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Sex Blogging, Gratuitous Nudity, Kinky Sex, Sundry Sensuality
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse comes for us all"
November 30th, 2021 -- by Bacchus
Later update: Via commenters who are smarter than me, I have learned that WordPress doesn’t handle spell checking independently, relying instead on browser spell-check functionality. So my ire should have been directed at our dear old blue-nosed friends at Google.
Today I noticed that the dictionary used by the ErosBlog installation of WordPress knows how to spell the word “cunnilingus” and is perfectly happy to flag it when not spelled correctly. In order to do that, it has to “know” the correct spelling. But it refuses to suggest the correct spelling! The best it can do is to weakly suggest the word “ceilings”. I am not making this up:
Almost certainly this was not a deliberate choice of the WordPress coders. I don’t have time today to research the source of the spellcheck routine and library that causes this result, but since WordPress is open source, it’s likely to involve logic that was coded elsewhere. This is hardly new behavior in a software product; Violet Blue caught Microsoft doing it with Word’s spellcheck way back in 2007. Nor is this the first time ErosBlog has covered search invisibility, search suggestion censorship, and arbitrary sexy-keyword “blue lists” that have been widely shared for censorship purposes in the tech industry. My guess is that WordPress is just one of the many software products that lazily or unthinkingly incorporates a library built around one of those ancient and stale blue lists.
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November 2nd, 2021 -- by Bacchus
I’ve been aware since at least 2014 that there were shadow porn channels on the Roku. These porn channels are usually associated with major-brand pay pornsites, they don’t show up in the Roku channel list, but they’ve long been available nonetheless. Well, that’s all over now. The pornocalypse comes for us all.
XBiz reports:
LOS ANGELES — Roku announced a change of policy concerning private channels last week at its annual developer conference that will result in an effective ban of porn channels by March 1, 2022.
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Companies affected by the ban include Pornhub, AdultEmpire, AEBN, Wicked, Adult Time and Naughty America.
All of these companies’ Roku channels are expected to disappear on March 1, 2022.
Roku has been the target of a well-funded campaign by religiously motivated anti-porn crusading group NCOSE (formerly known as Morality in Media).
Morality in Media — our ancient enemy — strikes again!
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July 25th, 2021 -- by Bacchus
The #Pornocalypse comes for us all — even mild-mannered gardeners!
No lesser source than the Associated Press reported out this sad tale of a New York state gardening group that was put at risk of deletion by too many automatic robot-moderation flags for the word “hoe”, which Facebook apparently thinks means the same thing as “ho”.
Moderating a Facebook gardening group in western New York is not without challenges. There are complaints of wooly bugs, inclement weather and the novice members who insist on using dish detergent on their plants.
And then there’s the word “hoe.”
Facebook’s algorithms sometimes flag this particular word as “violating community standards,” apparently referring to a different word, one without an “e” at the end that is nonetheless often misspelled as the garden tool.
Normally, Facebook’s automated systems will flag posts with offending material and delete them. But if a group’s members — or worse, administrators — violate the rules too many times, the entire group can get shut down.
Elizabeth Licata, one of the group’s moderators, was worried about this.
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When a group member commented “Push pull hoe!” on a post asking for “your most loved & indispensable weeding tool,” Facebook sent a notification that said “We reviewed this comment and found it goes against our standards for harassment and bullying.”
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“And so I contacted Facebook, which was useless. How do you do that?” she said. “You know, I said this is a gardening group, a hoe is gardening tool.”
Licata said she never heard from a person and Facebook, and found navigating the social network’s system of surveys and ways to try to set the record straight was futile.
Contacted by The Associated Press, a Facebook representative said in an email this week that the company found the group and corrected the mistaken enforcements. It also put an extra check in place, meaning that someone — an actual person — will check offending posts before the group is considered for deletion.
“We have plans to build out better customer support for our products and to provide the public with even more information about our policies and how we enforce them,” Facebook said in a statement in response to Licata’s complaints.
Note, however, that Facebook did not promise a better way to get in touch than to have an Associated Press reporter make phone calls.
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January 24th, 2021 -- by Bacchus
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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August 18th, 2020 -- by Bacchus
Today’s headline at The Virge focuses on the way that Oculus, the Facebook-owned leading manufacturer of virtual reality (VR) headsets, is forcing its users into the Facebook social media ecosystem, and appears perfectly willing to soft-brick its own hardware to punish the reluctant or unwilling:
You’ll Need a Facebook Account to Use Future Oculus Headsets.
