e621 used to be my absolute favorite furry website because there was no censorship on images. All images, no matter how out-of-taste, raunchy, or politically incorrect, were accepted. Six months ago, the worst kind of censorship was on things like "It's not furry so get it out" which is understandable and "It doesn't look good enough" which is arbitrary, yet understandable.
Let me preface the following information with a particular relevant highlight of administration action. There is a previous forum threat that I am paraphrasing (https://e621.net/forum_topics/26180). There used to be a handful of images that were outright racist propaganda. An example of some imagery depicts non-furry art from the 1900's of exaggerated African features and making them look like animals. It should not have been accepted in the first place, and everyone should be able agree that it simply made sense to delete it. Not to maintain political correctness, but to adhere to the uploading guidelines. It appeared that site uploading guidelines were bent to explicitly accept those images in the first place, even though they went against site guidelines. Or, perhaps maybe there weren't any uploading guidelines back then and there wasn't administration approval either, and it just slipped in because someone decided to upload it. Either way, according to the existing rules, it made sense to delete them.
e621 administration has decided that https://e621.net/posts/2282749 is not acceptable to be on this website. The reasoning states "Glorification and thoughtless use of a real person's death." That sounds especially arbitrary because it isn't enforced equally. There was a previous forum thread (https://e621.net/forum_topics/26515) that made the reasonable comparison between George Floyd's death and the deaths of other people, like those who died in 9/11 or political figures. The glorification of those people's deaths were not respected to the same degree as George Floyd. The administration's reasoning (found in the thread, and not the picture itself) was something along the lines of "This was too recent and the examples you mentioned happened decade, so right now it's in bad taste." That raises the question of 'how long does it take to be in good taste,' but whatever. It was a crude photo which sexualized George Floyd's death using Zootopia characters. It stands to reason that a furry art archive site should archive everything, but it wasn't too egregious to decide that it didn't belong here. I disagree with the decision, but it's at least understandable.
Then e621 administration decided that https://e621.net/posts/2393305 is not acceptable to be on this website. Here is the pic for those who are curious: https://imgur.com/a/eVGrpVp
There is no death. There is no sexual kink to it. It is furry-izing a photo, which is a very frequent practice in the furry fandom. It's turning something that wasn't a furry into a furry. The reason it was deleted? "Not relevant to the furry fandom"
I actually cannot comprehend how it was not relevant to the furry fandom. It is a (reasonably well-drawn) image of an anthropomorphic Kyle Rittenhouse. Does this mean that all furry-ized photos are to be deleted? What about Furry-ized Obama or Furry-ized Hitler or Furry-ized Trump? Does this mean that furry adaptations of memes should be deleted if they did not start out as furries?
This simply looks like blatant censorship against parodies and political commentary of current events and current politics.
e621 claims to be an archive site. There are literally two pencil-drawn portraits of real-life dogs that were drawn by Adolf Hitler, still up as of September 5th, 2020 (https://e621.net/posts?tags=adolf_hitler_%28artist%29+). It seems like a double standard as to what does and doesn't deserve to be archived. This is something that I would use e621 to find. I tried to use e621 to find it, because I knew that if it was anywhere, it would be here. I was surprised when I thought it wasn't uploaded yet and I was betrayed when I learned that it was uploaded and deleted.
All that I ask for is transparency.
Perhaps the navigation to this rule is too difficult for me. However, I'm not technologically illiterate. I have clicked the 'rules' link that appears on nearly every page on this site and I have navigated to the uploading guidelines. I haven't seen any rule as to why either image was removed, and the alleged rule used to delete the second image mentioned is outright contradictory to the content of the piece.
Please, just give us an explanation as to when these images will be reinstated or amend the uploading guidelines to provide a reason as to why these images will remain deleted.