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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
March 16th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
Twitter has been “the only major adult-friendly social media” for quite some time now, and thus I’ve been saying for awhile that it was about due for some hot #Pornocalypse action. And now it’s here, in the form of some porn killwords silently added to the default “Top Tweets” presentation of Twitter search results:
Violet Blue included the news in her weekly roundup yesterday, and she credits a tweet from Crash Pad Series for spotting it.
Violet and friends have been working out which porn words are blocked on Twitter. So far #porn, #bondage, #femdom, #revengeporn, and #phonesex have come up in their discussion. Violet says “one of the things I hate about sex censorship is that it renders previously useful tools into unreliable and inaccurate tools” as is illustrated by this tweet:
I decided to do a little exploring. #Spanking still returns “top” results (I guess the thinking is that we don’t want to stop parents from talking about how precisely they should go about beating their precious darlings) as does #enemas (don’t want to harsh that trendy coffee-enema health craze!). #Fisting, though, gets the double-deathkiss; Twitter first offers you #fishing results, then says it has no top fisting results if you demand to “Search instead for fisting”:
#Buttfucking and #rimming? Blocked. #Pussy, #cunt, and #vagina are all blocked. But #dick and #penis are fine, because men I guess.
Let’s be double clear what we mean by “blocked” here. So far, there are no reports of any killwords being applied to the “all tweets” search. You can still find this stuff with an extra click. The block is being applied to the “Top Tweets” functionality, which of course is the default search result presentation. What is a “Top Tweet”? Twitter says:
When you search on Twitter.com, you can toggle between “Top”, “All”, and “People you follow” results. Clicking “Top” shows popular Tweets that many other Twitter users have engaged with and thought were useful.
We’ve built an algorithm that finds the Tweets that have caught the attention of other users. Top Tweets will refresh automatically and are surfaced for popularly-retweeted subjects based on this algorithm. We do not hand-select Top Tweets.
I’ll close out this post with a not-unexpected irony: there are no “top tweets” displayed for #Pornocalypse.
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February 24th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
This is huge:
Violet Blue has all the details at ZDNet:
Every Blogger user behind an “adult content warning” page was told Monday by Google to delete sexually explicit content, or find their blog removed from every form of access except registered users.
Until today, Google’s Blogger platform previously allowed “images or videos that contain nudity or sexual activity,” and stated that “Censoring this content is contrary to a service that bases itself on freedom of expression.”
That changed on a whim Monday when Google ripped the rug out from under its previously-compliant Blogger users, who were told they’d be disappeared if Google decided their blogs contain “sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video.”
Rather than leave its already-restricted adult content alone, Google has told Blogger users it will be eliminating all adult blogs from public access on March 23, 2015, (and taking them out of all forms of search).
Blogger blogs with adult content which — at this time — are findable in search will be deep-sixed from the Internet once the changes take effect.
It’s worth noting that the vast majority of adult blogspot/blogger blogs are, at this time, moribund. Which means that nobody will be bring them into compliance. And when they go dark in a month, a huge proportion of the links in the sex blogosphere will break.
I have said it before. I will say it again. Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own domain that you control. If you use a free service to post adult material, that free service will, eventually, fuck you. (Not in the nice way.)
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January 30th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
It’s not a perfect article, but I can’t really complain about any coverage of the #Pornocalypse that opens with my line about it:
If you sift through #Pornocalypse for even a short while you will see a familiar message cropping up again and again: ‘The pornocalypse comes for us all.’
It may not yet have the tradition and durability of doom-laden portents like ‘The End Is Nigh’, but the Pornocalypse is real; it’s happening every day and affecting a great number of people.
While the adult biz has always been wary of the mild witch hunt vibes that provide its background noise, the past few months have seen attackers from all sides try and cut the power that lights up the sex business.
That’s from Pornocalypse: The End Of The F*cking World? by Joseph Viney at BaDoink.
I’m quoted at some length, as is Ms. Naughty, who offers her own formulation of Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet:
“The warning I would give anyone who deals with adult content is this: don’t trust your business to a third party. Because they will inevitably try to censor you. Buy a domain, host it yourself (on an adult-friendly host), make sure you have total control of that content. Your livelihood is too important to trust to a “free” service. There will always be someone who complains and then you’ll have someone on minimum wage making major decisions about what porn is.”
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January 3rd, 2015 -- by Bacchus
In her lengthy intro to a pair of business articles written by sex workers, Violet Blue writes about some of the business challenges she faces as an independent businesswoman in the business of writing about sex. I can’t speak to the challenges specifically faced by women, but there remain many resonances in this that are bitterly familiar to me, a man in the business of writing and blogging about sex and porn:
I’ll just put it this way: If it wasn’t for sex censorship by so many major companies, financial institutions, tools and platforms, I’d *only* have to face the typical set of challenges all women face who run their own business. The limitations of censorship, plus the danger of doing business with companies who routinely deal unfairly (and occasionally behave harmfully) to independent businesses/businesspeople (whose business might be sex-related), has absolutely hurt me as a businessperson.
That’s everything from having my name blacklisted in search engine autocompletes, to getting accounts revoked without actually breaking any rules, being disallowed to advertise (or take advertising) through everyday channels like AdSense, worrying payment processors and social media sites (and more) will delete my account, unable to plan around Amazon and Google who may de-list (or deep-six) sexuality searches without notice, being unable to do a Kickstarter or put an app about human sexuality in Apple or Google’s marketplaces, constantly being reported on sites I have accounts on simply because some people think what I do is wrong, not being able to use any of the decent mailing list companies to have a newsletter… I could go on.
