Editorial

It is rare to read a news article about the internet and social media which does not start from some observation of how the rapidly changing environments of online spaces have brought many benefits but also associated risks and harms which constantly outpace lawmakers’ abilities to ensure ‘safety’ online. Safety is, of course, frequently code for ensuring that sexual representations remain at the margins across online and off-line spaces, subject to the capricious whims of governments and, increasingly, other less accountable agencies. When Covid-19 was identified in 2020, voices describing pornography as ‘a public health crisis’ were temporarily silenced as the impacts of an actual pandemic were felt across the world. Many workers faced, and continue to face, long-term consequences of that pandemic, but for workers across those businesses centred on sex and sexual services, government support was not forthcoming, contributing to already precarious working conditions and attendant economic inequalities. As mainstream media reported on the impacts of the pandemic, one success story seemed to preoccupy the headlines – the exponential rise in sign-ups of creators to OnlyFans (for example, Boseley 2020; Hancock and Nilsson 2021). Campaigning against sex work and pornography also continued, with news stories of sex trafficking and child exploitation (Paul 2020) and revelations of failures to moderate content (Vega 2020). Throughout 2020 and 2021 we saw content creators, performers and sex workers increasingly pushed out of online spaces by various tactics which operate outside the scope of traditional media regulation.

Social media platforms have been moderating sexual content for years, encouraging users to flag and report potentially offensive posts, employing content moderators to plough through data, while developing machine learning to identify and remove sexual content. The necessity to moderate has taken on greater urgency for platforms following the passing of the 2018 Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) bills leading to removal of commercial sexual content from many mainstream websites. FOSTA/SESTA have also contributed to a general chilling of sexual speech across online spaces, including Facebook which quietly revised its community standards to ban nudity and sexual activity. Nudity was also removed from the microblogging service Tumblr in December 2018 – as explored in Porn Studies (2019) Volume 6, Issue 3 (Byron 2019; Tiidenberg 2019) and in Tiidenberg and van der Nagel (2020, 45–46) and Pilipets and Paasonen (2020). In December 2020, notwithstanding attempts to rebrand itself as a more respectable entertainment platform (Rodeschini 2021), Pornhub was forced to remove millions of videos after campaign groups and a New York Times article (Kristof 2020) claimed a large number of uploads featured underaged and sex-trafficked subjects which, in turn, encouraged credit companies Visa and Mastercard to pull out of payment services to all Pornhub-related websites. Earlier this year, OnlyFans announced it would move to remove NSFW content on 1 October 2021 but reversed its decision after ‘talks with payment processors’.

The term ‘deplatforming sex’ has been around for some time (Molldrem 2018) since Tumblr took the decision to remove sexual content from its platform. That the decision proved disastrous to the platform’s financial model is no compensation for the immediate loss of a vast archive of queer and sexual content. As Molldrem (2018) forecast, the ‘Tumblr drama … raises important questions about the politics of sexuality and digital technology in a moment of heightened sexual anxiety and attacks on digital platforms that facilitate sexual economies in American culture’. Increasingly, in addition to outright bans and deletions, there are subtler forms of censorship such as shadow banning (which limits the reach of sexual content without removing it entirely) and the creation of platform imaginaries which make sexual content and sex workers invisible (as in the corporate communications of OnlyFans, which highlight the accounts of celebrities and influencers). Other more subtle – only in their being less obvious to the majority of users – modes of deplatforming have been gathering pace as banks and payment providers have quietly removed service from anyone they suspect of having connections to sex work. All of these actions have had serious impacts on individuals’ abilities to monetize content and services while probably contributing very little to the supposed goal of safety for users.

In this special issue we focus on the various ways in which deplatforming has had impact on the work, rights and safety of sex workers and how platform actions against sex while promoting ‘sexiness’ may be contributing to a narrowing of sexual spaces particularly for LGBTQ+ who had utilized online spaces to forge communities often impossible offline. Sexual and digital rights seem particularly at risk in the so-called safe zones of the internet and, as individual platforms built on performer and sex worker labour seek to de-sexualize their online spaces, it is diverse sexual content, sexual communities and consensual sex work that bear the brunt of deplatforming.

We include two ‘conversations’ in this issue, and the first, ‘Automating Whorephobia: Sex, Technology and the Violence of Deplatforming’, is an interview with Danielle Blunt by Zahra Stardust, exploring the impacts that deplatforming of sex has had on the work, the rights and the safety of sex workers and what steps those same workers have taken to hack the systems. As Blunt explains, ‘sex work is both a hack of a system and the hustle of survival to expand the choices we have’ and their conversation ranges over the kinds of insights sex worker organizations like Hacking//Hustling have been able to bring to bear in policy-making spaces. Sex workers are the first to feel the effects of legislation like FOSTA/SESTA and their insights and lived experiences are immensely valuable to current debates on internet regulation.

The global impacts of American legislation are explored in Carolyn Bronstein’s article ‘Deplatforming Sexual Speech in the Age of FOSTA/SESTA’. The dominance of US-based digital platforms has significance for entitlements across the globe to information, free speech and communication. As Bronstein argues, not only do corporations have minimal regard for citizens’ rights generally but they give even less consideration for the effects of their decisions on communities like sexual minorities and sex workers. The breadth and vagueness of FOSTA/SESTA have emboldened tech companies to make sweeping changes to their terms of use regarding sexual content, seemingly willing to sacrifice the sex workers and content creators who helped them build those platforms, in order to maximize profits. If corporate policies and legal mandates are increasingly shaping sexual citizenship, what kinds of regulation of social media should we be fighting for?