Oculus will soon require all of its virtual reality headset users to sign up with a Facebook account.
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Starting later this year, you’ll only be able to sign up for an Oculus account through Facebook. If you already have an account, you’ll be prompted to permanently merge your account. If you don’t, you’ll be able to use the headset normally until 2023, at which point official support will end. Old headsets using non-linked accounts will still work, but some games and apps may no longer function.
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Facebook also says that all future unreleased Oculus devices will require a Facebook login, even if you’ve got a separate account already.
Yes, that’s a clear violation of our nation’s anti-trust laws. No, anti-trust enforcement isn’t really a thing these days, which is how they can get away with it. Moving on. Antitrust in tech is a fascinating subject, but it’s not the ErosBlog beat.
Pornocalypse? Now, that’s our beat. From the article:
The new changes apparently consolidate Facebook’s management of its platforms. A new privacy policy will be administered by Facebook itself, not the separate Facebook Technologies hardware subsidiary, and “Facebook will manage all decisions around use, processing, retention and sharing of your data.” Oculus will also adopt Facebook’s core community standards rather than use a separate code of conduct, and Facebook will add a new “VR-focused” section to its standards.
Emphasis added by me: “Oculus will also adopt Facebook’s core community standards.” Boom. Headshot. That’s the ballgame. #Pornocalypse comes for Oculus. It’s right there in the Facebook community standards:
The very first time I ever mentioned virtual reality porn on this blog was in 2016, when I quoted Mark Mann at The Walrus for the proposition that VR porn was a compelling use of virtual reality:
When it comes to porn, VR is so engaging that viewers “forget” it’s a simulation. The penis I saw through my headset, for example, seemed to rise from between my legs. It wasn’t an unnaturally large member, and the owner was caucasian, so it was believably my own. The model was life-size and more than life-like. It was so much like being alone in a room with another living, breathing human that my mind didn’t bother to contemplate the difference.
In a nutshell, that’s why porn has been a big driver of headset sales from the beginning. Porn is always a driver of new and expensive technologies, especially if you’re marketing the fancy new gadgets (and you always are) to well-off young tech-savvy men. And that’s why it’s always been a truism in tech that, if your system doesn’t have porn on it, your system is broken. In my 2013 The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All post, I quoted some 2008 words by Ethan Zuckerman that he attributed to his late-1990s experiences at Tripod, an early web hosting and prototypical social media company in what was called the “portal” space:
I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media — it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work.
Porn has really worked well for Oculus/Facebook. The headset company had its origins in a successful 2012 Kickstarter, got bought by Facebook in 2014, and released its first consumer product in 2016. Thus, Facebook has been in complete control, throughout the product’s rise to prominence in the world of VR porn.
You might reasonably ask “What prominence?” So, let’s do a little experiment to assess that. Type “VR Porn” into your browser. As I write this, the first result is, no shock, a site called VRPorn.com. (They have, more than once, been ErosBlog advertisers.) One click (on “How to watch VR Porn”) takes you to their hardware page. Oculus products make up three of their ten supported platforms:
It’s the same old weary pornocalypse story. Tech companies (even ones like Facebook, which has #pornocalypse backed into its very bones) cheerfully allow porn during the initial stages of a new technology or social media project. Then, once the product reaches a certain stage of maturity, they decide it’s time to “go respectable” and push all the porn off the platform. Dance with the ones what brung ya? Hell no! We don’t even know those dirty perverts!
#Pornocalypse comes for us all. Today (with delayed/deferred rolling implementation stretching to 2023) it came for all the people who dropped large coin for an Oculus headset in the expectation of watching porn on it. Facebook says to you: “Sorry, suckers!”
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June 16th, 2020 -- by Bacchus
I am somewhat notorious for doom-and-glooming that the pornocalypse comes for us all. The aphorism is shorthand for my observation that companies and social media platforms evolve through a life cycle in which porn, adult sites, and persons interested in these are initially welcome while a platform or internet business builds out its internet presence, and then — slowly or rapidly — these outfits purge all the porn from their platforms in response to various pressures. Often, there’s a hypocritical element, especially when the company or platform retains a business model that’s porn-adjacent. In such cases, the porn purge looks like greasily disingenuous posturing: “What we do here is a matter of healthy pleasure. We’re not pornographic, oh no! And to prove it, we’ll exclude all those stinky pornographers — yes, the very ones that we courted for their traffic and money when we were younger, newer, and more desperate for traffic.”
