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Pornocalypse Comes For Kink Education

Wednesday, September 6th, 2023 -- by Bacchus

Speaking honestly, I’ve sort of let my #pornocalypse coverage lapse recently. Not much has changed in years; corporate social media keeps tightening the noose, formerly adult-friendly places become less so. On the one hand we still have the old-fashioned open web, with the freedom to publish on adult topics but without much access to traffic or to the financial system. The freedom to sleep under a bridge, right?

meme of the space under a highway bridge, studded with concrete pyramids to prevent human access, superimposed with the Anatole France quote about how the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges

On the other hand, we have the infamous five websites, which is where all the people are, and from which they mostly will not migrate nor follow any links.

famous five websites filled with screenshots tweet by Tom Eastman

Adult material and links are mostly not welcome there, on the five websites, except to the extent that that this material is disguised from the machine censors by cutesy emojis and twee circumlocutions. If you’re a “spicy accountant” or a “mattress actress”, a lover of “quink” or a “corn” aficionado, a fan of big eggplants or women whose peach icons sometimes spray cartoon raindrops, corporate social media is very much for you.

eggplant peach eggplant peach eggplant peach squirt squirt squirt squirt

So yeah, I’ve grown tired of the #pornocalypse beat, and I’ve let lots and lots of pornocalyptic stories glide by without any of my commentary. But yesterday, Pandora / Blake (perhaps best known to ErosBlog readers as the director and publisher of Dreams Of Spanking), published an open Patreon post discussing their frustration at the recent deletion of their kink education channel on YouTube.

Blake, also sometimes professionally known as Pandora Blake

Blake’s treatment exemplifies the recent trend in #pornocalypse behavior by the major social media platforms that I first wrote about back in May:

Increasingly the hot new trend in #pornocalypse is social media platforms banning accounts and people not for what they posted/linked, but merely because of who they are. Biggest example was PornHub getting banned from Instagram despite having a whole team of lawyers and creatives making sure their Insta account broke no rules. It’s frustrating, and it’s why I never have the courage to try anything effortful on adult-hostile social media channels.

It used to be common for porn-hostile platforms to tolerate porn-adjacent people, sex educations, and even sex workers, as long as the platform’s specific TOS against adult material were complied with. For many people, this was workable; they’d ride the ragged edge of the TOS for months or a few years, getting specific posts banned and enduring shadow bans, until eventually (and with great pain) they’d lose an account after too many strikes and have to start all over again. You could make a living that way, if you didn’t tire. But, over time, I started noticing that specific TOS compliance stopped mattering. All over porn-hostile social media, people started losing accounts not for any specific violations, but simply because of who they were. If their public identity was too identified with adult topics, they would be banned without warning or appeal, never knowing which posts gave institutional offense. Thus, Blake’s experience:

I’ve been publishing videos on YouTube since 2014, throughout my campaigns against UK porn censorship and age verification. For the last two or three years I’ve been regularly posting original kink education videos, many of which I’ve accompanied with transcripts here on Patreon. The channel mostly consisted of these fully clothed talky adult education videos on topics ranging across consent, BDSM, porn, feminism, queerness, and organisational and self-care strategies. It also included video podcast style interviews with other educators, interviews with adult performers, political campaign videos, and a few carefully cut trailers for spanking films that showed no sex or nudity, but either clothed character interactions and plot snippets (in the case of multi-performer videos) or excerpts from clothed POV fetish talk videos. I suspect it was these latter videos that fell afoul of the content policy, but I have no way of knowing.

None of the videos on my channel included sex or nudity. I avoided posting links to any adult sites in the video descriptions, linking to Patreon and mxblake.com instead. … I’m furious that a channel 90% of which consisted of educational material about consensual pleasure and LGBTQIA issues has been summarily deleted without any option to review or edit the content. Was it just those few talky trailers which YouTube objected to so much, or is the entire project of BDSM education in itself too risqué for YouTube?

My speculation is that the answer is “neither”. Rather, I suspect that one or more videos generated enough algorithmic red flags to fall under human eyes, and the human in question applied the new-ish unofficial #pornocalypse policy that’s been spreading so rapidly throughout corporate social media: “If the entity who posted this is any kind of pornographer or sex worker, nuke their whole stinkyporny channel and get them off the platform. Fuck the terms of service! Those words only mean what we pay them to mean, no more and no less.”

nuked by social media crude digital collage

For me, the event that dropped the final scale from my eyes was when PornHub got banned from Instagram. If it ever made sense to go dancing with the social media devil while accepting your periodic lumps from the censorship algorithms, it no longer does, in my opinion. PornHub has a whole professional social media team, complete with content creators, editors, and as much legal support as they need. You can guarantee that they posted nothing that contravened Instagram’s TOS, not by the least jot or tittle. Did it matter? No. Throw them into the pit! You and I? We’re not going to fare any better.

