Ten Steps Back — The War On Censoring Internet Sex
Why these platforms are censoring sex and sex education now more than ever
When we think of war, we think of weapons, bombs, terrorism, and violence. When we think about war hundreds of years ago, we think of archaic weapons, bows and arrows, and the death toll. Clearly, we’ve evolved past bows and arrows. Considering the evolution of weapons in war over time, we have to consider the greatest weapon in our society now — information and technology.
Without a doubt, society has evolved past loss of life and weapons as the primary form of war (though it still continues today). The “civil war” we are seeing in the US is over the consumption and distribution of information. As big tech censors former President Trump, flags any COVID-related content, deletes sex educators for talking about the clitoris, removes conspiracy theorists for “harassment and bullying,” there are now fewer places where we can freely express our thoughts without feeling unsafe. I personally have been censored for creating videos about incorporating masturbation into your self-care routine and sharing which celebrities have old souls.
Let me give you some background.
I worked on a law enforcement response team for a top media platform. Anytime someone committed a crime on the platform, law enforcement would reach out to my team for any evidence they could obtain legally. To put it simply, I have seen the darkest corners of the internet. I witnessed the most disturbing crimes on a daily basis. I can safely say sex education and talking about celebrities with old souls do not even scratch the surface of actual crime on the internet.
Today, I own my coaching business that involves both sex education and sexual health. I believe strongly in a holistic approach to coaching, one that involves a connection to self and to one’s sexuality. I’ve created TikToks about incorporating masturbation in your self-care routine, the connection between manifestation and sex, and sex as an empath, getting most of them taken down at some point, only to be restored after I fiercely appealed.
So why are these seemingly innocent videos being taken down?
We’ve created a censorship monster that we can’t seem to contain.
As COVID-19 hit in March 2020, we had to stay in our homes, with little in-person interaction. Our primary form of interaction with other people moved to the Internet and social media, making it the most powerful tool in our new way of living. But what if the information we consume through our TVs, phones, and computers does not reflect reality? What if it’s a story that’s being perfectly crafted to manipulate the way we are seeing the world? We saw prime examples of this as 2020 carried on, deception and twisted truths became the norm.
To avoid a much larger conversation on the censorship of political views, I’d rather discuss the war on censoring sexual content online. Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, are all becoming ruthless about removing sexual or suggestive content on their platforms, introducing newer, harsher community guidelines monthly. With vague terms like “adult nudity and sexual activity,” they justify their removals without explanation of how they determine these calls. They also remove any links or swipe-ups leading people to OnlyFans, forcing sex workers to create convoluted ways to get there instead. They’ve started to completely remove sex workers from the platform altogether, without allowing them to restore their accounts ever again.
These attempts to remove sex workers from these platforms is not new of course. In 2018, Instagram removed former adult film star Lana Rhoades’ Instagram prompting her to make a video crying and begging for Instagram to restore it.
Why the importance of having an Instagram? It’s their primary form of making money now. It’s the central location of drawing in an audience, booking brand deals, and creating paid partnerships.
So why don’t we just leave Instagram and go somewhere else, say TikTok?
TikTok censors more than any other platform, removing any content with the words “sex” or “OnlyFans,” forcing creators to replace them with “seggs” and “accountant” to mask their identity. They’re also inconsistent with their regulations, allowing men to pose mostly nude and removing women in bikinis.
In my TikTok that was removed for “adult nudity and sexual activity,” I am completely clothed, discussing celebrities with old souls, one of them Lana Rhoades, the former adult actress. She is on a green screen behind me only showing her in a bikini. I posted the video twice, both taken down. I appealed both of them — only one was reinstated while the other was determined to be too explicit and kept removed — it’s the exact same video.
What’s the reason for this chaotic, inconsistent censorship on sexual content?
It’s the increase of legislation put forward by the Senate in an effort to protect children and victims of sexual abuse and revenge porn, the latest being the Stop The Internet Sexual Exploitation Act. This new bipartisan legislation was put forward by the Senate in December 2020 in an effort to regulate sexual content and avoid circulation of child porn and revenge porn. This nine-page act will force platforms into a corner, banning all sexual content instead of allowing a balance, which will put sex workers and sex educators at risk.
First, the act requires any platform that hosts pornography to require the user to verify their identity and submit a signed consent form of everyone appearing in the video before uploading content. This requirement of the act puts sex workers at risk, having to confirm their real identity and allowing law enforcement an easier way to track sex workers in a database.
Second, it requires platforms to have an easy access point on their website that instructs individuals on how to request removal of a video if the individual has not consented to it being uploaded.
I was shocked to learn a few years ago how difficult it was to find Pornhub’s law enforcement / trust & safety site. Only in April 2020 did they decide to hire “outside experts” to clean up their site and make it compliant. Here is what you find when you see Pornhub’s commitment to Trust & Safety:
“Today, we are taking major steps to further protect our community. Going forward, we will only allow properly identified users to upload content. We have banned downloads. We have made some key expansions to our moderation process, and we recently launched a Trusted Flagger Program with dozens of non-profit organizations. Earlier this year, we also partnered with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, and next year we will issue our first transparency report.”
A transparency report discloses any data and information regarding the policies of that platform. Platforms produce this transparency report typically twice a year to disclose their efforts in protecting their communities and what they’ve reportedly taken down or reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. The fact that Pornhub is conducting their first one in 2021 is astonishing.
Third, the act states that video downloads are prohibited to prevent the circulation of the content. Users can easily screen record and work around this in a number of ways. While a necessary inclusion, this point does not prevent the circulation of content.
