The digital closet, p.19
The Digital Closet, page 19
Take Instagram for example. As Instagram cofounder and former CEO Kevin Sysntrom explained, much of the platform’s focus on censoring explicit content is meant to maintain its 12+ rating in the Apple App Store and thus capture a larger youth market share.78 Instagram largely achieves this by operating two types of censorship based on hashtag use. The first type permanently blocks all content with particular hashtags from ever appearing in a search. It contains over one hundred hashtags that have been applied to millions of photos, mostly having to do with nudity, pornography, pro-anorexia, and self-harm. These hashtags range from the expected—#anal, #bigtits, #blowjob, #porn, and so on—to the vaguely sexual and somewhat surprising—#cleavage, #sexual, #femdom, #fetish, #footfetish, #freethenips, #gstring, #nipple, #shirtless, #twink, #wtf, and the like.79 These banned hashtags betray a general anti-sex comportment that sexualizes and objectifies female bodies by banning images of female-presenting people with cleavage and thongs that would be legally permissible to wear in public settings. They also work to foreclose politically sexual speech, like the famous Free the Nipple campaign in which males and females posted close-up photos of their nipples so that Instagram would have trouble determining whether they were sexually explicit or not according to its policies. The campaign began in 2014 to protest the double standard in which female nipples are eroticized and legally required to be covered in public under most state and local laws in the United States. The campaign grew immensely on Instagram and even attracted attention and support from celebrities like Miley Cyrus and Chelsea Handler. Lastly, Instagram bends its own rules to render images of feet censorable as sexually explicit solely based on the context clue of a hashtag indicating that users might masturbate to the images. This demonstrates a stronger commitment to preserving the spirit of heteronormativity rather than the letter of their community standards.
The second type of censorship is a soft ban in which a select number of hashtags return only thirty or so results. Users searching for these hashtags receive the following message from Instagram: “Recent posts from #[hashtag] are currently hidden because the community has reported some content that may not meet Instagram’s community guidelines.”80 While Instagram implies that these soft bans are only temporary, research has shown that many have remained censored for at least several months at a time. Some of the soft-banned hashtags include #bi, #curvy, #everybodyisbeautiful, #iamgay, #lesbian, #mexicangirl, and #woman.81 This demonstrates an even more insidious policing of queer expression on the platform, as it reinforces body normativity, reproduces Google’s earlier obfuscation of bisexual discourse, and shuts down the sharing of images from LGBTQIA+ users because of the potential association of these hashtags with pornography. More recently, Instagram has soft-banned hashtags in a way that reaffirms cisnormativity. For example, in 2018, the hashtags #woman, #strippers, and #femalestrippers were all banned but hashtags like #man and #malestrippers were not.82 In the wake of FOSTA, the company also banned the hashtag #sexworkersrightsday, further marginalizing and stigmatizing sex workers in the United States.
While these two forms of censoring images from appearing in search results based on hashtag use are Instagram’s most proactive efforts to censor nudity on its platform, it also uses some rather clunky computer vision algorithms to automate content moderation and community reporting procedures that are exploitable by alt-right misogynists (as we’ll see in chapter 4). While there is little to no publicly available data on these systems, it is fair to assume that they internalize a lot of the same biases as Google’s SafeSearch and Cloud Vision API. What is available are many instances of Instagram’s algorithms failing to appropriately identify objects in images. Sometimes this leads to quite funny and ridiculous results, such as in 2019 when Instagram censored a photograph of a potato.83 Other times the results are much more appalling.
