[ih] The New Campaign for a Sex-Free Internet

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

*Sex, money, and the future of online free speech*
EXCERPT:

For more than a decade, both amateurs and professionals shared their
sometimes sweet, sometimes weird, and often graphic sexual activity on
Pornhub. Launched in 2007 not long after YouTube and with a similar
free-for-all spirit, the site represented a new wave of "adult
entertainment" in which anyone with an internet connection could partake
and anyone with a digital camera could become a star.

Dubbed "tube sites," Pornhub and its various peers began to dominate web
traffic generally and porn consumption specifically. These sites trod on
porn's established business model, but for savvy sex workers the tube site
network could provide a way to break into the business or reach audiences
directly, without the porn industry's usual middlemen. To monetize one's
presence in the early days took some creativity, but tube sites would
eventually offer content partnerships that allowed people to get paid
directly for their videos. Their competitors, such as cam sites and clip
stores, made the process of charging money and getting paid even smoother.

The result? For the first time, people with a truly diverse array of body
types, looks, races, ethnicities, sexualities, gender identities, and kinks
had direct access to the tools of porn production and distribution. In the
past, porn had catered to a much more narrow range of tastes, with
predictable results. Now audiences could access all sorts of content that
defied conventional notions of who and what was deserving of lust. On sites
like Pornhub and the microblogging platform Tumblr, outside-the-mainstream
content thrived.

And then, one day, it was gone.

In December 2020, without warning, Pornhub removed all videos posted by
unverified users—a massive cache of content encompassing anything not
posted by formal content partners or members of the platform's official
model program. More than 10 million videos were suspended, and unverified
users were banned from uploading or downloading new videos.

It was more than a disruption to the site. The unannounced disappearing of
so many videos was "a huge cultural loss," says Ashley, a transgender sex
worker and civil rights activist with a robust presence on social media and
in offline organizing. (At Ashley's request, we're identifying her by first
name only.) Ashley volunteers with the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP)
Behind Bars, a group dedicated to helping incarcerated sex workers. She
recently helped spearhead a campaign protesting financial discrimination
against sex workers and LGBTQ content creators. Unverified videos, Ashley
says, are "inclusive, just by definition, of all the queer content that
people felt unsafe with being directly affiliated with."

The Pornhub purge came about two years after Tumblr's ban on any content
depicting sex acts, and preceded a similar announcement in summer 2021 from
OnlyFans, a subscription content site popularized by sex workers. OnlyFans
would later reverse this edict, but the fate of adult content on the site
remains uncertain.

Then, in September 2021, the first user-uploaded porn site—Xtube, founded
in 2006 and now owned by the same parent company as Pornhub—shut down
entirely.

Demand for online porn hasn't weakened, at least not according to web
traffic numbers. Nor do there seem to be fewer people willing to create and
post it; it's not uncommon to hear sex workers complain about the glut of
adult content creators these days.

Nonetheless, it's a financially precarious, and perhaps even dangerous,
time to be in the business of online porn. And one of the biggest reasons
why is that a constellation of activist groups, rooted in deeply
conservative opposition to virtually any depiction of sexuality in the
public sphere, have put considerable pressure on the middlemen who keep
online porn in business. In some cases, that pressure has led to the
creation of onerous new laws; in others, it has been aided by support from
powerful figures in business and government. These groups have repeatedly
sought to conflate the existence of consensual commercial sex and porn
production with the prospect of forced sexual exploitation, often with
lurid statistics about exploited minors that don't stand up to scrutiny.

Although these groups say their aim is merely to rid the web of abuse, it's
clear that their true goal is to eliminate the vast majority of adult
sexual content from the web through a combination of legal pressure
tactics, lobbying for new laws, and political intimidation. It's a campaign
for a sex-free web. Rather than help vulnerable women, these efforts
threaten to make life worse for the very people they claim to want to
help—while simultaneously stifling internet expression more broadly.

*From 'Morality' to 'Exploitation'*...

[...]
https://reason.com/2022/04/09/the-new-campaign-for-a-sex-free-internet/

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True