Sex, power and platform governance

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes platform governance and platform power through the lens of deplatforming sex, and deplatforming of sex through the lens of concentration of norm and infrastructure power. Based on a meta-analysis of ethnographic, interview and social media data associated with cases of deplatforming and replatforming sex on social media, the article offers suggestions for reimagining platform governance and articulates a hope for a more sex-positive platform governance research agenda. Governance needs to be guided away from vague language and moral panic-driven conflation of problems, as both lead to overregulation of already culturally undervalued practices, topics and groups. Further, sex on social media needs to be regulated not just to protect the sensitive groups from it, but also to protect sex from the commercialism percolating through the technology stack. If the regulation is vague, the stack will always revert to the safety of the charmed circle as that is where the money is, and commercial gain cannot be the arbiter of any human rights, sexual rights included. Finally, cases of platform governance, when taken seriously, serve as indicators of a trajectory that the platformized and social media-dominated internet is on. Currently, the future looks dim.

KEYWORDS:

• Platform governance
• platform power
• deplatforming sex
• infrastructure power
• Tumblr
• Libertine Center

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I am purposefully avoiding the more elegant construct of normative power here, as a body of political science work uses the term to discuss Eurocentric visions of universal norms and their diffusion.

2 Following Gillespie and Aufderheide (2020) on stacked moderation and Nieborg, Poell, and van Dijck (2019) on an ecosystem of expanding levels, the three junctions are inspired by the visual metaphor of the stack (Bratton 2016).

3 People interested in swinging, variants of partner swapping and group sex.

4 According to Paasonen (2018), there is reasonable worth in the claim that ‘porn built the internet’, as pornography has been one of the few forms of content that users have consistently been willing to pay for, and a range of key technologies for e-commerce were first developed and applied on porn sites.

5 For context, Facebook bought Instagram for US$1 billion in 2012.

6 A parallel can be drawn, perhaps, with how Craigslist removed the entire Personals section in the wake of SESTA/FOSTA.

7 Craigslist’s legendary Personals section was also shut down in 2018.

8 It does offer examples of CSA.

9 The outer circle is ‘bad sex’ (homosexual, unmarried, casual, non-procreative, non-monogamous, commercial, masturbatory, etc.).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Östersjöstiftelsen [grant number: 1035-3.1.1-2019].