#SESTA-FOSTA

[thoughtportal]

This is SESTA FOSTA all over again and so many people are falling for it.

[personal-blog243]

I get that “best little whorehouse in Texas” was considered very progressive for its time (and today) for its portrayal of sex workers and arguing for decriminalizing in person sex work.

However, the more I think about it the more inaccurate and sanitized a portrayal of sex work it seems. At least from what I remember. The cast of the movie was almost all white, cis-het, and Dolly Parton even sings a song about how she doesn’t want the prostitutes who work for her to drink or even have tattoos????

This obviously doesn’t accurately acknowledge that most prostitutes are WOC, most of them are queer people, and there is also a huge issue of drug abuse in the sex trade. There is also very little violence in the movie which doesn’t accurately portray the epidemic of violence against sex workers.

I’m not saying you can’t like the movie, but not all sex workers are clean cut, cis-het, sober, blonde, white women with cutesy southern accents and no tattoos 🙄.

I should clarify that I personally have no direct experience with sex work I just have some friends who are. Any movie that takes place in Texas should probably have more Latin American characters. I guess this is what happens when you try to make sex work appeal to conservative, white, republican, cis-het, Dolly Parton fans.

[didtheyunbanporn]

so the law that was responsable for porn being removed on tumblr (FOSTA-SESTA)  looks like its gonna get overturned as the courts found it violates the first amedment more speficically the part that says “use of computers and internet” part of it. could be big!

[not-poignant]

Is it just me or is censorship all across social media getting really bad lately? Pinterest just removed a whole bunch of my pins for sexual content - they were all fully clothed queer men and women showing vague intimacy, nothing overtly sexual at all. Like one they removed was literally just two men's heads leaning on each other. That's wacko right??? Have I missed something big going on?

Tbh it's been getting increasingly terrible for a long time, anon, it's not a lately thing, it's been since before the Tumblr purge, and it is at least in some part due to the SESTA/FOSTA law that got passed in the USA, and the increasing passing of laws in many countries that are specifically concerned with removing net neutrality and treating all of us like 3 year olds.

It will get worse, not better. And you've probably been missing a few big things! It sounds like you were most directly impacted by what happened with Pinterest, so you've just noticed it. Many of us noticed it around 2018 with the Tumblr purge. Some of us have been impacted by elements of it way earlier, due to Livejournal's Strikethrough which necessitated the invention of Dreamwidth and helped to really get AO3 off the ground. And this was back even before we now have many laws that scare a lot of big companies into removing adult content.

Steve Jobs famously hated / loathed pornography and was on a mission to literally try and remove it from the internet, and part of that mission was to - as much as possible - make it nearly impossible for apps that have it to get listed in the Apple store. This is partly why AO3 doesn't have an app. This is why Dreamwidth doesn't have an app. This is why the Tumblr Purge happened - so they could continue to have an app. And while some sites don't get targeted, as soon as you do get targeted by the Apple store, it's either 'provide your legal identity to prove that you're the age you say you are' to access adult content or it's 'goodbye adult content.'

We've also had an increasing rise of morally panicked, puritanical TERF-informed anti-shippers who believe that their emotional reactions to fictional content they find troubling are firstly valid moral judgements, and secondly, a valid reason to abuse, bully and send death threats to real people. And these people basically work hand-in-hand (often without realising) with extremely powerful Evangelical Christians who have government influence and a lot of money in the USA and literally work to change laws to make it reflect an extremely puritanical vision they have of the future. You know, the homphobic, transphobic, misogynistic, racist, kinkphobic, bigoted, antisemitic etc. etc. etc. one. (It's highly ironic and tragic that most antis are young and queer and just extremely uneducated).

I'd say people notice based on what impacted them directly. So some of us realised in 2007. Some of us realised again in 2018. And since then there's been a lot of blows from a lot of sites. In a way, Pinterest is joining an already very bloated bandwagon of sites cornered in the manner. The reason why people say 'unalive' these days instead of suicide, or 'r@pe' these days instead of rape is because of Tiktok censors. The reason so many folks moved their adult fanart and art accounts off Instagram, or they've gone dead, is because of Instagram censors. The reason so many adult writers on Patreon are very careful about what explicit words they write directly onto the site is because of Patreon censorship.

After all this, it's possible that Pinterest has a bug and are implementing a new AI algorithm for detecting adult content, and it's just broken. In those cases, reporting and appealing actually often does help. When Tumblr first implemented their algorithm, it wasn't very well trained yet, and like, pictures of fruit etc. were being banned because the AI algorithm was still figuring out what to do. Tumblr was in a rush in order to keep the app in the Apple store (over 70% of their income is from app users, the site would have literally died if they didn't act quickly), and so they ended up with an extremely overzealous and initially broken (and still sometimes broken x.x) algorithm.

If Pinterest is going through something similar, either with the app store or with having to address a sudden legal change, they may be having algo problems, and reporting will help them train the algorithm better.

Trust me, there will be people behind the scenes - staff at all of these websites - who hate the changes as much as you do, even if they can't say so for professional reasons. But even the new owner of Tumblr got pretty close to saying 'it fucking sucks but we have to do it if you want the site to exist' (which honestly made it a lot more...possible to handle the change, because it's not usually the sites you have to hate/resent, but the laws getting changed around you. Also if anyone here is an adult and can do so - please vote!!!)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Sohn was eminently qualified to serve on the FCC, and there was no mystery as to who she would serve in that role: the American people, especially those who have been abused, forgotten or underserved by Big Telco and Big Cable, from digitally redlined inner-city to rural broadband deserts.

