Silicon Valley's sex censorship harms everyone | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley's sex censorship harms everyone

wired.com

147 pointslaurex151 comments

I find it weird that "Silicon Valley" is to blame here. This is the result of DC's actions - not SV. Which is mostly coming from the religious right who are big funders/power-holders and dislike sexual imagery and non-fundamental norms in the public eye.

SV is just going with where the $$$ are at and complying with the law. They don't give a shit about anything else as long as stonkz go up.

It is not that lawmakers censor nipples. it is google that is demonetizing them, even though it has the power (by virtue of controlling both sides of the ad market) to change those attitudes. Yet they have only been becoming more restrictive , not less

It is the politicians that pass laws to punitively punish companies like google is they ever allow any kid to see anything that isn’t ideologically pure.

Unless it's a carefully framed slow motion sequence of someone getting their brains blown out. Or hacked to death with a large sharp blade.

But at least our kids are safe from nipples.

No law prevents google from placing ads almost wherever they like. Late night TV shows always had advertising on them, yet even remotely referencing sex on the net is unmonetizable

Could you provide an example of such a law? To my knowledge the US courts and legal systems have been fairly consistent that sexual content is protected under the First Amendment.

The main culprit appears to be the prudishness and conservatism of large companies, somewhat big tech companies but especially credit card companies and payment processors.

Agree that politicians are to blame here, but SESTA / FOSTA laws have bipartisan support, not just from the religious right.

Exactly. The whole goal originally was to counter online sex trafficking which is easy to be for, not for religious zealots to "censor nipples" as some here who probably didn't read the wired article think. It's just that like everything there are unintended consequences.

The goal was to shut down online prostitution; trafficking is just a performative excuse.

Don't pretend trafficking wasn't/isn't a major problem made even bigger and easier by the internet. Here's one example: https://abcnews.go.com/US/woman-allegedly-trafficked-backpag...

This is not responsive to my comment.

it was never clear that FOSTA / SESTA was the solution. Law enforcement came out against the law because the law makes their job harder. Before Craigslist and Backpage cooperated with them in turning over data and traffickers. Now the traffickers are using other methods or working with less LEO friendly operators.

You have cause and effect backwards. Historically 'trafficking' meant human trafficking for the purposes of prostitution. The terminology creep to extend that to any kind of organised prostitution (for example brothels), is absolutely the result of the Christian right, as is the war on porn. Here's one piece Wired ran in 2015 exploring that - https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/03/christians-and-sex-...

Here's a deeper journal article exploring the same territory from 2014 - https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5305/amerjintelaw.108.4.0609...

Unfortunately, normalizing organised prostitution creates what amounts to a safe haven for human trafficking - this is a key part of the debate. It really seems to be the case that a voluntary mass market in "organized prostitution" is in fact unsustainable because any such attempt will be abused by human traffickers. Niche escorting services may survive, but only because their focus on perceived quality makes them less vulnerable to being taken over in this manner - and it's not clear so far how a separate, more permissive regime for these more resilent services could be created as a matter of law.

You state this with certainty I haven't seen from the researchers in this area. I was under the impression that this more an open question.

Numerous sex workers in countries where prostitution is legal disagree with you.

Yes, I know. It is difficult to get someone to understand something, when their income depends on their not understanding it.

So you know better than them what's good for them?

Both major parties cater to Christian interests over anything else. The US is a "light theocracy".

Until that changes, we will constantly have to defend our industries and personal lives from the intrusion of the church.

To expound on this, we've still yet to have a president who doesn't identify as Christian. I don't think we're particularly close to a point where a self-professed atheist could get elected president either, although I could see someone of another mainstream religion getting elected in the not too distant future.

As a non-American, can anyone please tell me how the media reacts to Tulsi Gabbard not being Christian? (She's Hindu ... and religious, so this is not relevant to the atheist part of your point.)

I actually don't think I was aware of this! Most of the media coverage I've seen on her is about her coming across as fairly unconventional for a Democrat in the debate performances, but I think the field was so large then and then narrowed down quickly enough that she didn't get much extended attention. I imagine if she makes it further into a national campaign, it might end up coming up though.

Chris Butler's cult isn't Hindu, although they would sure like people to believe that.

Trump is very clearly not a Christian. Seemed to be loved by people who call themselves Christian but seemingly don't follow any of Jesus' message.

It's really curious.

>Seemed to be loved by people who call themselves Christian but seemingly don't follow any of Jesus' message.

That describes most Christians, honestly. Trump identifies as a "non-denominational" Christian (as opposed to atheist or any other religion), employs Christian symbols in his politics (likely not in good faith, but again that isn't unusual) and has strong support within the Evangelical Christian community, who clearly find something within him that resonates with their faith.

> That describes most Christians, honestly.

In your experience, perhaps, but it's exceptionally dishonest, and frankly hateful, to say that describes "most Christians." I know more Christians than non-Christians and the behavior discussed here describes maybe 4 of them (out of about a thousand).

That'd be like someone saying "most LGBTQ are pedophiles." I'm sure it's true in some cases, but is highly unlikely to be true for "most".