In 2018, internet studies researchers Stefanie Duguay, Jean Burgess, and Nicolas Suzor interviewed queer female Instagram users and found that they experienced Instagram’s content moderation as overly stringent.84 That same year, journalist and sex worker Alexander Cheves reached out to his network on Twitter and received over one hundred messages from other sex workers and adult performers whose accounts on Instagram had been flagged, disabled, or shadow banned in 2018.85 Here are just a few of the particularly egregious examples of Instagram censoring (nonpornographic) LGBTQIA+ content. In 2019, Instagram banned the account of Tom Bianchi, a male erotic photographer and HIV activist who has helped to document the history of gay men’s lives on Fire Island and elsewhere in the United States since the 1970s.86 Speaking about his photography, Bianchi told LGBTQ Nation,
Fire Island was, for me, a little utopia away from everything. It’s literally an island. And even for me, my photos were an idealization. . . . Stonewall happened right before I got to New York and shortly before I started doing all of this at Fire Island. The image of the homosexual was that of degenerates working in shadows and perverts trying to seduce children. So healthy young American boys playing on the beach? Early game changer. . . . Basically I saw myself as the supporter of and encourager of the whole gay consciousness that was emerging at that time in a very positive way. . . . What’s special about it is remembering the affection that we all had for each other. We were all best buddies. We played together, we partied together, we adored each other. We danced with each other.87
In 2018, Instagram also censored a photo of Queer Eye’s Antoni Porowski in his underwear.88 Also in 2018, the Warwick Rowers, a rowing team that highlights advocacy and allyship for women and queer communities, had yet another of their posts censored on Instagram. This time, the photo was of the rowers nude but with no exposure of their genitals, the cover for their upcoming charity calendar whose proceeds support LGBTQIA+ inclusivity in sports.89 Perhaps most egregiously, in late 2017, Instagram censored a photo of two lesbian women cuddling in bed with their child.90 All of these efforts are solely meant to prevent nudity from becoming easily visible on the platform so that Instagram can maintain its market share of iPhone users. This market share is more valuable to the company than the intermittent public relations crises that result from its stifling of LGBTQIA+ expression.
Apple’s aggressive anti-porn censorship regime even impacts large independent companies like Barnes & Noble and Amazon, both of whom rely on the Apple App Store to disseminate e-reading apps. For instance, in 2017, Barnes & Noble began terminating the accounts of erotica writers on their Nook platform without warning.91 Similarly, in 2018, Amazon followed suit and began shadow-banning authors of romance, erotica, and similar books considered to be sexual content. A number of authors had their books stripped of their best-seller rankings with no warning or notice from Amazon. While this alteration may seem mild to some, it is worth noting that many of Amazon’s algorithms use best-seller rankings to determine how content appears in searches, whether the book shows up in advertisements, and whether the book can be served up as a recommendation for buyers who have purchased similar titles.92 These changes only took effect on the US Amazon site and thus demonstrate that Amazon was likely introducing these changes in anticipation of FOSTA’s enactment.93 However, the focus on eliminating erotica from the Nook and Kindle stores also betrays a focus on censoring mobile content likely meant to assuage Apple and keeping their mobile apps in the Apple App Store. This marks a radical divergence from past precedent in the United States where the last major attempt to censor an “obscene” literary text was William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, which reached the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1965 before being overturned with testimony from Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer. Since then it has been presumed that establishing the negative impact of literary texts and demonstrating their obscenity was too high a bar to clear, and censorship was largely reserved for audiovisual texts going forward. While Amazon is a private company and does not have to adhere to these precedents in managing its digital storefront, it is shocking to see them take such a conservative and anti-sex stance on literotica. Further, self-publishing e-books presents a low barrier of entry for authors—it is cheap and easy to do—and thus literotica is a haven for LGBTQIA+ and other non-normative sexual content. Shadow-banning literotica from the Kindle and Nook platforms makes queer content harder to produce, locate, and afford for authors and readers alike.
Reddit similarly had a number of its apps pulled from the App Store in 2016 because they contained a NSFW toggle that allowed users to search for porn subreddits and view them on their iPhones. Reddit was forced to remove the toggle and make it extremely difficult to view any pornographic content through its apps to get them fully reinstated in the App Store.94 In 2018, Microsoft banned nudity and profanity platform-wide, including on Skype, in Office 365 documents, and in Microsoft Outlook, a move likely connected to Microsoft’s move to integrate these services into the mobile app ecosystem on iOS.95 In fact, all major platforms and app providers are forced to bow before Apple’s anti-sex morals, as Apple gatekeeps access to between 20 and 25 percent of all mobile phone users globally.96 FOSTA simply gave Apple yet another financial excuse and set of rhetorical tools to justify its heteronormative policing of sex and sexuality.