So the monopolists went to work. For sixteen months, they successfully lo the Senate to block her confirmation hearing. Not her confirmation — just the hearing. Over $23 million in telco money flowed into the Senate over this period, and that was just the start.

The ISPs also went to work on the frothing culture warriors of the American right, smearing Sohn as a “groomer” and an “anti-police radical.” They ran a homophobic smear campaign against Sohn, who is gay, and condemned her for her work as a volunteer board member with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on the grounds that EFF opposes unconstitutional digital police surveillance and campaigned against SESTA/FOSTA, a law that has put sex-workers in grave physical danger while doing nothing to accomplish its nominal goal of preventing sex-trafficking (disclosure: I am a Special Advisor to EFF and am proud to have worked with them for over 21 years).

-Culture War Bullshit Stole Your Broadband: Your internet sucks because telco monopolists kept Gigi Sohn off the FCC

[inthefallofasparrow]

How did the internet become so puritanical? On social media, outspoken anti-sex advocates increasingly cry “gross” at everything from R-rated rom-coms to fictional characters and queer people having sex to consenting adults with slight age gaps to dating short people. They see oversexualization in just about everything. They often accuse the things they dislike of being coded fronts for pedophilia, and the people who enjoy those things of being sexual predators. These social media users frequently form enclaves that turn as nightmarish and troubling as the things they’re ostensibly trying to police.

This dovetails with what we’re being told right now about Gen Z and sex: They’re having less casual sex, they hate dating, they’re more reserved about relationships in general. It’s easy to pigeonhole online anti-sex police as being teens and young adults, a.k.a. “puriteens.” Because so much of this comes down to carnal horror, you might assume that everyone who’s horrified is a teen who just hasn’t arrived at a mature view of sex and other adult activity. Such anti-sex zeal increasingly forces sex-positive communities back into the internet’s underground. It also aids and abets the larger cultural shift toward regressive attitudes and censorship of sexual minorities and sex-positive content.

Yet overwhelmingly, the common thread among this new generation of ��antis” — a broad label for people who are opposed to sexual content in media — isn’t that they are minors who are scared of sex. It’s that none of them distinguish between fictional harm and real-world harm. That is, regardless of their ages, they believe fiction not only can have a real-world impact, but that it always has a real-world impact ...

[hungerpunch]

i would kill a man and skin him if i never had to witness another tumblr user whimpering "will you unban porn now?" please jesus god fuck god christ PLEASE if tumblr didn't have to ban porn they never would have! you're asking and blaming the wrong people. look up FOSTA-SESTA to start with and then how that impacted app store policies.

[campgender]

excerpts from Amber Dawn’s “Touch ≠ Touch Screen” that i thought particularly resonated with the most recent iteration of conversations on transmisogynistic + whorephobic censorship on tumblr & other social media

image description: three screenshots of a poem from the collection My Art Is Killing Me (2020) with stylized spacing.

excerpt 1:

Just survivors, I’m talking only to you now (literally you).

Did your abuse fever teach you to solder belonging and harm?

Were you seen and were you shamed in the same

original place? Did you inherit

a coercive dichotomy?

Anxious arousal hand

me downs?

Does your public network see you and hate you in looping rounds?

Does logging on harm you? Does all this somehow feel familiar?

excerpt 2:

Let’s talk about 2018 when

FOSTA-SESTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop

Enabling Sex Traffickers Act) was passed as law by US Congress

on April 11, marking the first ever exception to Section 230.

So after twenty-two years, yes, twenty-two years, social media platforms

where made responsible for user generated content if that content may be

intended for sex work yes

all sex work, yes, consensual sex work and, yes

anything like a butthole or a female-presenting-assumed nipple, and yes

responsible for or in authority of images, words and phrases

that mend desire together

with age, race, size, orientation, disability, labour

economics and any bodies subject to other-ness.

And with other-ness, I’m talking about

fat babes in neon green lingerie, about two brown men

kissing, about trans women being radiant and using

their real fucking names. I’m talking about

masculine-presenting-assumed folk with baby bumps. I’m talking sexual

assault survivors showing off the scars on our inner thighs. I’m talking about

women posting screenshots of the violent Tinder messages we receive

every damn day. I’m talking about

speaking up. I’m talking language

reclamation. I’m talking decolonizing

sexualities. I’m talking gagged faggots

about dyke march photos

torn down. I’m talking

about locked accounts.

excerpt 3:

viii.

I’m talking about this—

power holding backlash.    How dare we get those likes

those shares, take up virtual space

speak truths, share strategy, love our ash and phoenix

bodies, rise up or dig deep, whichever way or all

directions at once.

We can be nimble AF

but how dare we?

Make the internet

white relentlessly white again

str8 cis thin and norm again

Redesign the sightline

of hating women.         I’m talking about this

power holding backlash.

I think about this a lot—

what it means to spend upwards

of two hours per day

on platforms that believe

we should not legally exist

un      see      able

end image description.

[littlemistit]

If you don't know what FOSTA/SESTA is, you need to know because everything you see and post on the internet is affected by it

[mxjackparker]

Censoring terms like "sex work" and making them unsearchable doesn't stop anyone from finding porn, which can be tagged a million other things, but it does make it harder to hear sex workers talk about their own experiences.