Honestly, I get tired of everyone using hyperbole so flippantly. It gives your opponents easy targets to completely discredit the point you were making. So, just...stop.

>In your experience, perhaps, but it's exceptionally dishonest, and frankly hateful, to say that describes "most Christians."

It isn't hate, it is experience, and it's something a lot of Christians would admit about themselves. Even the Bible says most followers of God are hypocrites who fall short of their own principles.

I'm not getting into a religious argument here, but you shouldn't talk about giving your opponents an easy target. Christianity is one hell of a glass house to live in. Maybe instead of attacking me, you should consider why so many Christians believe so deeply and fervently in a man of such excremental moral character like Donald Trump. You can't simply dismiss the question by claiming none of them are real Christians. Take the plank out of your own eye before pointing out the speck in someone else's, as the man said.

Ok, but that doesn’t remotely address the rather obvious question of why so many self-described followers of Christ voted for and advocated for a man who is so deeply and obviously un-Christlike.

Lesser of two evils, perhaps? Single issue voters?

If you want to know what someone really values, ignore what they say and look instead at what they actually do.

Trump presented himself as a Christian, which is the relevant factor here.

Yeah, I specifically said "identify as Christian" when thinking about this; he's said a number of things that make it clear that is how he's presenting himself politically (e.g. something about how the only book he liked better than his "The Art of the Deal" was the bible, and like, I certainly don't know how devout, say, Rutherford B. Hayes was, so it seems reasonable not to count him separately.

> The US is a "light theocracy".

That's not remotely close to being true. The US has among the strongest separation of church and state laws of any nations and they're well protected decade after decade. If the US were actually a light theocracy, the conservative majority Supreme Court would wreck the US promptly with crazy theocratic changes that would make Iran blush. It was the first nation in history to explicitly codify such a strict separation in its constitution as well. Those separation lines have, on average, been made stronger over time.

You can dislike the Christian culture that exists in the US, certainly. It hasn't made any consequential inroads into state in two centuries, in fact the opposite is the case: Christianity (and religion more broadly) has been pushed back out of US life in numerous significant ways (and properly so; eg: gay marriage, abortion rights, making it illegal to discriminate based on religion, acceptance and ease of divorce, sunday alcohol sales & business activity, drug legalization laws, press dominance and positioning (the press is ~95% left-leaning now and very much not religious in nature)). That there have been occasional set-backs in things such as abortion rights, doesn't nullify the overall point. Religion has been losing political and cultural ground in the US for a long time and that's likely to continue. Religion used to dominate US life and heavily factor into US politics, as recently as the post war 1950s-1980s era, and that is no longer the case (the left for example is drastically less religious than it was just 40-50 years ago).

I'm not sure you disproved his point. You disproved it was a theocracy which no one has argued.

The fact that religion is losing ground doesn’t make the point any less true. I do not live in the US. Looking in from outside, it’s obvious that religion plays a material part in lawmaking, including maintaining a status quo that is increasingly untenable. Of course, you need to read between the lines. Even though it is becoming increasingly hard to do so, the US obviously relies on historical prestige to get away with saying one thing (“separation of church and state!” being drilled in to all kids as part of their Freedom Class) and doing another.

The fact that the US has strong separation of church and state laws is what prevents us from being a true theocracy. It doesn't disprove my point whatsoever.

The fact that the vast majority of politicians that get elected talk about doing what they do in the name of God more than shows that.

Or try growing up in a small country town as one of the only families that don't attend church service. Until you've been suspended public school for "spreading Satanism" because you said church sounds boring, you haven't experienced the same America as the rest of us.

Laws don’t mean anything unless they’re enforced. You proved we’re not a hard democracy, but haven’t proven we’re not a soft democracy, per OP’s point.

Theocracy tells me you don’t know what that word means.

SESTA and FOSTA are certainly DC's doing, but I think it's fair to say there is a serious aversion to sexuality and eroticism among incumbent platforms, that did not require any prodding from US lawmakers. For example, AFAIK, Instagram has never allowed "adult" content, since long before FOSTA; Steam has never allowed "pornography" on its platform, resulting in hundreds of games requiring patches [1] to play in the form the publisher intended.

Eroticism being a core component of art going all the way back to literal cave paintings, I am sometimes frustrated at the prudishness of the platforms we use in the contemporary age.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/curator/34059662-Uncensor-Pat...

I mean isn’t this a function of all this stuff being ad supported?

Brands don’t want ads next to porn. That seems like the core of the issue here.

Steam isn't ad supported.

It's Visa supported, and Visa doesn't want sex.

There are actually strong, non-"puritanical" reasons for this. An oft-cited anecdote is the spouse or parent that finds mysterious porn charges on the credit card. Sex-related services carry an extremely high rate of charge backs. The transaction risks are much, much higher than other categories of goods and services.

So while Visa could simply charge more, there are numerous other headwinds that make this tricky. Political will, payments risks, brand risk, and deep rooted family/social stigmas that fuel the rest. They kind of all have to be dealt with at once for this to start making economic and business sense.

For proponents, it's going to take generational change to shake all of these network effects out. The first step of which is consumers (Gen Z?) publicly admitting that they see no harm in sex-related commerce and to begin showing this in their purchasing behaviors.

