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The Sex Blog Of Record
Sunday, 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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Wednesday, March 18th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
I was not planning to link to yesterday’s article in Buzzfeed about the Twitter #Pornocalypse news from Monday, because Buzzfeed did that oh-so-annoying thing that mainstream “press” does where they publish a thinly-rewritten version of news that first appeared on adult sites, without crediting any of the sites that broke the story. (In this case that would be Crash Pad Series, Violet Blue, and me.) But, also annoyingly, the mainstream story is typically the one that generates a meaningful response from corporate PR flacks, and that was true this time as well. Buzzfeed’s story is now updated with this news:
UPDATE
According to a Twitter spokesperson, the limited search results on adult content were the result of a bug that occurred during some algorithmic tweaks to Twitter’s search function. “We recently made some changes to improve the algorithm that fetches the most relevant content for Top Tweets in search results.” The spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “A bug was discovered that caused us to aggressively filter some content from Top Tweets inadvertently. We’re working to correct the issue.” March 17, 2015, at 10:11 p.m.
I’m rather skeptical that this “bug” was actually a bug. If you’ll recall, Tumblr’s David Karp quite implausibly claimed (after a firestorm of user protest) that big portions of their #pornocalypse flirtation back in 2013 were “never intended” and “have been fixed”. My cynical suspicion is that “it was a bug” is becoming the #pornocalypse version of “it was a rogue intern” — the excuse trotted out when a company is embarrassed by something they would prefer had gone unremarked by the world at large.
For what it’s worth, the adult press did a much better job of reporting on this story yesterday:
AVN: Hey Twitter, The Search Query Was For Fisting, Not Fishing!
XBIZ: Twitter Reportedly Clamping Down on Porn Search Results
However, personal memo to Stephen Yagielowicz at XBIZ: it’s sort of cheating to present text that comes from a Twitter FAQ page as comments sourced to “a Twitter spokesperson”. If you didn’t communicate with an actual spokesperson, you’re letting your readers think your information is fresher than it is; and if you did communicate with an actual spokesperson who refused to say anything except to quote from the online FAQ, that would have been newsworthy and worth mentioning!
Update:
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Monday, 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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Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Erosblog’s first post went live on October 3, 2002: Is This Sex Blog Thing On? That was ten years ago, which makes us like 70 in dog years (or internet years, take your pick). Surprisingly enough, there have been 3,652 posts since then; as close to a post a day as anybody could want. Plus, 16,772 non-spam comments. Thanks to everybody for reading and participating!
I have to shout out for the three other sex bloggers who were at it before I was and who are still at it; there may be others, but these are the ones I know about and remember, who were there when I started, who I found early on, who have kept at it, and who are still here. Violet, BJ, Daze — it’s been a hell of a decade. There’ve been dozens who came later, who told us (and the world) they knew more about how to do it, who did it harder or louder, or who (maybe) did it better. But we are still here, and most of those others are not. Survival is the ultimate measure of success, no?
I also have to acknowledge Indie Nudes — an ancient and venerable “list of links” that has survived and thrived like some ancient dinosaur turtle. Lists of carefully chosen links were the way the web was organized, for a few years a long long time ago, before blogs and even before decent search engines (*cough* AltaVista *cough*). So, when Erosblog was pretty new, Indie Nudes put me on their list. They’ve kept me there ever since, and they send surprising traffic; nobody but Google sends me more. I don’t know who runs it or why they keep doing it, but thanks!
There have been lots of changes since ErosBlog was a mere puppy. The architecture has changed a bunch of times; when I started, I used a desktop blogging client for Windows called simply “BLOG”. Eventually I updated to Graymatter, but I was late to the party and its evolution was slowing down right at a time when challenges (especially in the area of comment spam) were speeding up. WordPress was the next obvious step, and by now (how many templates later?) it’s such an old friend as a content management system that I use it for everything, even things that look nothing like blogs. If all a man has is a hammer, everything looks like a nail…
Just as many changes in my life. When I started, I was single and lonely, and I had a professional job, with a tie and a (very small) office that put me one tiny step away from cubicle hell (just outside my door). I quit that job (for the second time) just days after ErosBlog went live, when the boss who was keeping the place afloat took a political appointment. I’ve been self-employed (at various things) ever since, and I couldn’t even tell you whether I still own a tie; if I do, it’s in a box in deep storage somewhere. Like most people who aren’t part of the metastasizing financial-services-and-megacorps conglomerate behemoth that’s eating the world, I’m poorer than I was ten years ago and a lot poorer than I was when I was lucky to be climbing the inflating side of the last bubble. But I’m living somewhere they can’t take away from me, I’ve got a good woman who loves me slumbering in our bed as I type this, I’ve got a big dog (who also loves me) slumbering protectively just inside my front door, and there’s pease porridge in my crockpot that’s been simmering fragrantly all night with a chopped onion and a hint of cumin. So life is excellent by any reasonable measure.
