In the past, there have been instances of users complaining about censorship on
toonpool.com. The most recent case happened when a picture uploaded by user
Sufun had been removed due to violations of the site’s terms of use. I asked
toonpool.com’s CEO Max Pohlenz about the site’s policy and the recurring
complaints
Max, can you tell me about the cartoons you have removed from toonpool.com
so far?
Well, basically we will delete all images that violate our terms of use. This includes,
for example, copyright infringements. We have removed a couple of pictures that
were using copyrighted characters, e.g. Donald Duck or Warner Brothers characters,
without adding some new interpretation.
Another reason for removing cartoons is plagiarism – sometimes artists have
obviously stolen somebody else’s ideas. Of course it’s often difficult to determine
whether a cartoon has been plagiarized or if people just got the same ideas.
Somebody even put up a collection dealing with that matter. A third category would
be offensive and discriminating content directed against any group or individual.
Most of the deleted images that raised complaints about censorship were
political in nature. Were there any similarities between the ones you removed?
We have been running toonpool.com for almost two years now and there are
members from 140 countries representing all major religions. So, when it comes to
political cartoons, there are necessarily differing points of view the users will express
in their art.
The most outstanding event in this matter were the Israeli attacks on Gaza in January
2009. A lot of the cartoons we received were directed against Israel’s policy. Some of
them, however crossed a line. There were some openly anti-Semitic cartoons and
others that compared Israel to Nazi Germany, often using swastikas. Those clearly
violated our terms of use and have been deleted.
Some users have called this censorship, keeping them from expressing their
opinions.
As administrators, we have to set some rules of conduct. There are mainly three
reasons for doing so: First of all, toonpool.com is supposed to be a site for an
exchange between artists from different cultures. Such exchange is endangered by
hateful statements, so we try to keep things peaceful while trying to allow for a
maximum range of opinions.
Second, there is a legal dimension. Toonpool.com is hosted in Germany, where as a
consequence of our history the use of swastikas and similar symbols is limited by the
law and incitement to ethnic or racial hatred is a criminal offense.
Third, the toonpool.com staff feels a responsibility to take a position in these kind of
things. As I said, we allow for a maximum range of artistic expression. We try to
remain as neutral as possible and keep a lot of cartoons and images that we
disagree with. Sometimes we need to act, though. We don’t want our site to be
misused for aggressive propaganda.
But people might argue that other comparisons with Hitler or the Nazis are still
online, take this caricature of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for example.
Basically, we disagree with any comparisons between Nazi Germany and other
states. They necessarily distort the system depicted and tend to trivialize the horrors
of National Socialism. Still, we kept some of them owing to toonpool.com’s ideal of
artistic freedom.
Drawing parallels between Israel and the Nazis in our eyes is especially harmful and
hateful and will not be tolerated. It doesn’t do anything to explain the Israeli /
Palestinian conflict and is a severe insult to the experience of the Jewish people
during the 1930s and 1940s.
We are currently rethinking our policy towards Nazi imagery in general, but haven’t
come to a decision yet. Concerning the latest incident, I hope that the users will
accept our position and respect our terms of use.
I noticed, that you have two ways of dealing with controversial pictures:
sometimes you just delete them but in the most recent case you replaced it
with a disclaimer and left the comments. What effect do you hope this will
have?
Replacing the image was my idea, this was the first time we tried it. Partly, we did it
for technical reasons: If somebody posts a link to a picture that has been deleted, its
better to have the disclaimer in place of the picture than an error message. On the
other hand, we wanted to offer the opportunity to further discuss the topic.
Will you do this with all removed pictures in the future?
We will do this in most cases of cartoons that don’t fall into the copyright violations
category. If an artist keeps uploading a picture we deleted, however, we will remove
his profile from our site. The new procedure is meant to provide more transparency. I
hope that the opportunity to discuss these matters will relieve some tensions.
Thank you for your time!