John Oliver recently covered this as it relates to sex work. Stigmas and dispositions are changing, but it's slow. A lot of signalling has to happen to a lot of people.

None of this explains why the banking industry blacklists porn stars from having checking accounts, nor why they allow other high-risk industries wholesale access...the gym industry, for example, is incredibly fraudulent and yet the banking industry has no problem letting them use ECH, a system so permissive it's a fraudster's wet dream....or why the banking industry has done nothing to self-regulate payday lenders.

Very good comparisons IMO.

I wonder how much of it is outrage-by-proxy, where you don't have a problem with it, but fear that others will.

“A lot of signalling has to happen to a lot of people.” More signaling makes all signals weaker until everything is noise. Probably not the desired outcome.

I'm not sure how they're working things on the payment processing front but Steam has sexual content on it's regular storefront now without requiring external patches. Heck some are even Steam Deck verified.

> An oft-cited anecdote is the spouse or parent that finds mysterious porn charges on the credit card. Sex-related services carry an extremely high rate of charge backs. The transaction risks are much, much higher than other categories of goods and services.

Bitcoin solves this.

In particular a layer two solution such as the lightning network appears necessary to reduce transaction costs and delays.

...steam is covered in ads, even opening them in a separate window when you launch the client. They're only for stuff sold on steam, and publishers (supposedly) can't buy ad space, but they're ads nonetheless.

This advertising obviously does not have the attributes that the conversation is referring to, namely that a third party is buying the space.

It has nothing to with "DC" (numerous anti-porn laws have been struck down by courts) and everything to do with the banking industry's moral codes, which is where the Christian Right shifted their moral crusade to after losing numerous legal challenges.

That's why you see platforms like Patreon crack down on adult content. The banking industry notices, the payment processors and merchant banks sit up and threaten to close the service's accounts, and the service instead capitulates and cranks up their rules around adult content.

They'll bray about fraud rates being high for adult content, but if high fraud rates were a concern, you'd think they wouldn't give the gym industry (for example) free license in credit card processing and ECH transfers...they're prolific scam artists. Ditto for all the as-seen-on-tv crap with outrageous shipping and "handling" fees and so on.

If the banking industry figures out that you're an adult media actor, you stand a good chance of getting banned from the entire system. What possible argument for fraud is there in that case? None. "Fraud" is just a cover for Christian moral code enforcement.

Edit: okay, maybe it's not the Christian Right influencing US banks rejecting porn stars for accounts for "moral" reasons. Must be the sentient Big Mouth Billy Bass units.

I agree that it's the banks but do you have any evidence to support your claims that it's the christian right?

This entry[0] has useful background.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Ex...

It’s the liberal that’s holding the power here, not the Christian that is fighting an uphill battle to preserve their religious lifestyle, and the right to parent their own children how they want.

It’s clear for all that opening the floodgates of porn into social media and platforms that both adults and _children_ use will cause this particular category of content to dominate the entire space. It’ll also lock out any children from most social media whose parents refuse (and rightfully so) to let them see porn. Not that this effort will always be successful, because children who don’t know any better will cave in to peer pressure from friends. This dystopia where what’s essentially filmed prostitution finds its way into almost all spaces in society, including children’s lives, is what the very powerful liberal wants.

Shouldn’t you be more concerned about the increase in women and girls forced to sell their dignity to survive? Is the suffering of people not more important to you than your cummies?

Twitter has a lot of porn on it, and we don't see it as "overrun with porn" or "unsafe for children." There is a way to do it right.

> Twitter has a lot of porn on it, and we don't see it as "overrun with porn"

That’s why I said “opening the floodgates”. Yes of course there is porn in social media already. It’s still a fact today that you wont see porn on Twitter/YouTube/Facebook/etc. unless you look for it. If you remove restrictions and push porn just like any other content, then all these platforms will essentially degrade into hybrid porn sites because this particular type of content will dominate the entire space. Some people here are upset that it’s even kept in check at all. SV are being called puritans for having some common sense and not letting this filth dominate their sites.

> or "unsafe for children."

Some people would argue that though.

Outspoken Christians form 9 out of 10 members of Congress despite representing 65% of the US population [1]. Religiously motivated laws get argued and passed on a weekly basis, and Christian fundamentalist ideas are constantly in the media spotlight.

Put down the persecution complex.

[1]: https://www.pewforum.org/2021/01/04/faith-on-the-hill-2021/

That an amazing attack on religion - well done.

Try it with “outspoken Muslim” or “outspoke Jew” and see if it has the same ring.

Outspoken Muslims form 9 out of 10 members of Congress despite representing 65% of the US population?

I'm genuinely uncertain what point you're trying to make.

The point is in the US we do our best to avoid labeling people with religious beliefs as "tools of their religion" when they occupy political office.

You should try and see how many political leaders are Jewish and then compare that to the % of the population that are Jewish. Comes across as kinda shitty behavior no?

Plenty of government leaders are religious but that doesn't mean they rule according to those beliefs. To make the assumption they do is just a weak attempt to smear people based on their personal beliefs.