I don’t have any solutions to offer, and anyway Blake explicitly isn’t asking for any. So I’ll leave you with Blake’s powerful summary of the state of the #Pornocalypse in 2023:

I mourn the loss of the open internet that was promised us in the early 2000s. My cyberpunk dreams of open peer-to-peer communication and free expression have been repeatedly thwarted, and I’m so angry about it. Fuck Google, their YouTube takeover, and their long-standing policy of devaluing adult sites in search results. Fuck Elon Musk for turning Twitter into his own personal ego trip, and a hotbed of Nazism and transphobia. Fuck Meta for taking over Instagram and enforcing their “family friendly” policies in a way that forces grown adult sex educators to talk about “s3x”, “quink” and “spicy corn”. Fuck Tiktok too, while I’m at it. I hate that in order to reach an audience we’re forced into these privately-owned silos which loathe everything to do with consensual adult sexuality, and which have the power to remove our access to social connectivity at the whim of a badly-trained algorithm.

All of this, every word.

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Talking To Trolls

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 -- by Bacchus

Julie Meadows is obviously a better person than I am, or at least she has a greater reserve of patience and humanitarian goodwill. I myself wouldn’t even dream of trying to engage the spewers of filth in the comments at YouTube; on her blog, she not only engages them, but tries to help them. Example:

I get it, I get it, you’re angry, you hate all “whores”, and like so many other underage people with angst, you’re taking out your frustations by bullying people on YouTube. What is it with YouTube and angry boys? The videos? The opportunity to be entertained and annoy? I will say a kind word to you, but I can’t go into too much detail because I can see from your homepage that you bully/spam comment lots of people, so you obviously weren’t just targeting the Bobbi Starr Interviews.

If you were my son I’d say this… Relax. People will always confuse you and make you mad and make you want to strike out, but you’ll get a lot farther by being kind, and it will make you feel better, too. Whatever it is that pains you, whatever difficult thing you’re going through, you can e-mail me. Maybe I can give you some good advice. You’re probably a good kid, you just have too much on your mind and parents that are not very attentive due to their own daily distractions. Relax. There’s nothing wrong with good-looking women who have sex whenever they want with whomever they want. If the problem is that they’re not having sex with you, give it some time and work on your people skills. You think too much. Besides, if you don’t change your attitude at some point, you’ll be buying time from these women, so you’d do well to start liking them now.

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I, Too, Scoffed At YouTube

Monday, March 1st, 2010 -- by Bacchus

For those of you interested in the business of porn, Ms. Naughty has posted an interesting ten-year retrospective. I haven’t been around quite that long, but I found myself nodding along. Especially when I got to these paragraphs about the relatively recent past:

In 2006 I remember going on to one of the adult webmaster boards and asking my peers: “What do you think of this Youtube thing? Should I embed this code on my page or will it break my site?” At the time I didn’t see that Youtube would become the future of porn. I don’t think many of us did. Yet it felt like only days before flash video was everywhere and porn tube sites sprung up like mushrooms, many offering full-length movies for free. Of course, it hasn’t ended well.

2007 and 2008 saw the Russians and the cheaters move into traditional webmastering in a big way, much to the frustration of the rest of us. A huge influx of new webmasters began catering to a dwindling number of surfers. Free porn was everywhere. The gold rush was over.

In the last two years I’ve seen an awful lot of old-timers sell up and leave the business, frustrated at constantly having to fight cheaters, liars, content thieves and scammers, seeing major companies beginning to rely on dodgy billing practices to keep themselves in profit. In the meantime the audience has come to expect that porn should always be free.

I think YouTube marked my first big “old fart” moment. You know, the one where you suddenly stop being the guy who falls in love with every new innovation, and instead you hear yourself saying for the first time “This newfangled thing will never catch on, it’s a buncha crap!”

And then you shake your cane at the clouds.

Four years later, I still hate YouTube (and embedded streaming Flash videos in general). They’re disgustingly linear, they create link rot when hosted by unreliable third parties (as they usually are), and until fairly recently, they didn’t generally look very good. But mostly I hate them because they turned me into this:

old man shouts at cloud

 
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