The #pornocalypse comes for us all. I’ve detailed dozens of examples since 2013 and — without the catchphrase — going all the way back to 2004 when LiveJournal started cracking down on the sex bloggers who helped make it great. I’ve been on this beat a long time.
You want to know who has been on their beat even longer than I’ve been on mine? The legendary sex toy sellers Adam & Eve, who these days style themselves the “#1 Adult Toy Superstore.” They’ve been at it for fifty fucking years — an entire half-century. They got their start selling condoms and lube in brick-and-mortar stores, then branched out by starting a highly-successful condoms-by-mail business at a time when this was still technically illegal because of the Comstock Act. At some point they added sex toys and began franchising their brand to more than sixty sex shops nationwide. Prior to 1996, they put up a website they called “a collection of the finest erotic catalogs on the Internet.” Yeah, they’ve been at this game for a minute or two.
Now, let me tell you the story of how Adam & Eve the sex toy selling mega-chain first came to overlap with my little operation here at ErosBlog. Cast your mind back sixteen years, to 2004. There I was, blogging happily along, when I got a lovely email from Libby. “Libby from Adam & Eve” was a genuinely nice person who later became a sex blogger in her own right. In 2004, she greeted me with kind words complimenting ErosBlog for being “chock full of wickedness” and being “one of the most popular sex blogs in the world.” (That last was the best kind of flattery, since it was, at the time, essentially true.) Here’s Libby’s entire email. (Yes, I still have it.) You’ll need to click to make it big enough to read:
The essence of Libby’s pitch: Adam & Eve wanted to “start a brand new e-lationship” with ErosBlog. (Aren’t you glad that neologism didn’t catch on?) Our new “e-lationship”, boiled down, was intended to be a sort of primitive affiliate deal:
Wasn’t that nice?
In truth, it wasn’t. In those halcyon days, most affiliate schemes offered more than a 20% revshare. And although sex toy affiliate programs have always been notorious for not offering useful stats that an affiliate can use to track sales, Adam & Eve basically had no stats at all; it was my impression that their program was a “trust us” deal where they periodically paid out revenue without any visibility at all into the number of sales, the referring links, or anything else that affiliates need to verify that we are getting fairly paid.
So I wrote back, and, long story short, pitched them to buy a banner ad instead. Which they did, maintaining it on and off for the next year or two. My stinky-porn sex blog traffic was worth paying for, and pay they did:
Note the content the Adam & Eve banner ad is running next to in this screenshot: it’s a brutal spanking photo from this post, featuring an interview with a spanking model about the experience of modeling for one of the most severe/BDSM spanking porn producers of her day. In 2004 and 2005, Adam & Eve was happy to advertise against this raunchy porn content.
But, you know: the pornocalypse comes for us all.
Fast forward to 2020. I am, for various reasons, currently in the market for a good sex toy affiliate program. I went to Adam & Eve to see what their offering might be these days. And it instantly became clear that they have succumbed to the pornocalypse. Their affiliate program these days has two layers of content screening for potential affiliates. A potential affiliate has to satisfy not only Adam & Eve, but also their third-party affiliate program operator, a company called Ascend.
Adam & Eve, who used to be totally fine running their banner against painful spanking content, now say they won’t allow their affiliate links to appear on any website that publishes bondage, pain, or urination content:
Well, fuck. ErosBlog sometimes offers pissing stuff. bondage, BDSM, and pain content, too. After all these years, I still have zero fucking clue how a photo of a bondage scene is supposed to “depict” the “consent of the participants” — is the model supposed to hold an “I consent” cardboard sign, or what? Indeed, I’ve blogged at length about the actual ways to confirm consent in the BDSM porn we enjoy. Ironically, one of the first posts in which I did so was the brutal-spanking post that appears next to Adam & Eve’s banner in the 2005 screenshot above.
But that’s not all. Adam & Eve have some sort of working agreement with an affiliate program operator called Ascend. To become an Adam & Eve affiliate in 2020, you’ve also got to satisfy the content requirements that Ascend imposes:
That’s right, folks. To sell sex toys for Adam & Eve, you’ve got to do it from a website that doesn’t have any “pornographic, obscene, sexually explicit, or related content.” I dunno how you’d do that, but them’s the rules. I didn’t make ’em.