When laws are repeatedly passed that are consistent with a certain religious interpretation, at what point does it stop being an assumption? I'll grant you that it would still not be a good thing to point at a specific politician and claim that they're doing it (unless you have evidence). But that's different from speaking statistically about Congress as a whole.

Please give an example. Plenty of religious beliefs overlap with the beliefs of the non-religious, not to mention non-Christian beliefs.

Abolition? Christians in politics have done more good than bad, unless you hate America, which it honestly sounds like you do. Hating America is very hip in certain cliques but it’s pretty cringe to listen to from an educated adult who benefits greatly from the freedom they seem to hate.

"Christians in politics have done more good than bad"

Feel free to provide some actual substantive backing of that (correlation v causation is so much fun), otherwise you sound like another Xtian carnie with a very dull ax to grind.

It’s common knowledge. Read a dictionary?

Even the admittedly anti-Christian Wikipedia can help you out here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilberforce

"admittedly anti-Christian Wikipedia"

Yep, 12 years of Jesuit / Marianist education taught me exactly that your kind of religiosity...is trash.

9/10 political power, yeah right. That’s why you have things like this being regularly pushed on society from the top down:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vhxVIKmKmlo

It’s disturbing.

What’s the end game of sexual liberation? Who knows.

I genuinely can’t tell if this is your legitimate view or if you’re moving the conversation along by making the religious right’s arguments for them. Either way, I’ll bite. 1. Nobody is arguing against a parent’s right to choose their parenting style. This is about altering society to fit their parenting style. 2. Permissive social networks (like Twitter) don’t have an issue with adult content overrunning the network. Furthermore, if adult content wasn’t roped off to all but a couple of mainstream social networks, isn’t it arguable that the reduced concentration will mitigate your hypothesised “overrunning”? 3. The implication that all sex work is exploitative is in 2022 untenable. There are myriad women out there who consensually do sex work when they could do something else instead. Sex work has pros and cons for the worker like any other job. The characterisation of this as “selling their dignity” is indicative of a view of sex and sexuality that is increasingly out of step with the attitudes of the young people who typically engage in sex work. The implication that sex work is exploitative or even “sad” is driven by the US’s legal stance on prostitution. I live in a jurisdiction with more permissive prostitution laws and the difference is night-and-day obvious. The (il)legality of full service sex work fuels the stigma, not the other way around.

I'm actually more concerned about religion than i am about porn. Religion is a tool to manipulate the people through lies, and it relies on training people not to do any critical thinking. And the lack of critical thinking in the world today is very scary.

No one is stopping Christians from preserving their lifestyle. No one. None. Zero.

What they are doing is not being held hostage to same said Christians from force-feeding it to everyone else. If you like it, fine. Have a biblically awesome life.

"This dystopia where what’s essentially filmed prostitution finds its way into almost all spaces in society, including children’s lives, is what the very powerful liberal wants." As opposed to the Handsmaid Tale/Stepford/Leviathan-like dystopia every Abrahamic hardliner wants.

Yeah, Hard pass on evangelical claptrap.

I think Steam has pretty much given up on not allowing porn... Outside certain cases.

When browsing Steam VR titles, it feels like half of that is interactive porn.

Steam does allow porn games now, though you have to log in and change some settings to see it.

And if you do, it’s ridiculously over saturated with them

Steam is in Washington, not the Valley or SF.

This is a classic case of an industry attempting to self-regulate in order to avoid legal regulation, with teeth. Even inconsistently-applied loose rules are good enough to keep the powerful Christian lobbyist pitchforks at bay.

This is probably the most pithy distillation of what the actual cause is.

> Steam has never allowed "pornography" on its platform

The amount of pure porn games that clutters some lists makes me doubt this very much.

Iirc steam only bans porn games with real people due to legislation regarding keeping track of the actors in the material.

It's been a long time since they blocked any other legal porn.

It didn't "require prodding" because it was assumed from the get go that there was more money (and/or less scrutiny) to be made 'playing it safe' than much else.

My understanding is that the payment processors hold the power here.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-mastercards-new-porn-rules...

CESTA/FOSTA definitely plays a part, but why would mastercard wait until 2021 to make these new rules?

also advertisers.

> Which is mostly coming from the religious right who are big funders/power-holders and dislike sexual imagery and non-fundamental norms in the public eye.

The Religious Right? Nicholas Kristof of the NYT, is probably the most powerful individual sex censor - the guy singlehandedly got Pornhub financially de-platformed!

To be fair, getting pornhub punished wasn't hard. They were hosting child pornography.

It wasn't hard to de-platform them because they are a vice company, not because of what was on there servers unintentionally. By your standard Meta/FB/Insta are much worse perpetrators of hosting child pornography

Those companies don't actively give people money to produce that content though.

I'm not denying that being a porn company made it easier, but let's not compare what was going on there to what goes on in the private messages of nearly any website large enough.

Pornhub's problem wasn't sex. It was revenge porn, authentic rape videos, and all the other content you will host if you allow anonymous uploads.

Not seeing that there is a difference between content intended for public distribution and content that is not is arguably part of the problem here. (Or, even worse, considering someone having sex and someone being raped to be morally equivalent.)