Katrin Tiidenberg’s article ‘Sex, Power and Platform Governance’ argues that the instances of deplatforming sex offers ‘a major teachable moment’ for us to examine how platforms actually operate and how those meet (or do not) our expectations that platforms operate as public spaces. Tiidenberg suggests we must pay attention to the nuance of differently motivated user groups’ experiences of individual platforms and recognize how research on digital intimacy or social media rarely captures the ears of policy-makers. When sex is added to the mix, governance always swerves towards caution and, as we saw with both Pornhub and OnlyFans, profits are put before the content creators and sexual communities. What does deplatforming tell us about the nature of platforms compared to states, governments and other institutions and how might we reimagine governance that gives space to sexual expression?

The recent volte-face by OnlyFans illustrates both the inequality of the relationship between platform and content makers and the possibilities for platforms like OnlyFans to push back against attempts to deplatform sex. In ‘Competing Platform Imaginaries of NSFW Content Creation on OnlyFans’, Emily van der Nagel explores how OnlyFans’ corporate communications were attempting to ‘clean up’ its image by emphasizing a broad range of content creators outside the NSFW content usually associated with the brand. Writing in the period before the ban and its reversal, van der Nagel demonstrates that OnlyFans has had a long-term strategy to reposition itself as ‘mainstream-sexy’ rather than NSFW. Her analysis suggests the company’s claims that its attempted ban was only necessitated ‘to comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers’ and that ‘OnlyFans stands for inclusion and we will continue to provide a home for all creators’ are perhaps not to be trusted in the long term. Certainly, the OnlyFans affair raises questions about how the creative labour of sex workers and performers has been exploited to build a platform; how celebrities who moved on to OnlyFans were able to benefit from the proximity of that creative sexual labour while themselves maintaining more respectable and socially acceptable ‘sexiness’; and how might the sexual, digital and economic rights of NSFW content creators be protected from capricious platform governance.

Social media platforms’ double standards and their value judgements are the subject of Carolina Are and Susanna Paasonen’s ‘Sex in the Shadows of Celebrity’. Examining those double standards highlights how different kinds of content, exchanges and users within the social media economy are valued. Are and Paasonen observe that sexual content is often ‘questionable in its monetary value and variously labelled as objectionable, sensitive or NSFW’ so that its rights to ‘protection in the name of freedom of expression’ are easily brushed aside and almost inevitably ‘mainstream celebrities trump sex workers by default, just as sexiness compatible with advertising interests trumps content more difficult to monetize’. Ongoing revisioning of platform imaginaries which make sexual content and sex workers invisible will no doubt have significant impacts on the work, rights and safety of those creators, performers and workers; we need to be alive to the everyday inequities of platform governance and demand that platforms support their sexual content creators.

This special issue on Deplatforming Sex offers a second conversation. Bringing together activist sex workers Danielle Blunt and Sinnamon Love with LGBTQ+ online experience researcher Stefanie Duguay and platform governance expert Tarleton Gillespie, our Deplatforming Roundtable took place in October 2021. Intended as an organic conversation about ongoing issues such as shadowbanning and debanking, the panel explored some of the ways companies and platforms have operated discriminatory practices in order to decrease their liabilities. Throughout our discussion it became clear that there is important work to be done in foregrounding the voices and expertise of sex workers and sex content producers in research. Researchers need to work more productively with sex workers and sex content producers if the complexities of platform governance are to be understood and their potential and positive contributions to sexual freedoms can be harnessed.

Our final three essays focus on related aspects of regulation crossing different centuries and continents. In our first, state apparatuses and their operation as constitutive of the category of pornography come under the spotlight. Kwasu Tembo explores the positioning(s) of pornography in late capitalism, particularly during the global pandemic. As Europe shut down during the winter and spring months of 2020, much news discourse talked of porn as a means of dealing with, escaping or mitigating fear of Covid. Tembo's ‘A Sketch of Two Parallaxes of Porn and Its Use: Revelation and Regulation' draws on the PornHub insights published during this period and examines how the material conditions of the pandemic saw pornography become a ‘state-sanctioned, medicinal pleasure’. But, as Tembo demonstrates, the stories about pornography and the stories pornography tells may not have been so radically transformed as might at first appear. This article contributes to ongoing discussions about the status of the information derived from the vast databases and algorithms of Pornhub and its ilk. The incorporation of Pornhub data alongside discussion of algorithmic bias makes valuable contribution to understanding the theorization and experience of digital porn during the contemporary (post Covid-19) era.

Moving back to the 19^th and early 20^th century, ‘From Corruption to Perversion: Sexually Explicit Imagery, Forensic Medicine and Sexual Psychopathology (1862-1927)' focuses on early trailblazers of the anti-obscenity movement in Germany and France. Diederik Janssen offers an examination of the ways in which obscenity and pornography have their own linguistic and legal profiles and have been very tangled concepts historically. Unpicking the medical constructs of the late 19th century and their rhetorical usages by early 20th century French morality crusaders and as negotiated by German vice police, Janssen considers the period’s consolidation of the perverse as a distinct category. Exploring how the study of graphic/explicit/obscene content started out in various continental anti-obscenity contexts, creating 'inventories' of obscenity in order to call for their eradication, Janssen highlights the ways in which such inventories are complexly entangled in contemporary debates and the cultural status of sex and sexuality.

Our final article brings us back to the present, as Min Joo Lee explores the consequences of state actions of censorship on both content and content creators. In ‘Webcam Modelling in Korea: Censorship, Pornography and Eroticism’, Lee outlines state attempts to criminalize the creation and dissemination of pornography via digital technologies. As government seeks to legitimize its censorship by mobilising ideas of a specifically Korean morality and the increasingly global claims to be protecting women from sexual exploitation, webcam creators are forced to negotiate incoherent rules and regulations which shape their performances and very subjectivities as irredeemably illicit.