Changes in the sex blogging world? Wow. Blogging was a thing, had been for a couple-few years, when ErosBlog got going. But sex blogging as a category? I wasn’t first to do it, not by a long shot; but I think I may have been the first person to put “Sex Blogs” in my sidebar as a blogging category. Eventually it got real popular and it seemed like everybody was doing it. Even the SEO spam robots were doing it for awhile; they’d scrape actual blog posts, mash them up and change a few words out with a thesaurus program, and then bung them back up on the web somewhere as bait for GoogleBot. Now, of course, we’re on the downside of the slope; blogs are old and boring, more “stable place to put my essays” than “exciting community where I make my connections”. The web itself is changing in the era of Facebook and Twitter and the smartphone and the ecosystem of apps; people are looking at it in different ways, on smaller screens, from more places, in shorter bursts, if somebody tweets a link perhaps. Links in sidebars are as dead as webrings as a way of moving traffic around, to the point where a lot of things-that-look-like-blogs don’t link out to anybody at all and sidebars are going away as people do mobile-friendly redesigns. People still stare at screens for amusement, but almost everything about the process (when they do it, how they do it, how they decide what to stare at, how they find what to stare at) has changed.
Where in all this do sex blogs fit it, in the waning month of 2012? Well, people still like reading about sex and viewing dirty pictures, and they all have these miraculous and awesome (I think so anyway; that’s how you can tell I’m old) little always-connected internet devices in their pockets now. Even if “blogs” finish going away and “surfing the web” has become hopelessly quaint, there’s got to be some way to keep on doing what we do (find sexy stuff, pull it together, make a few wise-ass remarks about it, entertain the folk). Our challenge as sex bloggers (or whatever we become when blogging is as dead as carriage racing) is the same as it always was: to do it well enough to be valued, to earn and maintain the attention of our readers in an overstimulated world where attention is the scarcest currency.
In 2007 I asked “Will there be a Ten Candles post on October 3, 2012?” In my secret heart, I was pretty damned sure the answer was “yes”. I’m delighted to have been right. But what about the future? Will ErosBlog still be here in 2017? I’m less confident than I was in 2007; I grow older and move more slowly, while the world speeds up and accelerates into the future. But I’m persistent, and I’m stubborn. Unless I stop being entertained by porn (which seems unlikely) I can’t imagine not having bits of it that need pointed at and talked about. So, just as I did in 2007, I’ll say “I truly do hope so!”
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Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 -- by Bacchus
This sets off all my “is probably an internet hoax” filters. But it’s funny even if it’s not true:
When a man in the UK was asked to be the best man at his friend’s wedding, he was touched. So touched, that he promised not to pull any pranks before or during the wedding. After the wedding though, that’s another story.
This man, who is choosing to stay anonymous, has set up this Twitter account for the sole purpose of automatically tweeting when the newlyweds are having sex. I’m not kidding. Read the entire tweet stream from the bottom up if you want the full story. But basically, this guy was watching his friend’s house while they went on their honeymoon and he placed a device under their mattress. This device…is a pressure-sensitive pad that tweets out when sexual activity starts, when it ends, the force of the “action,” and a “frenzy” rating.
High tech voyeurism! And not the last such device we’ll be hearing about, I’m sure…
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 -- by Bacchus
Whatever I was expecting from my new Twitter account, I can tell you truly, I did not really anticipate it would be a fertile source of answers for that age-old question: What should I blog about today?
And yet, this morning in my Twitter stream I found the following, any one of which I could churn into a full blog post on a slow day:
- @violetblue asking “wondering: what sex toy changed your life?” My flip-sounding answer (but it’s true!): “WordPress. (And its ancestors.)” The beauty of Twitter is that I can just say that and let people unpack it for themselves, whereas if I said it here, I’d need eighteen paragraphs of exposition. But @MollyRen has part of it: “Sex blogs changed my life. For the 1st time I found out what people were *really* doing, met awesome people through them.”
- @mistressmatisse linking to her Stranger column about shooting for Kink.com The excellent quote I would have used to pad a link-post about this item:
Before we began shooting, I asked Bobbi about her limits. She eyed me a little warily. “Don’t slap me in the face–someone dislocated my jaw that way. And don’t call me a stupid whore or spit in my face.”
I was slightly taken aback. It isn’t that I’ve never done those things. (Except the “stupid whore” part; I don’t like that brand of verbal humiliation.) But I wouldn’t do them to someone I just met unless he or she very specifically asked for that. I suppose it’s different in porn, but I assured her that wasn’t my style of domination.
So Bobbi and I got along just fine.
- @rollertrain (Rollertrain! I’ve missed you terribly since you left us for art school and moved to a not-many-words PG-13 Tumblr…) passing along a link that informed me of a woman who died after elective buttock-enhancement surgery.
- @MollyRen again, this time her profile link: “Stuffies: A blog about food and sex“. Leading directly to a question for Faustus: Do you suppose feederism, with its sometimes interest in controlling body size/shape in a real and concrete way, has anything in common with the fantastical shrinking women and inflation fantasies you’ve blogged about? (And, yes, I’m aware of the awkwardness of specifying “fantastical fantasies” — but how else to contrast a fantasy that cannot come true, from the great many achievable ones?)
All that hit me inside of ninety seconds, whilst I was still blinking the sleep from my eyes. My head, it’s swimming I tell you!
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 -- by Bacchus
I scoffed. I balked. I dug in my heels like a crochety old person. Kids these days, and their newfangled fads. It will never amount to anything, I said. Waste of my time. If I wanted to send funny little short messages, I’d have texting enabled on my cell phone. Blah blah blah.
Meanwhile, the world kept right on changing without me.
Slow I may be, but I am finally figuring it out: people I find interesting are having conversations I want to know about, and they’re doing it on Twitter.
So, here goes. My Twitter name is: ErosBlogBacchus.
Better late than never, eh?
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