Pornocalypse & Share Our Shit Saturday #SoSS

Social media platforms and financial institutions are notorious for being anti ANY type of sexual or adult content. It’s not just about censorship and hiding the content, but about stopping those dirty dirty sex people from making any money from it by closing down sources of income, promotional avenues, advertising spaces.

In some cases they have users flag their content as adult content. I have zero problem with this. It seems a sensible way to handle it. But many platforms simply won’t deal with any kind of perfectly legal adult content at all.

Some examples:

  • Paypal freezes accounts that it deems to be making money off adult content.
  • Facebook removes posts that have any level of unacceptable nudity, including, you know, women’s nipples.
  • Fetlife struggled to find card processing companies that would take their business, and changed their terms of service to placate the one who would.
  • WordPress and Blogger do random purges of sex blogs.

The list goes on.

Recently two more platforms raised red flags.

This last discovery about Twitter is what prompted this post. It’s not a new thing on social media, a search will reveal that it’s been going on forever. It’s essentially a method by which a platform silently and stealthily reduces someone’s reach to ‘punish’ them for doing the wrong thing.

I’d never even heard of it until someone raised it as an issue on Twitter.

My account on Twitter is shadowbanned. So are the accounts of many of the sex bloggers from our little corner of the internet. What that means is that I don’t appear in searches at all, that anyone who doesn’t follow me can’t see my content if it’s retweeted, my comments won’t appear under hashtags, some people I talk to won’t see my comments, I’m essentially made invisible to anyone who doesn’t already follow me.

I have no idea why I have been shadowbanned (I mentioned that it’s done without warning, right?). Not only don’t I know why, there is no way to know how to get the ban lifted, or if it will ever get lifted. Despite being a sex blogger, I don’t tweet anything explicit. And I certainly don’t tweet hate or spam or abuse at anyone.

Apart from the ‘social media that doesn’t allow me to be social’ suckage, the most negative consequence of this shadowban is that Twitter is really the only tool I use to do any publicity, to tell people about my blog, to point them to my books, and without a platform where information is easily shared, I’m really only talking to people who already know about them (“Geez Ferns, WE KNOW THAT ALREADY!”).

I am notoriously bad at self promotion, but Twitter is where I can engage in casual banter with friends AND throw in the occasional ‘hey I’m over here, I wrote a thing!’ callout and hope to get one more person to take a look at a non-stereotypical happy-making version of F/m and go ‘aw yeah!’ and you know, maybe sell a book or two and be able to buy a cup of coffee on the strength of my writing.

So yeah, I’m kind of bummed.

So to the point of this post (yes there was one!): What can you do to help?
 

Share the content of sex bloggers you love.

 

Sex bloggers have rallied to start a new meme: Share our Shit Saturday #SoSS.

If you’re a blogger, pick some content you loved that week and share it on Saturday, mention the #SoSS meme, and then promote your post wherever you have a voice.

If you’re a reader, if you might previously have thought to yourself ‘good post!’ and clicked away. Please take a second to share it somewhere. Most bloggers have sharing buttons, so it’s easy enough to just click it: Done.

If it’s not a Saturday, that’s okay too because Share our Shit Someotherday (#SoSS). Seriously, just share it.

I’m a bit slow off the mark and it’s already Sunday here, but I don’t care. I’m going to cheat some and share some *other* people’s #SoSS posts (I am going broader than my normal F/m focus for this one: I think it’s important to support everyone who is being penalised for creating adult content).

Trolling The Net #36

by Molly’s Daily Kiss

Share Our Shit Saturday! #SoSS by Erosblog

#SoSS Posts that made me squirm by Cara Thereon

Sexy link roundup: sexual rights, anticipation and acrostic poetry by Girl On The Net

 

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If you want to check if your twitter account is shadowbanned, you can test it here (note that locked accounts will always show as shadowbanned, so those results don’t count).

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19 comments

  1. It seems pretty bizarre that social media is so prudish when society is generally becoming more open about sexuality. Over the years I’ve even seen some quite trashy, cheap stuff in our media and yet tasteful resources aren’t allowed by twitter and the like?

    Just as a btw- would you like to know how I discovered you, a year or so ago Sharyn? I googled the Blade scene with the violent blonde vampiress because I’d seen it recently and wanted to see it again. I found your upload on Youtube and that took me to this brilliant blog!

    1. It’s totally bizarre. The fact that so many of them ban content of a sexual nature, but are perfectly fine with hate speech and abuse and violence beggars belief.

      *smile* So funny that you found me that way. I have only 4 or 5 things posted up on youtube. For those who are curious, the (very poor quality) clip Jace mentioned is here (from Blade: Trinity).

      As a note: THIS is by far the most viewed thing I have ever posted anywhere ever (over a million views!).

      Ferns

  2. Total bullshit! Let’s see then. I wonder how many of the sites that indulge in this kind of thing are based here in the good ol’ USA… You know the place with that “freedom of speech” thing. Hmmmm

    1. It’s utter bullshit :(.

      If they want to deal with American money in the form of advertising or customers (i.e. all of them), it doesn’t matter much where they’re based. Fetlife is Canadian based: they struggled to find any payment processor who would accept their business, and they had to compromise to get a deal with the one that would.

      It’s not a ‘freedom of speech’ issue for the most part (though that’s coming: we’re seeing it in the UK now), it’s a ‘conservative private enterprise’ issue.

      Ferns

  3. I’m going to be over there ——> Pretending I have a clue about half of this malarkey. But you know should you need outraged pitchfork and fiery torch waving count me in.
    Coug

    1. Heh… Imagine being in SecondLife being all hilarious and clever and shit and nobody is responding and you slowly realise that it’s because *nobody can see you* because the system has muted you without warning. Yeah, it’s that.

      Outraged pitchforks and fiery torch waving are totally required!

      Ferns

  4. You are as well banned on bloglovin. I follow most sex bloggers there, but I cannot add your blog. Tried it a few times.

    1. Ugh, really?! Bah!

      I find it so strange because in the scheme of things, I’m not even explicit. I guess a mention of ‘BDSM’ might be enough: freaky terribleness and all that :(. Though I’ll bet they allow 50 Shades related content…

      Thank you for trying and for letting me know.

      Ferns

  5. How telling that Facebook and the rest of social media corporate boys club fall over themselves to welcome and profit from Russian-backed trolls bent on disrupting democracies all over the world while they light their hair on fire at the sight of a woman’s nipple!

  6. Wow, this was an eyeopener for me, appears my @Old_Fox62 twitteraccount is also shadowbanned

    I didn’t even know that could happen, strange thing is I still get new followers once in a while, I guess by retweets of my followers, but when I do a search from my vanilla account the @Old_Fox62 is non excisting :S

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