this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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This is a nonsensical argument. If I were running a website, I would also ban any account selling sex. The amount of legal exposure you'd face regarding human trafficking is too great. I'm not going to spend resources trying to sift through these accounts so some randos can profit, especially when accounts tied to trafficking would still be missed. I'm not pro-corporations, this just makes practical sense.
I agree with this. I don’t have a problem with porn, but allowing it on your platform instantiates one HELL of a burden on you.
Let them go to places dedicated to it, like PornHub. PH now has verification requirements, I believe, to protect people. I can’t be bothered to find the article right now, but in the last few weeks I recall reading something about a ton of child porn being traded on Facebook.
This is a really complicated situation. Yes, meta has created the leading platform for sex trafficking (Insta) and FB has similar problems.
However, that barely touches on the issues in play here. For one thing, the platforms have been far more effective at removing sex positive educators than they have at catching adult men using girl's Insta accounts to sell child porn. For another, a repeating pattern involves major platforms being built by sex workers and then the platforms trying to purge sex work later on (Tumblr, onlyfans). For a third, removing all sexual content from a social space in unhealthy, repressive, and weird, playing into misogynistic and religious social norms and pathologizing one of the fundamental aspects of being human. Pornhub has account verification, for instance, not because of actual concern about trafficking but because of Nicholas Kristoff's weird christianity-derived hatred of porn.
I understabd why beehaw prohibits sexual content given the legal environment we're in. But trying to remove sex from social spaces, especially online, is NOT a good or even neutral idea.
I disagree with your interpretation of the article. They aren't protesting policy that bends all sex related accounts. They are protesting inadequate and inaccurate enforcement of a policy that, in principal, allows for sex-positive education and bans pornography and trafficking. And the problem is that meta has done a way better job banning healthy and arguably necessary sex-positive education than jt has pursuing trafficking or child porn.
I'm also not sure why you bring up profit. The article does mention finances of one particular kink group, that isn't the point they were making. They were saying that meta's business model involves offering a public service - been online social space - and that the company arbitrarily violated their own terms of service by banning a bunch of people seemingly because those people belong to a group the company doesn't like (i.e. people with non-vanilla sexual interests).
Moderation is hard and the legal questions are complicated (and way beyond me), but I feel like your comment really dramatically oversimplifies and sort of misrepresents what's at issue here.