> Pornhub's problem wasn't sex. It was revenge porn, authentic rape videos, and all the other content you will host if you allow anonymous uploads.

Meta/FB/Insta/Whatsapp/Messenger were & are responsible for facilitating significantly more of all of the above terrible things. Of course the problem was sex and that they are a vice company, it made them an easy moral outrage target.

> I find it weird that "Silicon Valley" is to blame here.

Even before FOSTA/SESTA companies like Facebook, CloudFlare, and PayPal have fought far, far harder for the rights of far-right groups than they even have for sex workers.

It’s a branding and criminal liability problem too.

Yak about sex worker empowerment, but companies like Craigslist made themselves unwitting business partners with pimps and other low rent types.

> Which is mostly coming from the religious right who are big funders/power-holders and dislike sexual imagery and non-fundamental norms in the public eye.

The universe of people who “dislike sexual imagery” is a lot broader than the (evangelical Christian) “religious right.” Left-leaning Black and Hispanic Christians, non-Christian socially conservative groups (Muslims, Hindus), non-religious socially conservative groups (many East Asians), and also sex-negative feminists have similar attitudes toward sex and sex work.

That’s why these laws have broad bipartisan support. “Sex work is work” is an area where (generally sex-positive) progressives and libertarians agree, but those two groups combined are still a pretty small constituency.

I agree with this. It’s easy to point to some other group to blame on this but I don’t meet many people in any group in the US who would be okay with children seeing nudity on TV. Contrast my experience with Scandinavia, where nude saunas are the norm and maybe it seems like the US just hasn’t yet progressed to sexual normalization.

Is that even a bad thing though? Who’s to say the Scandinavians aren’t messing their kids up with all the nudity? Who’s to say the Americans aren’t messing their kids up with their Puritanical approach to sex? I feel that nobody knows the answer right now and we’re most comfortable not changing anything until we do.

If the sight of a naked female breast messed kids up, breastfeeding would be a bit of a problem.

Apple, historically, has taken an anti-porn stance. https://www.wired.com/2010/04/steve-jobs-porn/

That’s normal. Silicon Valley is the only part of America that makes anything or does anything worthwhile. As a result, people have built up an expectation that that is where they should go to get things done.

What is this post about exactly? Reddit has more porn than any one person can possibly see in a lifetime. Twitter too.

Apple and Facebook took a middle of the line approach to avoid offending people.

Also sex is a hard line to walk. There’s just so much shady shit out there that is exploitative and done in bad faith. It’s much easier to set conservative rules and leave other dedicated spaces for more provocative content.

I don’t necessarily disagree, except with the characterization of Apple and Facebook as taking some sort of ‘middle line’? I guess Apple doesn’t actively prevent me from watching porn on that sweet pro display xdr. But Facebook doesn’t even allow non-erotic nudity. It’s PG-Pope, as far as I can tell.

How do you watch porn on apple devices? For me the 3rd party apps only work on Android (a great example when side loading can help)

Pretend you make a video about the best gay movie stars, because you're gay and you like to document your role models. You're doing something that doesn't involve genitals or anything explicit, but is per se sexual because gayness is by definition a sexual topic.

Post it to YouTube, and you get demonetized because you're making sexual content (worst case). Or your viewers get recommended videos about sex toys too (average case).

I think there is a pretty hard line between straight porn and sexual content that is pretty easy to police, but the problem remains that conservative approaches towards sex tend to stifle the experiences of people who aren't sexually conservative.

People have a set of assumptions that they make when they hear "movie star" (straight white man). When you add more adjectives (gay movie star, female movie star, black movie star), those are assumptions are broken and we are no longer in the land of "normal" movie stars, but "sexual" "political" and "ethnic" ones. I didn't read the article bc fuck Wired but I can assume they're pushing for openness towards sex bc it allows us to be more open to those who have an identity strongly rooted in sex (which honestly should be everyone even if you're straight)

> I can assume they're pushing for openness towards sex bc it allows us to be more open to those who have an identity strongly rooted in sex

Just because one is open towards sex doesn't mean that their identity has to be "strongly rooted in sex".

I don't need anyone to know my sexual orientation. It's not important in whether I'm doing my job right, or when I'm engaged in my hobbies. If anyone wants to have an identity "strongly rooted in sex", more power to them, but there's something wrong in that statement if you have to shove your opinion about your sexuality in contexts that don't matter, and where not all people share your opinion on the importance of sex to their identity.

>Just because one is open towards sex doesn't mean that their identity has to be "strongly rooted in sex".

That's not what I meant, I think you misread. I meant that we (straight "normal" people who don't necessarily have an identity rooted in sex) should not stigmatize sexual topics because there are those who have a non negligible amount of their identity rooted in their sexuality.

>have to shove your opinion about your sexuality in contexts that don't matter

See but that's the thing. There are no hard and fast boundaries in the real world when it comes to "does sexuality matter here," because sexuality is kind of a fundamental aspect of being a human. The types of jokes you make, the types of clothes you wear, what people think of you and how you think of other people - all these are things that can be and are influenced by your sexual orientation.

>where not all people share your opinion on the importance of sex to their identity.