We might similarly read Facebook’s dedication to policing sexual expression, as was examined in chapter 2, as another result of Apple’s gatekeeping given the large portion of Facebook users who access the platform primarily through its mobile app. However, while there is plenty of evidence of Facebook overblocking LGBTQIA+ content, there is less documentation directly connecting it to Apple’s standards for its App Store. While we’ve already examined Facebook’s heteronormative content moderation policies and some of their impacts on sex education, it is worth adding a few explicit examples of them censoring LGBTQIA+ speech before moving on to examining the Google platform. In 2018, several site admins for the sex education group SEXx Interactive on Facebook were banned the day after their biggest annual conference for an “offending image,” which turned about to be their logo, which was simply the word SEXx in bold black text on a solid peach background.97 Cyndee Clay, executive director of sexual health and harm reduction advocacy group HIPS told Motherboard that they were seeing a lot of content getting blocked or removed from Facebook for violating community standards, including a post from a friend of hers asking to interview sex workers for an article.98
In a 2018 story, the Washington Post found dozens of LGBTQIA+-themed advertisements that were blocked on Facebook for supposedly being “political,” getting caught in the crossfire of Facebook’s attempt to moderate political content after the 2016 election and alleged Russian misinformation campaign. These included advertisements for pride parades, beach concerts, pride-themed nights at a sports arena, an LGBT youth prom, an NAACP-sponsored conference on LGBTQIA POC, a Lyft ad raising money for an LGBT community center, an LGBT-themed tourist expedition to Antarctica, gay social groups, a gay comedian’s stand-up event, senior-friendly housing options, and perhaps most notably an advertisement for a panel discussion with an LGBT radio station in Washington on the history of Stonewall.99
Overblocking on the Google Platform
Steve Jobs’s recommendation that pornography enthusiasts turn to Android was misleading at best. The Google platform has largely kept pace with Apple in the race to see which can be the most anti-sex and anti-pornography. For example, Google maintains its own “kill list” for Android. In 2013, researchers found that Android’s firmware filtered words like intercourse, coitus, screwing, lovemaking, most terms for genitalia (with special attention paid to female anatomy), panty, braless, Tampax, lactation, preggers, uterus, STI, and condom.100 These words were not contained in its dictionary and not available for autocorrect or auto-complete functions. This essentially made it more difficult for Android users to talk about sex and about their bodies, betraying a sex negativity whose silence helped reinforce heteronormativity. In the same time period that Apple was pointing the finger at Google as being pro-pornography, Google was systematically censoring it across their entire platform. Google banned pornography on Google+ at its rollout in 2011, on Blogger in 2013, in Google Glass apps in 2013, on Chromecast in 2014, on AdWords in 2014, and in the Google Play app store in 2014.101
Since then, people have reported Google Drive automatically deleting pornography stored on Google’s servers without warning.102 For a period in 2018, Google News censored all articles with the word “porn” in them, including legitimate articles that simply happened to be about or to mention porn, like stories on revenge porn or on the suicide of adult entertainers that were published in mainstream newspapers and magazines.103 In July of 2018, Google AdSense blacklisted a page on GovTrack.us for hosting legislative information about a then thirty-two-year-old bill called the “Child Sexual Abuse and Pornography Act of 1986.” The site’s admin submitted a request to review the violation to Google but was quickly given a response that the request to unflag the page was denied and that the page would remain unable to display AdSense ads to generate revenue.104 Today, you can even purchase a Google router and use Google Family Wi-Fi to filter all web traffic passing through that router with Google SafeSearch.105
Each of these bans produced instances of overblocking, most notably the shift to the content policies at Blogger. In 2013, Google announced that it had changed the content policy for the site, which had provided free blog hosting since 1999. The changes included a policy shift that would ban and begin deleting blogs “displaying advertisements to adult websites” without offering any definition of what constituted “adult” content. As Violet Blue reported, at the time, the blogs that Blogger marked for deletion included “personal diaries, erotic writers, romance book editors and reviewers, sex toy reviewers, art nude photographers, film-makers, artists such as painters and comic illustrators, text-only fiction writers, sex news and porn gossip writers, LGBT sex activism, sex education and information outlets, fetish fashion, feminist porn blogs, and much, much more.”106 In 2015, Google made additional changes, removing adult blogs from its search index, hiding them from public discovery without a direct invitation and Google login, and providing content warnings to visitors before they land on the page.107 After these changes, bloggers were left with few alternatives to host their content. WordPress.com may host what Google considers “adult” content but does not offer options to monetize that content. Until 2018, Tumblr was a popular option, but its blogs were not indexed by Google Search and monetization was also difficult. The only real option was for bloggers to pay to host their own blogs, which produced financial and technical barriers for content producers.
