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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
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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March 17th, 2021 -- by Bacchus
On December 21, 2020, the popular adult user-upload site xHamster had 219,000 sex stories in its database:
Five days later, all those stories were gone. The URL had went 404 Page Not Found. (With a cute hamster, naturally.)
Generic 404 text says “Sorry, this feature is technically unavailable due to technical reasons.” But that’s boilerplate. Three and a half months later, the sex stories are still gone. Sorry, people, they ain’t coming back.
Was this truly a #pornocalypse situation? xHamster isn’t talking, but signs point to yes. The biggest (and presumably most profitable) part of xHamster’s offering is its tubesite-style video content, which they monetize, presumably, in all the usual tube ways. In December of 2020, other large tubesites were targeted in a coordinated media campaign that used questionable content on their sites to successfully interrupt their credit card billing access via Visa and Mastercard. My guess is that xHamster saw that attack go down, did a quick internal review of vulnerabilities, and removed the entire erotic stories section out of fear that unpleasant content in there would open them up to similar attacks.
Story sites, as all who frequent them know, accumulate some really bizarre stories when not moderated. I don’t use the word “perversion” lightly, but I feel safe in saying you will get a comprehensive tour of human perversion when exploring any really big story site. The notorious and long-ago arrest of Jake Baker for posting snuff stories to alt.sex.stories notwithstanding, sex story archives have frequently been an “anything goes” medium for over-the-top erotic expression. Blood-on-the-walls splatter-gore, cannibalism, piss and poop and vomit, incest between people of all ages, and other squicky stuff that’s too odd to describe in a few short words: it’s all in there.
Now, I never frequented xHamster’s offering, and thus I can’t say whether or how well they moderated their stories. Maybe they didn’t have any of the wildly perverted stuff. Odds are, though, whatever they did have panicked them. They saw other tubes under attack, and it dawned on them how readily their most unpleasant story content could be weaponized against their billing. Since the stories likely weren’t much of a profit center… Boom! The pornocalypse came, real sudden-like.
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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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October 13th, 2020 -- by Bacchus
According to Twitter, yesterday:
there is an online vertebrate palaeontology conference going on right now, and the automatic censor is blocking anyone from using the word “bone”
There’s no word on which bone-headed virtual conference software tool was responsible for this enormous boner. But another participant reported:
It’s also censoring “Hell,” so no one can mention the Hell Creek Formation. They’re now referring to it as the “Heck Creek Formation.”
This sort of stupid nonsense is what happens when you build nanny filters into your core tools. Somebody needs to tell tech companies to cut it the hell out!
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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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