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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
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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June 25th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Remember last week when I blogged about rumors that Google was disabling certain shortlinks built using the Goo.gl link shortener, if the link targets were porn sites? Well, thanks to a pair of tweets from Rain DeGrey attempting to share a photo from HardTied.com, right now you can see that that little chunk of the #pornocalypse in live action. Here are the tweets:
And sure enough, if you click the goo.gl link in that first tweet, right now Google is serving you this instead of the photo Rain linked to:
The only sentence in the two policy links Google offers that seems even remotely relevant is this one: “Do not use this service for spamming or linking to content that may harm other users.”
The modern state of Google’s anti-spam software: there’s a rule in there that assumes that porn and spam are the same thing. Don’t be evil? My ass.
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June 17th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
This is Violet Blue’s story, and all I know about it is contained in this tweet by her:
I hope and imagine that once she’s done the reporting, it will form the basis of one of her excellent columns for ZDnet.
However, I have some observations.
First, I don’t like shortlinks, never have. They always struck me as a bad idea because they obscure the link target. Every click on a shortened link is a leap into the unknown.
Shortlinks, if you didn’t know, are online services that take a long link and translate it into a much shorter one. Then they maintain a database of the translations and when anybody hits the short link, they are directed to the service, which provides the long link and forwards the surfer onward to that long link destination.
But what happens if the shortener service goes bankrupt, is acquired and shut down, is destroyed by circumstances beyond its control, decides to stop faithfully forwarding some or all links, or is compelled by judicial process or shadowy official menace to stop faithfully forwarding links?
These problems — at least one of which is inevitable in the fullness of time — are behind my second and third objections to link shorteners.
In the long enough run, every shortened link will be broken, even if the site that used it and the site it pointed to are both still there by some miracle. The connection will be lost to history, and lots of broken links in web archives and such will be obscure that would not be obscure if the original, long, somewhat informative link had been used instead. This is a big enough problem that Jason Scot’s Archive Team maintains an always-on spidering project that’s attempting to preserve the destinations of as many shortened links as possible.
More immediately and more urgently, you have to trust link-shortening services, but there’s no reason for them to be inherently trustworthy. Most are free services, so you’re not even a customer they would need to care about protecting to the limited extent that corporations care about individual customers these days. They have the power to redirect a shortened link anywhere they want, or to simply break it, and they can do this on a link-by-link basis, on the basis of disliking certain link destinations (as appears may be the case with the story behind Violet Blue’s tweet), or they could do it to all of the links they’ve shortened. Nothing stops them from doing any of this, and nobody has the right to demand they behave differently or better when they do it.
That’s a lot of power-over-your-communications to give away to a third party in exchange for a little convenience. I’ve never really understood why people do it. As a blanket proposition, I would argue that link shorteners suck.
This thread in the appropriate Google support forum dates to 2011, and a close reading shows that Google’s link shortener sucks a little bit more than most because they’ve long been in the habit of letting an automated algorithm declare certain link targets to be “spam” and then disabling the shortened links to them. That thread is full of legitimate users complaining that their shortened links (often the ones in places like sent email newsletters where the person who created the short link has no editing power to replace it with a working one) are broken. In typical Google fashion, these users are left crying into the wind; there is no recourse and scant hope of ever gaining human attention, mercy, or correction of the “error”.
My speculation and prediction is that Google would claim (will claim, if they can ever be induced to respond at all) that Naked Sword was not targeted specifically; rather, the notion would be that the Naked Sword shortlinks were determined to be spam by the implacable and unaccountable software machine. My own gloss on that is that Google’s rolling #Pornocalypse sweeps all porn before it. The company is so hostile to porn that it increasingly treats all porn as spam. (Anybody who has watched the decline in quality of porn-oriented searches on Google knows what I mean by this.)
There are more and more of these situations in the world where we communicate using services provided by faceless and unaccountable corporate actors. There’s no recourse to be had when they decide that one person, one company, or one industry should no longer be heard. It’s not even censorship, it’s just silencing induced by corporate distaste. Less dramatically, there’s nothing to be done when they program their robots to not really give a damn whether a given porn-industry communication is an unwanted commercial solicitation (spam) or a desired and requested communication. The robots don’t give a damn because Google doesn’t give a damn; the concept of a “legitimate porn link” seems not even to be on their radar.
And thus does the #Pornocalypse come for shortened links.
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June 9th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Keeping track of the details of Amazon’s many waves of crackdown on the self-published erotica that supported the Kindle’s early success is too complicated and “inside baseball” for me to keep up with; however, it does appear that another one of those corporate censorship waves is cresting just now. For details, I’ll turn you over to subject-matter expert Selena Kitt, who reports that Amazon is targeting dark erotic romance and BDSM now:
Heads up authors: Amazon is targeting erotica again. This time, it’s “Dark Erotic Romance” (read: DubCon and NonCon) and BDSM. I hate to say I told you so — but I told you so.
…
Now Amazon has started filtering and banning BDSM simply for being BDSM. For some books, it’s all about perception. Titles with obvious references to abduction, kidnapping and reluctance are being culled. Descriptions with those identifiers are also being removed. And of course, covers are being targeted, now including things specific to domination and submission—chains, ropes, handcuffs, all the markers of the genre, may get a book banned.
There’s also a new level of search filtering to make double-triple sure that adult books don’t appear anywhere in searches on Amazon; basically you have to search, fail, and then click a fine-print link to reveal what you were searching for in the first place:
But there’s another feature that’s popped up in the past few weeks that is a little alarming for erotica authors under the ADULT filter. Now, when your book is filtered, not only does it not appear under an “All Department Search,” as well as showing up very last in any search results in the Kindle store, regardless of title or keywords — it now doesn’t even show up in the Kindle Store initial search results. Now a reader has to click the “excluding adult items” link in order to see an ADULT filtered book.