Nowhere has overblocking been more visible on Google’s platform than on YouTube. As digital media researchers Jean Burgess and Joshua Green note,
Advertiser-friendly content regulation—particularly using automated methods—can just as effectively smooth the edges off radical progressive politics or the witnessing of human rights abuses as it can work for the intended purpose of dampening abuse, hate speech, and extremist activity. And the conflation of sexual content and harmful speech in content regulation can often end up inadvertently discriminating against sexual and gender minorities.108
This became readily apparent in what is popularly referred to as YouTube’s adpocalypse in 2017. Advertisers realized that their ads were popping up on videos of white nationalists, hate preachers, and sexually explicit content. Major advertisers like Coca-Cola and Amazon pulled their ads from the platform and ad revenues plummeted.109 YouTube acted swiftly to implement a system to automatically demonetize any videos violating its new “Advertiser-Friendly Content Guidelines,” therefore preventing ads from appearing alongside them. The criteria it used to make these determinations were vague and expansive, including videos whose main topics included inappropriate language, violence, adult content, harmful or dangerous acts, hateful content, incendiary and demeaning content, recreational drugs and drug-related content, tobacco-related content, firearms-related content, adult themes in family content, and controversial issues and sensitive events like politics, war, and tragedies, regardless of if they were presented “for news or documentary purposes,” as well as a lot of LGBTQIA+-related content.110
YouTube’s system is unique because its censorship is based fully on machine learning–based automated content filters and does not incorporate community flagging or reporting. As YouTube notes, “In the first few hours of a video upload, we use machine learning to determine if a video meets our advertiser-friendly guidelines. This also applies to scheduled live streams, where our systems look at the title, description, thumbnail, and tags even before the stream goes live.”111 YouTube acknowledged that the system was imperfect and implemented an appeal system in which creators of demonetized videos can get their cases reviewed, but only if they have been viewed 1,000 times in the past seven days. This requirement effectively prevents niche YouTubers from ever successfully appealing the demonetization of their videos and puts an unfair burden on smaller-scale content creators.112 While these changes continue to cause significant damage to LGBTQIA+ content creators, they successfully appeased advertisers who quickly began returning to the platform.113
For example, Erika Lust, an erotic filmmaker, had her account shut down and was permanently banned from the platform after posting a series of video interviews with sex workers about their trade.114 Lust wrote on her website, “There was NO explicit content, NO sex, NO naked bodies, NO (female) nipples or anything else that breaks YouTube’s strict guidelines in the series. [ . . . ] It was simply sex workers speaking about their work and experiences.”115 In 2018, the YouTube channel for Recon, a fetish dating site for gay men, was suspended yet again, only being reinstated after a negative backlash on Twitter and in the press.116 YouTube demonetized many of Sal Bardo’s films, including Sam, a film about a bullied trans boy’s journey of self-discovery, despite the fact that the film has been screened at festivals and in classrooms around the world and had over six million views on YouTube.117 Queer YouTuber Stevie Boebi reported that all of her lesbian sex videos were completely demonetized on the platform.118 Gaby Dunn similarly reported that YouTube had demonetized all of the LGBTQIA+ and mental health content on her and Allison Raskin’s channel Just Between Us.119 YouTubers Amp Somers and Kristofer Weston of Watts the Safeword have also had their content flagged and/or demonetized on YouTube.120
