would like to clarify that this is not entirely true, there is actually no rule saying you must get permission to post a picture of someone, but if someone objects to a photo of a person then the photo is supposed to be hidden
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What I find absurd, but not particularly funny, is posting multiple forum threads complaining about a curator adhering to the guidelines on an observation that was frankly kinda weird and not at all in accordance to how iNat is intended to be used.
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Discussing or attempting to arbitrate specific curatorial decisions on iNaturalist.org, which this thread has quickly turned to, is not appropriate for the forum as has been discussed elsewhere. As such, I’ve closed and unlisted this thread. If someone has a complaint about potential misconduct by another user, including a curator, they can always submit a ticket to staff at help.inaturalist.org.
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