I call terms of service like this “porn-hostile TOS”. It’s my policy not to do business with anybody that has porn-hostile TOS. But, sometimes, the porn-hostile TOS are just for show. Sometimes, they are intended to cover butts and look good, but they aren’t enforced. By the time I got this deep into reading the rules, I had become curious whether Adam & Eve (and Ascend) could actually be 100% serious about all this porn-hostile nonsense. From a sex toy retailer! So I went ahead and filled out an affiliate application, just for the pleasure of seeing my inevitable rejection letter.
I was not disappointed. Here it is:
That makes it all nice and offical! My website does not meet their quality standards. It contains “inappropriate content”. Sixteen years ago, they pitched me to join their affiliate program, and when I said no, they bought advertising. Now? The pornocalypse comes for us all. Nowadays, you can’t sell sex toys for Adam & Eve if your website has “pornographic” or “sexually explicit” content. How the fuck does that even work? Sex toys are sexually explicit by fucking definition. Putting the Adam & Eve link on your website makes your website sexually explicit! What the actual fuck? It doesn’t make any sense.
The pornocalypse comes for us all. It fucking ate Adam & Eve.
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December 8th, 2019 -- by Bacchus
Folks, it’s official: Twitter is no longer an adult-friendly or porn-friendly platform. The pornocalypse comes for us all, and in 2019 it came for Twitter. A series of incremental rule shifts mean that Twitter now proposes to ban any predominantly-adult accounts. What’s more, they have formalized shadowbanning as policy without becoming any more open about the process or what triggers it. And finally, rule changes around “graphic violence” and “violent sexual conduct” appear to completely prohibit a great deal of kinky pornography, especially if it involves BDSM, urine, or semen.
Let me not overstate the case: we aren’t hearing — yet — about widespread banning of porn accounts from Twitter. But the rules are in place, in some cases since June. And it’s a fool’s hope to think “Perhaps they won’t enforce against me…” The usual pornocalypse pattern is to change the rules, wait a respectable period, and then start the porn bannings. At which point the rhetorical justification is “Why are you complaining? What you’re doing has been against the rules since forever, we were actually being nice for letting you slide so long…”
Once upon a time, the Twitter status quo was that porn was pretty much OK so long as you marked your account “sensitive” and kept your nose (aka your avatar and header graphics) clean. That changed in a policy dated March 2019, but the new policy didn’t actually appear on Twitter’s website until some time between May 25th and June 7th:
Yup, since June it’s been the case that “your account may be permanently suspended if the majority of your activity on Twitter is sharing sensitive media.” “Sensitive media” is graphic violence, adult content, violent sexual conduct, gratuitous gore, and hateful imagery. Adult content is “any consensually produced and distributed media that is pornographic or intended to cause sexual arousal.” Just in case you were feeling hopeful, erotic art isn’t exempt: “This also applies to cartoons, hentai, or anime involving humans or depictions of animals with human-like features. What’s more, the definition of “graphic violence” mysteriously includes “depictions of bodily fluids”, so no snowballing, ejaculation, facial cumshots, squirting, or watersports. The definition of “violent sexual conduct” is written in a way that prohibits vast swathes of BDSM porn, too:
“Simulated lack of consent” describes most modern bondage porn. And BDSM porn that includes whipping or spanking? That’s “sexualized violence”, because it’s almost never “immediately obvious if those involved have consented to take part.” Of course in commercial porn they have consented, but our proofs are in the context: the interviews at the beginning of the porn shoot, the happy smiles at the end, the researchable reputation of the porn producer, the willingness of the performers to return for additional shoots. Still images and short clips can’t usually encompass enough of this evidence of consent to make it “immediately obvious.”
After the March-dated set of rules that Twitter published in June, there was another update to the Sensitive Media Policy dated November, differing from the June (March-dated) set only by a few words. But there are also changes elsewhere in the Twitter Terms of Service (TOS). As XBIZ reports, Twitter is finally updating its TOS to permit the shadowbanning behavior for which it is already notorious:
In a nutshell: Twitter has explicitly reserved the right to shadowban, under the legalese of “limit distribution or visibility of any Content on the service.”
This is the paragraph from the March 2018 terms of service, which apply until December 31, 2019:
“Our Services evolve constantly. As such, the Services may change from time to time, at our discretion. We may stop (permanently or temporarily) providing the Services or any features within the Services to you or to users generally. We also retain the right to create limits on use and storage at our sole discretion at any time. We may also remove or refuse to distribute any Content on the Services, suspend or terminate users, and reclaim usernames without liability to you.”
