More Twitter Pornocalypse Incoming
Twitter has not been an adult-friendly platform since at least 2019, when it added porn-hostile terms of service (TOS) that are so far mostly unenforced. But now comes word that our old friends at Morality In Media (recently rebranded under the anodyne acronym NCOSE, for National Center on Sexual Exploitation) have ginned up a lawsuit starring conveniently anonymous parties and an incidence of uploaded “child sexual material” they claim (plausibly enough) Twitter flailed at moderating. The idea is to do to Twitter what they did to Backpage, forcing a blanket Twitter ban on all sexual expression:
XBIZ News Editor Gustavo Turner told the Daily Dot that NCOSE believes the “majority of depictions of lawful sexual activity or commercial sex fall under ‘human trafficking.'” The civil action case is an extension of NCOSE’s goal: “the eradication of all free sexual expression” from “public discourse.”
“The Twitter lawsuit NCOSE is sponsoring has two aims: to test the exception to Section 230 that FOSTA created for matters supposedly dealing with what they call ‘human trafficking,’ and to pressure Twitter into preemptively [adopting] a corporate censorship stance regarding all sexual material,” Turner said. “The rationale behind NCOSE’s tactic is that if a platform, because of the sheer volume of third-party content uploaded, cannot verify the ‘consenting’ and/or the ‘adult’ parts of sexual content, it should preemptively ban all of it.”
The quote is from Anti-porn Organization Takes Aim at Twitter for NSFW Ban, Sex Workers Warn, which article in turn relies heavily on reporting from XBIZ: Religiously Inspired Group NCOSE Files FOSTA Lawsuit Against Twitter.
I don’t have a lot of analysis to add to those excellent articles. However, my pessimist take is that because of underlying #Pornocalypse inclinations already displayed by Twitter, this lawsuit (and others that will surely follow if this one gets any traction) won’t prompt Twitter to upgrade and humanize its account moderation team and algorithms. (Bad moderating is the only actual wrongdoing of which Twitter stands accused in this case.) Instead, it will give Twitter “cover” with the punditry for doing what its porn-squeamish investors (there are always squeamish investors) already want: some fully-automated over-broad machine censorship that drives porn broadly off the platform, a la Tumblr. And that will be the end of adult expression on any major/corporate social media platform.
My advice to all you “horny on main” Twitter users: Prepare for the pornocalypse. Keep doing your adult marketing while you can, but remember Bacchus’s First Rule, and build yourself a backup-plan website too, if you don’t already have one. And consider making a no-adult-content alt Twitter account for all your news and politics and other non-porn activity that’s important to you. You’ll be glad of it when the porn-moderating weather gets heavy on the platform.
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I wonder if the current kerfuffle will be educational to the corporate social media users who don’t understand how it works politically speaking. I know many people under 40 who are more or less disengaged with “feeds”/”suggested content” social media and old media.
As a senior citizen I am still amazed and baffled by the joy that this country gets at guns and violence, but lies in fear of love and sexuality in any form. unless some dude can profit from it in his own personal moment of fame to try to make it a shameful, degrading act. seems like we never really left the puritan age. We still have witch hunts and have a minority that feels they need to control the rest.
As many of your readers will know, @honesterotica was summarily suspended from Twitter (incidentally the same day as Trump). No notice, no chance to negotiate. It turns out that it was our header illustration by the French artist Jean Dulac, which we’d been using ever since we opened the account four years ago, that was the issue.
Fortunately our appeal against suspension was successful, so we were only off-air for two weeks. It helped that we know someone at Twitter who was able to ‘escalate’ our appeal. Our ‘mole’ told us that it was probably a machine-learning algorithm that had initiated the suspension …
What did we learn? That it appears to be the header image and information that triggers Twitter; there appears to be little or no censorship of content – so far.
There is also an ‘artistic merit’ clause in Twitter’s ‘guidelines’ that appears to allow ‘scenes of a sexual nature’.
What’s unforgivable is that no notice was given, and no chance to object …
John, I feel like there’s a logical leap in your account that may be hard to justify. Your suspension may have been triggered by header content as detected by machine, but I don’t see why you would conclude from that, that suspensions are not occurring based on content, especially when there is expressly a content-based reason for suspensions in the TOS now. Either way, I’m glad you’re back!
Thanks Bacchus :-)
I should have said ‘there appears to be little or no censorship of OUR content – so far’.
Glad you’re glad!