Search engines filter porn even from users who turned safesearch off

Evidence

To be safe, search engines treat all users as not wanting accidental porn: better to make the user looking for porn refine her query and ask again, than to deliver porn to users who did not expect or wish to receive it. Reasonable, perhaps; but the intervention is a hidden one, and in fact runs counter to my stated preferences. Search engines not only guess the meaning and intent of my search, based on the little they know about me, they must in fact defy the one bit of agency I have asserted here, in turning safesearch off. — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet, 569

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Flickr disabled safesearch-off for entire nations rather than verify ages — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms,…, 576; Google censors autocomplete but refused to censor anti-Semitic search results — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms,…, 561; Invisible content filtering is more dangerous than content that is visibly withheld — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms,…, 552 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Invisible content filtering is more dangerous than content that is visibly withheld #exemplifies (0.88) — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet, 552
• Blocking a porn-associated hashtag silences legitimate political and social speech too #exemplifies (0.75) — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet, 556