You can't tell others what their identity is or how it's formed. It doesn't matter what you think, the truth is that (hypothetically) I was kissed by a boy when I was 7 or some shit and that has forever changed my life etc etc. Who are you to tell me that's not important to my identity?

If sex isn't part of your identity that's fine, but you should still be open to the idea that it's important and OK to talk about. Because if we don't talk about it, then discussions are had in the context of unspoken defaults (straight white man=normal=default), even/especially if the conversation has nothing to do with sex.

EDIT:

>I don't need anyone to know my sexual orientation. It's not important in whether I'm doing my job right, or when I'm engaged in my hobbies

This is irrelevant and borders on being maliciously discursive.

1. You don't need to reveal your sexual identity to be open to discussions about others' and their relevance to the task at hand.

2. Experiences at work, home, among friends, within your internal dialogue, have many more dimensions than "am I doing this job correctly/am I enjoying myself."

3. Moreover, even if you restricted your own experiences to just those dimensions, others' experiences of you doing your job/enjoying yourself aren't going to map perfectly. OK, you sealed the deal with your client. What were you wearing? Did you speak to them with the stereotypical gay accent? Unless your job has absolutely no human interaction, people can and will profile you on criteria that you think don't matter.

This is a hypothetical scenario and seems weird to create a debate around. Do you have explicit examples of YouTube censoring content that seems unfair?

For YouTube, they are appeasing advertisers who do not want to align their brands with provocative content. However, back to your example, just a quick search on YouTube right now shows hundreds of gay movie star videos and clicking on the first few of them launch with ads.

YouTube also tries hard to make interesting content that keep you engaged. Maybe you're okay with hyper sexualized content, but if you're not, YouTube would have a hard time bringing you back after losing you. I guess the same could be said for a content creator who leaves the platform, but seems YouTube made the calculus they have more to gain keeping a wider audience than having a wider range of content.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/19/youtube-lgbt-restricted-mo...

Granted YouTube does still exist in the year 2022 so it had done its due diligence when it comes to representing and supporting LGBTQ+. But even 10 years ago there wasn't as much pressure to do so. Same sex marriage was only legalized last decade.

>Maybe you're okay with hyper sexualized content

I explicitly said that LGBTQ+ content could be demonetized _despite_ the fact it's not hyper sexual.

>but seems YouTube made the calculus they have more to gain keeping a wider audience than having a wider range of content.

>For YouTube, they are appeasing advertisers who do not want to align their brands with provocative content.

Neither of these are necessarily ethical goals (what if we're in Gilead and a woman showing her ankles is considered provocative). And I would argue that YouTube, by virtue of its near monopolistic power and pervasive reach, has some obligation to act ethically. And to be fair, they have got a little better at doing that specifically in regards to LGBTQ+ content over the past couple years, but we should remember that that wasn't the case and isn't necessarily the case.

It is kinda weird to see war footage of people burning alive, dismembered corpses, children being bombed. But one little nipple... I guess US TV is the same.

I always assumed it was because of Christianity making sex taboo above almost all else.

Ah, so that's why Catholics have so few children. /s

It's easier to be chaste than it is to be holy, so people go for chasteness and pretend it's holiness. Completely misunderstanding the gospels in three process.

In fairness, American TV also does not (frequently) show (real) gore as is often the case in other countries.

What are you talking about, more than half of the internet bandwidth being used in the world as I type this is transmitting pictures of nipples.

A 2014 Google study reckoned 4% of the Internet is porn.

https://www.statista.com/chart/16959/share-of-the-internet-t...

4% of websites, according to that article. I didn't see any graphs on bandwidth. I doubt that half of all traffic is porn, but 10% wouldn't surprise me at all.

Even this comment contains nipples.

( o ) ( o )

All I see is eyes

  (.)(.)

Eww, take your regular expression elsewhere.

I've noticed social media using more aggressive censorship (not exactly censorship; more like requiring you to be logged in) on war gore than sexually explicit images.

I did not seen children being bombed. I have heard about that happening and seen video where it took place, but after the fact and fairly sanitized.

The brutality of War is not nearly shown as much on TV as your comment implies, at least not in TV I was watching.

Real violence is getting harder to find as well. Everything that isn't advertiser friendly is purged from mainstream channels. And it seems like the definition of "advertiser friendly" gets more and more stringent every day.

You're overstating it, lots of violent content is banned on every single popular platform, including hosting services.

I have to activate a complicated account level override to see nipples on the Reddit app. I can see gore in 2 clicks.

James Foley, Christchurch, etc. There's a long list of stuff that is almost universally censored, it's not a matter of setting account flags. Incidentally, Reddit is one of the most permissive hosts in terms of content, allowing stuff that even Imgur doesn't.

In Europe, sex is good and violence is bad. In the US, it's the other way around.

(stolen from someone on /. years ago)

I’ve worked at a VC-backed social media app and currently work for a privately owned porn company.

SV has the dumbest double standards about sex and nudity. Just colossally dumb.

There’s a few forces at work that the article doesn’t dig into -

1/ VCs get their money from LPs. LPs are orgs like university trusts and pension funds. Those LPs demand “morality clauses” that limit what VCs can invest in. And VCs give it to them.