And this is the revised passage, effective January 1, 2020 (italics added by XBIZ):
“Our Services evolve constantly. As such, the Services may change from time to time, at our discretion. We may stop (permanently or temporarily) providing the Services or any features within the Services to you or to users generally. We also retain the right to create limits on use and storage at our sole discretion at any time. We may also remove or refuse to distribute any Content on the Services, limit distribution or visibility of any Content on the service, suspend or terminate users, and reclaim usernames without liability to you.”
I tweeted about all this back in June, when Twitter started the #pornocalypse ball rolling, but I didn’t make a blog post then:
I did, however, predict new #pornocalypse rules in April, before they started rolling out:
There are several recent web articles offering more analysis of the Twitter #pornocalypse, but read them with care. All of them, to one extent or another, seem to conflate the changes in June with the recently-announced TOS changes that haven’t happened yet. That said, they offer more analysis of the implications than I’ve attempted here:
It’s long been my view that Twitter wouldn’t remain friendly to adult content forever. The pornocalypse comes for us all — there’s no social media platform that’s immune. But Twitter, famously, was the last major platform standing. It’s going to be a much bigger blow when they start banning all the image-posting accounts, the erotic-art accounts, and most especially, all the accounts of porn performers and other adult-industry people whose accounts exist for the sole purpose of sharing and promoting their work. I don’t care if people start defensively including 51% political tweets, or puppy tweets, in an effort to avoid the deathly “dedicated to posting sensitive media” label. If sharing of adult imagery is any major fraction of your reason for being on Twitter, you’re at risk of having some faceless support person, probably backed up by some algorithm that scores your account with an internal “sensitive media rating”, decide to terminate your account. Look for porn performers, artists, and, yes, sex bloggers, to start disappearing from the platform.
Don’t think you can argue “but my sensitive media wasn’t the majority of my activity! My account wasn’t ‘dedicated’ to it!” You can’t lawyer-lips the #pornocalypse. Once a platform declares itself adult-hostile, which Twitter now has, the actual enforcement is always arbitrary, capricious, and without much hope of meaningful appeal. Even if there’s “sensitive imagery” in less than 10% of your posts, say, a hostile eye looking at your account is likely to parse the image-sharing (especially if it supports your livelihood) as the thing your account is “dedicated to”, discounting the rest of your activity as ancillary chaff. You want get some anonymous underpaid outsourced support staffer to look at your statistics “proving” that porn is in less than 50% of your posts? First, you’ll never be given a chance to make that argument, and second, even if you somehow manage it, they won’t care. Good luck with that.
In the Daily Dot article I linked above, the report reached a Twitter spokesperson, who tried hard to suggest that nothing was really changing in all this. Then the reporter specifically asked about the banning of accounts “dedicated to” adult material that’s otherwise permitted by the Sensitive Media Policy:
When asked whether Twitter will ban users who primarily share consensual porn or fictional illustrations of consensual nonconsent, Twitter did not clarify.
That refusal to clarify speaks volumes, and what it says is nothing good.
I believe, too, that it’s significant that Twitter no longer denies shadowbanning. We can expect it to see it deployed a lot more readily against adult-focused accounts. There were limits to how far Twitter could go when their official claim was that shadowbanning did not happen. But on all social media platforms these days, sneaky ways to minimize the visibility of adult material are popular. An outright ban can be argued, if only in the court of public opinion. But search invisibility is a penalty that’s extremely difficult to prove, much less complain about — especially when it’s applied by secretive algorithms to content that fully complies with the applicable content policies and terms of service.
I’d like to wrap this up with some helpful suggestions about where to continue the adult conversation once Twitter finishes suppressing it, but I don’t have any. There are a bunch of minor social media platforms that have started up to implement free speech goals, but none that I’ve seen have the kind of adoption and broad social graphs (at least, not yet) that make the major platforms worth bothering with. At least for now, we’re facing life in a world where all social media is a hostile place for adult expression.
I know I’m faintly famous for my Bacchus’s First Rule coinage, which suggests we all retreat and retrench to web spaces that we control. I still urge people to do this; it’s the best way to save something from the pornocalypse. But it’s not even the start of a solution to the problem. We like social media for its connectivity. When all the platforms are united in putting porn firmly beyond the pale of acceptability, it may be possible to preserve our unwelcome adult-community identities by sharing our content from platforms where we can’t be deleted, but that does nothing to connect us again. When all the search and connectivity is controlled by massive porn-hostile corporate platforms, how do we find each other and our audiences?
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