Fourth, and most notably, the act requires these platforms to have a 24-hour telephone hotline where people can call directly to staff and request the removal of content. Additionally, the content needs to be taken down within two hours of the request. With the amount of volume these companies deal with regularly, two hours is simply unrealistic. Staffing a hotline that would be able to cover this volume would impose a huge cost to the company’s operations, a cost that companies will not prioritize during a pandemic.
Fifth, the act requires platforms to have a software that blocks any reupload of the content that’s been removed. Something most companies already have, but again a huge cost and difficult for smaller platforms to implement. I easily reuploaded my TikTok video with a different background sound to mask the identity, showing the flaws in the software.
Sixth, the act instructs the DOJ to create a database of people who have indicated that they do not consent to any sexual content of them being distributed online. Something that other organizations have databases of here and there, but not a central location from the US government. This would allow the DOJ to easily pull up information after a claim has been made, but would not prevent the distribution.
Because of my work in tech law enforcement, I have a deep understanding of the copious amounts of child porn and child exploitation on the internet. I do understand the need to create safeguards to protect children and victims of sexual abuse online. I also have an understanding of the issues this act will raise for not only sex workers but all sexual content and freedom of expression online.
A nine-page act does not cover the complexities of sexual content on the Internet.
Implementing these vague and far-reaching regulations on these platforms will only force them to do one thing — ban all sexual and suggestive content on their platforms entirely instead of hiring people, implementing softwares, and creating balanced guidelines for their platform. They simply do not want to make the call and risk lawsuits each time. Rather than progressing and allowing sex-positive, educational, and sexual wellness content, platforms are going to do away with it altogether.
I probably don’t need to emphasize the importance of sex education and wellness in our culture — it actually prevents future child molestors, stigmas around sex, and shame around sex which leads to a healthier outlook on sexual expression. When we censor and hide sex-positive content, we also say that a natural, expressive part of our human existence is shameful.
So sex education is important, but what about sex workers?
Sex workers allow and create these stigma-free zones of expression. OnlyFans has undoubtedly allowed many people to monetize their content and create full businesses from their sexual expression. These businesses are built on creating safe spaces for people to express themselves sexually without judgement. Censoring this will only fester the issues of shame around sex, which creates further oppression. Sex work will always find a way on the Internet.
This has already started to make waves on Instagram. Instagram removed the accounts of top-earning OnlyFans creators and sent this message:
“Under our policies, we allow accounts to break our rules a specific number of times before we remove them altogether. We are not able to disclose the number of violations an account is allowed to have. Unfortunately, your account has exceeded this threshold and will be removed. Given your account was removed for repeatedly breaking our community guidelines, we will not be able to reinstate it.”
The synchronicities of taking down several of the top OnlyFans accounts clearly implies a new rule that Instagram created. Typically these notices are vague, without referencing which “rules” were broken and under which circumstances. Since these accounts “exceeded” the threshold, it clearly suggests that these are new rules and new arbitrary strikes that will wipe out all sexual accounts without any chance of redemption.
Through the political lense, the publisher versus platform debate arises.
Can these platforms censor anything they want? Classifying Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or Reddit as publishers would allow them to censor whatever they want. As platforms, they would have to abide by the protections of the First Amendment. It’s naive for these companies to act like publishers. They operate as platforms with the amount of power they have and the billions of users utilizing them as their sole forms of expression.
Clearly there are loopholes in our laws and in big tech’s policies.
The creators of these popular platforms surely did not consider what to do about child pornography as they created the apps. Lawmakers were not considering sex workers as they created laws around technology. And the founding fathers certainly did not consider social media when they created the First Amendment. This very specific niche needs far more understanding and evaluation than doing away with sex content altogether. Loopholes in regulation will not actively protect children and victims. For centuries, we’ve attempted to censor and regulate sex. Simultaneously, nothing about sex in real life has changed — in fact sex crimes have decreased.
In the 1970s, criminology professor Berl Kutchinsky at the University of Copenhagen, evaluated sex crimes in Denmark, Sweden and Germany as they legalized pornography in the late 60s and early 70s. He did not find any correlation between a rise in crime and decriminalization of porn. Some types of sex crime actually fell during this period, like rape and child molestation.
More recently, a compilation of more than 80 studies in 2009 concluded that a causal link between porn use and sexual violence “is slim and may, at certain times, have been exaggerated by politicians, pressure groups and some social scientists,” the authors wrote.
We need to create safeguards to protect victims of sexual abuse, child porn, and sexual exploitation, but we cannot do away with all sexual content entirely. Nine pages is not enough. A few acts by the Senate does not eliminate the foundational issues around sexual expression and sexual content. Education is vital in creating safe expression which reduces sexual violence and harm in the future. Platforms need to have the support to enforce these regulations while also allowing for sex education and expression. They must facilitate open conversations around the balance of explicit content and educational content, specify the terms in their community guidelines so users have a clear understanding of what is allowed and what is not, and implement resources and counseling for the teams that handle these processes.
Censoring content does not eliminate the reality of it happening.
We need platforms where we can express freely, and that should not be a controversial statement. We can allow free expression and allow people to make their own decisions about the content. Censoring sex won’t stop people from distributing and consuming porn. It won’t stop people from having sex. It will only create more shame and taboo which inevitably leads to more illegal, twisted understandings of sex. Without sex educators, we would not be able to separate hardcore porn with reality. We need sex educators and individuals expressing online to normalize our taboo and normal fantasies, honoring the duality, instead of shaming them.
We will start to see the true intentions of these platforms — to make money and control information. A new platform that will truly rule will be one where we can express freely and safely no matter anyone’s views. How far will be too far in censorship? We will find out soon if not already.
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