A message to Pinterest:-
Dear Sirs,
Of late, you have sent me frequent email messages advising me that you have removed content from my account due to it not being in compliance with your “acceptable use policy”. This suggests to me that your “acceptable use policy” requires urgent review.
To date, in all of your messages, you have stated the following with regard to the content in question “it was originally uploaded by you or another pinner”. In every case, the content was not uploaded by me (as you are obviously able to ascertain), in which case you should be addressing the issue with the person who did upload the content and not with myself.
However, in each case, you have stated that the reason the content was removed is because it contained “nudity”. Since when did Pinterest join the ranks of the Facebook puritans and since when has nudity been a crime or in any way harmful to society?
I myself am a very well established artist with international recognition. The works for which I am best known all contain nudity, but there again, so did the works of some of the worlds most famous artists, both living and dead. Aside from my role as an artist, I am also a art curator, art journalist and art educator. In every case, the content you have removed is artistic and as such, you are actually in direct contravention of an artist’s rights to freedom of expression, as defined in the The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and overseen by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Presuming from your actions that you are ignorant to such legislative guidelines, I am attaching a variety of documentation for your review, in the hope that these may prove of assistance to you.
During the interim, I wish to bring to your attention that I am an avid activist in such matters, and opposed to censorship in all its forms. In-fact, I wrote a recent article on this subject matter, which you might with to read. You can find same via this link: http://
To date, all of the content you have removed, is content not posted by me, but shared by me. Whilst I am totally opposed to your illicit intervention into my account, I have tolerated your intervention on the basis that it is not my content which you are censoring. However, in the event that you should censor or intervene on any post made by myself, I will close my Pinterest account immediately. Should this occur, I will instigate immediate legal proceedings against yourselves without further notice and shall forthwith bring your actions to the attention of the mass media via press, social networks and the like. I am confident that within a very short space of time Pinterest will be facing class action law suits from the masses, which without any doubt, will in the due course of time, inevitably lead to the demise of Pinterest. It would be a pity should this occur, but the public at large have on the whole had enough of puritan type intervention against nudity and artists in particular have rights which if motivated to do so, they will stand-up and fight for. I for one am more than willing to motivate them and I for one am more than willing to fight!
Thus, as I mentioned at the outset of the message, your “acceptable use policy” clearly needs urgent review and amendment, at least that is, if you wish to maintain the existence of Pinterest. You might also be interested to note that Pinterest is awash with pornographic commercial images that are in no way associated with the arts, although that is not to say that artworks do not contain sexuality (they have for centuries!) that could by some be defined as pornographic. However, a non-art related pornographic image can be spotted a mile away and as I say, Pinterest is awash with them. Thus, before you start censoring the arts, you might like to take a closer look at the nature of content on your website and address the more obvious issues.
I will now make this correspondence public and look forward to reading your response, in order that I may also make that public also. Ultimately, I hope I don’t meet you in court, but if you are adamant in pursuing the self-destruction polices that you are currently implementing, then undoubtedly I will.
Thank you for your attention to this matter and in anticipation of your prompt response.
Yours truly,
Thomas Hodges.