I just write about sex. That’s it.
I’m not even a sex worker, a porn maker, nor have I ever been a porn performer – what they (mostly female entrepreneurs, natch) go through trying to run their businesses is so beyond unfair, it paralyzes me with anger sometimes to think about it.
So I have to approach business differently; none of the formulas – or even tools and services – available to everyday, independent women in business are actually available to me. I imagine that if the playing field were even, I might be as financially stable (or even thriving) as many of my friends are.
She’s not wrong. At least once a week I have some business notion in the adult space, and 99% of the time that notion doesn’t survive five minutes of serious thought. “That would be great, but there’s no reliable way to get paid without PayPal or credit cards.” “Awesome, but I can’t finance the start-up costs, not even with crowd-funding.” “How on earth could we market such a thing without access to social media?” “No way would that app ever get into the app stores.” Yes, there are workarounds and expensive middlemen (they do always seem to be men) and kludges and sneaky back doors and potential ways to bootstrap. Nothing is impossible, but in time it begins to feel like running a marathon in a fat-suit.
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September 10th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Under fire from a variety of different directions, the crowd-funding platform GoFundMe, which had hitherto been one of the most relaxed of the crowdfunding platforms, just banned a whole raft of different types of fundraisers. This Washington Post article has the whole story. The part that’s relevant to the sex-positive world: as part of the changes, GoFundMe substantially beefed up its prohibition against fundraising that touches upon any of the adult industries. Here is what the GoFundMe terms of service had to say on the subject as of August 24:
You may not use the GoFundMe service for activities that … relate to sales of … items that are considered obscene [or] certain sexually oriented materials or services.
Pretty vague, and certainly GoFundMe was never adult-friendly. But the new terms they announced yesterday are rather more dramatically pronounced in their condemnation of porn and sex and anybody who admits to having anything to do with those things:
In order to ensure a positive experience for all visitors, the purpose of your GoFundMe campaign must not relate to any of the following items.
Adult Material
Sexually explicit
Sexually suggestive
Adult services or products
Pornography of any kind
Cosmetic sexual enhancements
Relating to adult industry
Content associated with or relating to any of the items above.
Of course that right there is a badly-written word salad that can mean whatever they want it to mean. But it’s very clear what they do mean: “No smut, and nothing to help smutty people. Go away, smutty people. Go far away.”
The Pornocalypse comes for us all, and yesterday it came for GoFundMe.
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August 5th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Here’s Aurora Snow writing about what it’s like being a porn star with a FaceBook account:
Why did Facebook delete me?
Or, I should say, why did Facebook delete my account three times? Yes, three times.
Exactly what prompts the social network to erase porn stars accounts even when they abide by the rules is something of a mystery. Maybe it’s the hard nipples protruding from a silk shirt or the Wonder Woman pose in lingerie. Or perhaps it’s the shock of seeing a bubble butt popping out of a skimpy bikini. It could be offensive language. You know, like, “Have a naughty Saturday” or “come play with my pussy” (with a picture of a kitty cat).
Then again, maybe it’s just because they’re porn stars.
Regular people frequently post the same content without fear of censorship. Think about how much time you spend posting photos and talking to “friends” in the comments. Some people upload content to Facebook for the perpetual online access it provides. We imagine it’ll be there forever. If your computer crashes or your home catches fire your content remains safe and secure in your virtual scrapbook. It’s all in the cloud.
Unless of course you happen to be a porn star.
I was devastated the first time I was deleted, and dumbfounded each time thereafter. Sure I’ve posted a few bikini photos, but nothing that wasn’t family appropriate. The photos I posted were conservative by porn standards and less sexually suggestive than most magazine covers.
Yet my accounts were deleted when I supposedly violated the terms of use. I lost contact with friends and acquaintances, irreplaceable photos from mobile uploads, and my faith in social media. Maybe my photos were flagged by a religious zealot trying to save my soul, or perhaps one of my “friends” wrote a derogatory comment beneath it. I wrote the word “ass” on a Twitter post that linked to my Facebook account and was shut down shortly thereafter. It could have been coincidence. Since my inquiries as to why it happened were ignored, I really don’t know.
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August 4th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Since I didn’t ever watch Friends back in the day, I really didn’t know who Julia Louis-Dreyfus even was until a fake-nude of her turned up (doubly-mislabeled) during the great frenzy to find nude photos of Sarah Palin after Palin became John McCain’s running mate back in 2008. But Louis-Dreyfus is indisputably a pretty big celebrity. And now she’s been banned from FaceBook for posting her own baby picture. In her own words:
BAN BAN BAN! No, no, no, insensitive material, inappropriate, blah, bla-bla blah blah, and I’m like “what?” And I keep trying to get in, change my password, absolutely not, they think I’m some sort of pervert, posting baby pictures, naked baby pictures. It’s me!
Here she’s telling David Letterman all about it. The baby picture is in the clip, but I’m gonna let Worldwide Pants and YouTube do the heavy lifting of showing it to you, they’ve got a lot more lawyers than I do:
I tell you what, if the #pornocalypse can sweep up Julia Louis-Dreyfus, there ain’t nobody safe. Automatic censorship by stupid robots, I tell you it’s the wave of the future!
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