2/ Google starting 2018-ish began to cave to advertiser pressure about nudity. They passed that pressure down to their different business. Now YouTube, AdWords, Adsense, etc all must ensure ad content is never shown next to nudity. Those business teams rolled out this missive in the most bungled way possible. False positives be damned, the ad dollars must flow.

This leads to startups being squeezed on both sides - investors can’t be seen supporting sex and ad platforms salt the earth anywhere an adult word might be uttered. So as a social media platform, you pretend it doesn’t exist (Reddit, Instagram), you quarantine it (Twitch), or you mass-deplatform and cross your fingers (YouTube, Snapchat).

I don’t know what the answer is for those products, but I feel like we could do better.

not even nudity. we run a website with virtual avatars, and some people like to dress them up with sexy clothes. somehow adsense detects nipples behind virtual clothes

Not mentioned in this article is the way indigenous people are a victimised by Facebook for just... being, because their traditional dress (in non-sexual contexts) is considered too revealing by Facebooks standards.

This happens all the time in Vanuatu and Papua Niu Guinea.

> "Those pictures are appropriate to me because it's part of my culture, but to Facebook it's not appropriate …those who are working at Facebook should understand that we have different cultures around the world."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-25/facebook-mistakenly-b...

https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2...

Not to mention advertisers, but could it be that most users don’t actually want porn and solicitations by sex workers showing up in their Facebook and Instagram feeds?

There is no shortage of places to find porn or sex workers online, for those who seek it out, including on some popular social media sites. It can be difficult to even search Twitter without getting a close-up photo of someone’s genitalia in the results. I don’t think it’s necessary that every social media site becomes a platform for porn and sex work.

The attitude of silicon valley is, ultimately, shaped by the cultural and religious values and background if its worker base. Such attitudes are often expressed in this forum as well.

> When female nipples are censored but male nipples are not, we know that we must police our own bodies to ensure we do not arouse men

It is probably true that digital media is more lenient to gay male sexuality than to female sexuality probably because the former is still media taboo. There is a sense that they go out of the way to protect women from themselves which is an attitude that should be thoroughly condemned.

I am almost 100% with this article and would often go even further, and I absolutely agree that marginalized people are going to be disproportionately affected. However, there are a couple assertions that seemed a bit dubious. For example:

> Danielle Blunt, a queer-identified sex worker with a master's in Public Health who’s spent time observing the phenomenon, notes that she’s seen Instagram ban hashtags like #femdom and even #women—while #maledom remains available.

I’m not exactly a porn or sex work connoisseur, but my immediate first thought is that I’ve actually heard the term “femdom” but never maledom. Of course, that could just be a lack of understanding on my part, but at least a cursory search seems to agree: femdom is a dramatically more popular term. I searched both on Google (which is a nice thing to have sitting in my search history, I’m sure) and moved a couple pages back to hopefully grab a more accurate result count, and got the measure 1,880,000,000/22,200,000 = 84x more popular. Exactly why is unclear, but my guess is that maledom is more often lumped into the larger BDSM umbrella and not distinguished. I suspect many popular BDSM terms that are not gendered are also blocked.

Of course, I could be wrong. I don’t have an instagram account, so I can’t verify how often these terms are used on such websites even if I wanted to.

Still, it goes on to continue draw this sex puritanism as being firmly gendered, but I think that this is not a result of Silicon Valley’s weird obsession with puritanism. Rather, the reason why some non-explicit sexual content is allowed and other non-explicit sexual content is not runs a lot deeper than just SV companies, and is the result of the general culture we have for what is “safe” and what is not safe. This is definitely 100% for sure biased, but that was never not the case, and certainly not an invention of Twitter or Instagram. Tumblr’s infamous “female-presenting nipples” line definitely is insultingly stupid, but its insulting stupidity rooted in deep American traditions of having double-standards.

If you disregard our bizarre cultural inequities regarding what sexual content is “safe”, what remains is a very clear issue: payment processors and advertisers (and some other gatekeepers, like the App Store) yield immense control over the entire modern Internet. I don’t even think it’s necessarily an issue with Silicon Valley specifically.

I was really hoping cryptocurrency would help provide a balance, but instead it looks like the primary function of cryptocurrency is to launder money and provide another place to gamble. Unfortunate, but oh well.

These past couple years must have beaten all records in censorship

So we are cool with political censorship, scientific and medical censorship, covid... But sex censorship adjacent is the thing we need to investigate

A lot of the points have nothing to do with 'Silicon Valley' since it broadly reflects society views. It seems more a hint that someone wants 'Silicon Valley' to manipulate society views

I don't think anyone has any problem finding sexual content

Also I don't think we want sex related content being forced on us 24/7

Or, maybe, we're not cool with any censorship?

And nobody is suggesting that sex-related content should be forced on anyone 24/7. But there's no reason why one shouldn't be able to find and join a group on, say, FB that caters to such things.

Some things should be censored, just like some things should not be promoted or given air time. I'm sure that even though you stated "we're not cool with any censorship", even you can find something.