In related news, this excerpt (or possibly, summary; it’s unclear) of an email Amazon sent to some authors about cover guidelines got posted to twitter:
No side-boob, people! Auntie Amazon does not approve of side-boob!
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May 1st, 2014 -- by Bacchus
There have been reports for quite some time about porn stars having their bank accounts cancelled for no good reason that their banks would admit. Now comes word — in the form of an extended speculation at Vice.com — that the driving force behind this banking crackdown on adult customers is in fact the Department of Justice:
News is slowly surfacing that shows the US Department of Justice may be strong-arming banks into banning porn stars.
It’s called Operation Choke Point, and it has nothing to do with deep-throating.
Instead, it’s a targeted effort to shut down as many as 30 separate industries by making it impossible for them to access banking services.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Thursday, American Bankers Association CEO Frank Keating wrote that the Justice Department is “telling bankers to behave like policemen and judges.”
“Operation Choke Point is asking banks to identify customers who may be breaking the law or simply doing something government officials don’t like,” Keating wrote. “Banks must then ‘choke off’ those customers’ access to financial services, shutting down their accounts.”
Keating said the highly secretive operation was launched in early 2013. That’s when porn stars started to complain to the media that their bank accounts were being shut down without explanation.
And while the actors are quick to blame banks like Chase and Bank of America for discrimination, those institutions may in fact have no choice.
“If a bank doesn’t shut down a questionable account when directed to do so, Justice slaps the institution with a penalty for wrongdoing that may or may not have happened,” Keating wrote.
Reading between the lines, there seems to be (as yet) no solid evidence that the porn industry is among the 30 separate industries that’s being secretly targeted by “Operation Choke Point”. But it does offer a better explanation than corporate prurience for the banking difficulties adult performers have been routinely encountering of late.
Thanks to Violet Blue for the link.
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October 21st, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Apparently this statue is at the center of a controversy in Kansas, where the raving loonies are having a second try at getting it declared legally obscene:
The American Civil Liberties Union is on the case (naturally enough) and recently they made a FaceBook post about it that included a photo of the statue. Facebook deleted it. And gave the freakin’ ACLU a 24-hour posting ban for having posted it:
We at the ACLU were reassured of one thing this past weekend: Facebook’s chest-recognition detectors are fully operational. A recent post of ours, highlighting my blog post about an attempt to censor controversial public art in Kansas, was itself deemed morally unfit for Facebook. The whole episode is a reminder that corporate censorship is bad policy and bad business.
The blog is about a kerfuffle over a statue in a public park outside Kansas City: a nude woman taking a selfie of her own exposed bronze breasts. A group of citizens organized by the American Family Association believes the statue to be criminally obscene (it isn’t), and has begun a petition process to haul the sculpture to court (really, they are). Our Facebook post included a link to the blog post and a photo of the statue in question.
Our intrepid Digital Media Associate, Rekha Arulanantham, got word on Sunday that the Facebook post had been deleted, and was no longer viewable by our Facebook followers or anyone else. I duly informed my Kansas colleague Holly Weatherford that the photograph she’d taken had prompted a social media blackout. Then, astoundingly, on Tuesday morning Rekha discovered the ACLU had been blocked from posting for 24 hours, with a message from Facebook warning us these were the consequences for repeat violations of its policy.
We were flabbergasted; we hadn’t tried to republish the offending post or the associated rack. So, just to get this straight: the ACLU’s post on censorship was shut down–not once, but twice–for including a picture of, and a political discussion about, a statue standing in a Kansas park.
Of course, the ACLU can get access to real humans at FaceBook in a way that normal people probably can’t:
There was no “appeal” button, and we were unable to find a page where we could report or challenge the post’s deletion. The best option appeared to be a generic Facebook content form, designed to receive any input at all about a “Page.” We got a response: a canned email informing us that Facebook “can’t respond to individual feedback emails.” Not exactly promising.
But we have an advantage most Facebook users don’t: We’re a national non-profit with media access and a public profile. So we tracked down Facebook’s public policy manager, and emailed him about our dilemma. His team was immediately responsive, looked into it promptly, and told us that the post was “mistakenly removed” (and then “accidentally removed again”). Here’s what Facebook wrote to us:
We apologize for this error. Unfortunately, with more than a billion users and the hundreds of thousands of reports we process each week, we occasionally make a mistake. We hope that we’ve rectified the mistake to your satisfaction.
Facebook then restored the original post.
…
our ultimate success is cold comfort for anyone who has a harder time getting their emails returned than does the ACLU. It’s unlikely that our experience is representative of the average aggrieved Facebook user. For most, that generic form and the canned response are as good as it’s currently going to get.
Indeed.
To be fair, this isn’t really a #pornocalypse story despite my post title. I’ve been using the pornocalypse buzzword and hashtag for stories about big internet companies who got big by being porn-friendly (or, at least, apathetic or agnostic about adult content on their platforms) who later inevitably decide to crack down on it and remove it in an attempt to be more attractive for investors, advertisers, and mainstream public opinion. Facebook, by contrast, has never been nudity-friendly as far as I know. This is really more of a cautionary tale about the doomed and foolish idea that you can machine-filter out nudity and sexual content without disrupting important grownup conversations (political, medical, et cetera) that you presumably actually do want on your social media platform. (I say “presumably” with some skepticism, though. In a world full of squeamish advertisers, perhaps FaceBook really would prefer that the ACLU doesn’t discuss a controversial nude statue. But if so, they have to know they can’t admit that out loud while still claiming to offer a functional social-media platform.)
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