And given previous statements here, the second that Steam or any other platform knows you're an adult they will not stop suggesting "adult" themes/products to you. Advertisers don't need to wait and gauge whether you will respond well to sexualized material. It's a given that you most likely will.

There is no problem with publishing or finding erotic material on the internet. The reverse, however, is much harder problem. Anyone that has tried to create a platform with content sharing knows this.

So, yeah: Sex censorship does harm everyone, because it saps resources from actual product development. But boy oh boy please keep doing it. Trim out the noise, many appreciate it.

You're missing the point. It's not about "erotic material" at all! It's about discussions on topics related to sexuality. The sex work angle here is not about sex workers finding clients - it's about them being able to discuss their work in general. Not to mention that whole thing where anything "gay" is automatically "sexual" etc.

The point I mentioned still stands. There are plenty of places where discussions of the sort you mentioned are allowed and encouraged. There is more need to allow for heterogenous topic hubs than to homogenize everything into one hub. That’s already happened by virtue of the content being available on the web.

How is this Silicon Valley’s fault?

You have a bunch of puritanical politicians and voters who attempt to aggressively punish anyone that goes against their idea of a perfect puritan society. The result is laws that by design force corporations into over censoring to avoid liability.

Turning around and blaming SV for this is nonsense, especially when the same puritans are blaming SV for all of the non-puritanically pure parts of society.

As a moderator of multiple NSFW subreddits a factor not accounted for in this article is spam. The subreddits I moderate do most permit content from commercial (eg OnlyFans) accounts. These types if accounts constitute the bulk of our removals.

Being sex positive doesn't mean you need to let your community become overrun with commercial solicitation. In communities without OF rules, you see the some content spammed across dozens of subreddits. There is no engagement with the community. If this behavior is left unchecked it leads to the erosion and eventual death of the community.

I think a big part of it is platforms not wanting to get listed as "adult content" by organizations maintaining filter lists.

Facebook wants absolutely everyone to use Instagram, especially teenagers. They almost launched Instagram for kids under 13, whom social media companies in the US are forbidden from offering their standard products to. I've seen public wifi filters class reddit as "adult".

The issue is that people have gotten used to being able to put things on the internet for free. Unfortunately for people involved in selling sex, there are many laws that make hosting their content relatively expensive. Each piece of content uploaded needs to be moderated by someone to confirm it’s not something that runs afoul of the law, this is unscalable, and thus the classic SV playbook doesn’t apply.

In fact the more popular a service gets, the more expensive it becomes to run, on an almost exponential scale. Meaning there’s an inflection point where the service won’t be able to profitably add more customers.

There’s a reason such a service hasn’t sprung up… no matter how you run the numbers there’s not a good, safe way, to both allow a backstage-type service and promise on penalty of criminal charges that some form of (child) abuse won’t take place on the platform.

Eh? Are there barriers to sex-friendly startups and platforms? Let's discuss those then. "Silicon valley" or not, others shouldn't be compulsed into featuring or supporting others' expression of sexuality. Consent as I understand is a foundational principle of any healthy sexual relationship or expression.

If a person wishes to censor or prohibit expressions of sexuality, so long as they don't prohibit others from independently expressing their sexuality then what is the problem?

yes there are. if you e.g. try to start a nudist community where no sex is involved, you can't monetize it through ads, and mastercard&visa require that you hold government ID proof for every member that uploads images.

demonetization is for all intents and purposes prohibition

Yes.. but crypto? Even if you are right, the problem is master card and visa not silicon valley censorship. So pass a law that prohibits payment processors from refusing any legit business? My whole point was to address the root cause instead of the lazy cause.

Sex censorship seems to be benefiting music videos. And IMO the videos make the sex more twisted than then reality, something like magazines and healthy body image.

Silicon Valley's Censorship Harms Everyone

I would note that, despite its presentation as new activisim-- sex workers advocating for safer work conditions and more societal acceptance has been a fight ongoing for many decades, potentially centuries. It might be taking a new front as the internet involves as increasingly important to sex work but this is not a new fight.

> In it, she argued that “[t]he increasing presence of women’s skill and success represents a challenge to tech culture” and that “[w]omen’s success and agency are in direct conflict with an industry culture that caters to the priorities—and egos—of males.” Her words resonated and stuck with me.

Couldn’t get myself to read beyond this point.. someone please do it and tell me if the article was worth it

"Instead, it seems likely that they simply don’t see queer users as important"

3.8%.[1] That's below the noise threshold from a revenue standpoint.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite...

What an uninteresting point of view. I don’t have time to be enraged about this

Have these people been on the Internet?

“ BARDOT SMITH CALLS herself a “corporate finance escapee.” Petite and exuding intellect, she looks the part, but for the past 10 years she’s been involved in a different industry: the precarious world of sex work. She is also, alongside a growing community of sex workers, actively challenging Silicon Valley’s status quo through research and activism. I first encountered her work in the form of an essay she wrote for the critical Silicon Valley publication Model View Culture in 2014. In it, she argued that “[t]he increasing presence of women’s skill and success represents a challenge to tech culture” and that “[w]omen’s success and agency are in direct conflict with an industry culture that caters to the priorities—and egos—of males.” Her words resonated and stuck with me.”

Is this satire?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com