#Pornocalypse Comes To Instagram: XBIZ Explains It All
Instagram is not a service that I use, nor one that I would normally cover on ErosBlog. It’s always been a #pornocalypse social media platform, like Facebook, with adult-unfriendly, porn-hostile terms of service (TOS). My whole pornocalypse shtick is that it eventually “comes for us all” — by which I mean that every porn-friendly social-media service eventually changes the rules and throws all us stinky-porn adult-industry people out. But how can it be the pornocalypse if we were never welcome? How can it be the pornocalypse if the TOS always said our stuff shouldn’t be there in the first place?
In the case of Instagram, though…
Instagram was something of a hybrid. They weren’t porn-friendly, but they used to allow quite a lot of risque material. The TOS were vaguely disapproving, but in actual practice you could get away with quite a lot. I never bothered, because I hate getting thrown out of places and not being able to bitch because I was technically never welcome in the first place. But lots of adult performers and sex industry people went hog-wild and built businesses and public followings on the platform.
Of course it had to end in tears. The #pornocalypse comes for us all. I’m not in a position to talk about the details because I was never on the platform. But Gustavo Turner at XBIZ has written a ludicrously detailed, thoroughly excellent piece of investigative reporting. Incredibly, he’s gotten way more detail out of Facebook and Instagram spokespeople than you would expect. Pay particular attention to the interplay between their comments, their denials, and their “no comments” — the picture painted by the differences is very telling.
The article is Instagram and the War On Porn: An XBIZ Explainer. It’s long, it’s good, it’s worth your time. It’s better than anything I’ve ever written on this stuff, and I’m proud of my coverage over the years. But I am not a journalist; I can’t get these people to talk to me, even when I try, which is not often. Gustavo is, and he can.
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I used to work customer support for a certain large app store, and I still remember one evening years ago. In one night, I got about a half-dozen calls about instagram. They were all from different people, but all of those people were men (who sounded in their late-20s, early-30s). They were memorable because every single one of these guys was telling the exact same story: Their 12 year old daughter (always a daughter, always 12) had opened up Instagram and saw hardcore pornography after searching for “eggplants” (always that search term, sometimes they mentioned that it was misspelled and sometimes not). They demanded that Instagram be removed from our store, or at the very least be made 17+.
Our store was very anti-porn, and at customer support we did have a policy that any call where someone was reporting a child encountering pornography on an app had to be reported to a special team (hence why I encountered so many of these calls, I was senior support and an intermediary to that team). Clearly, though, these weren’t real reports, it was a targeted harassment campaign. After a bit of digging I figured out that all of these guys were getting their cues from this psychotic anti-porn ministry website:
h t t p s : / / w w w . x x x c h u r c h . c o m / p a r e n t s / w e – n o – l o n g e r – s u p p o r t – i n s t a g r a m . h t m l
I still sent up the reports, but included the link to every other case that had reported the exact same thing, and a link to that web page. I sympathize with Instagram, because as much flack as they get for their anti-adult content stance, they’re also having to deal with even more flack from people on the opposite side who want them to be even more restrictive.
I don’t know exactly what’s happened to Tumblr, but my temporarily chaste feed is now chock full of all kinds of nudity, and sexual activity. Not sure if it’s a stampede of new puppet accounts that only get to exist for a while, but there’s all kinds of nudity on there again.
Justin, the Tumblr filters are almost completely automated, and make a lot of mistakes, but more to the point the rules are very specific: no “female-presenting” nipples, and no genitalia, basically. (Not how they word it.) A lot of people are getting away with a lot by showing buttocks and skin and supporting suggestive camera angles by unlimited prose.
For the record, I don’t expect that state of affairs to persist. The #pornocalypse does not rest. When it finally filters all the way to the upper echelons of Verizon that there’s still porn on Tumblr, the rules will change again.
This is not ‘artful posing’, it’s penetration, oral sex, full nudity, genitals on display. Video, photos, gifs. Check out https://finestviewsagain.tumblr.com/, https://wildho-ney.tumblr.com/, https://eroticpleasuresoflife.tumblr.com/, https://oursultryevening.tumblr.com/, and that’s just after a few mins of scrolling through my feed.
The question is Why it’s currently proliferating, and how long it lasts, yes.
re: “Employees do not have the ability to request accounts be removed or restored without a robust review of the account against our policies,” the source justified.
Er… WHO does the “robust review”? My guess is that they are “employees”, or is it all Zuckerberg himself? Perhaps they send out a van to pick up homeless street people who are not paid by Facebook or Instagram? The statement contradicts itself in my mind. Does “Omid” stand for Operations Manager Identification? You sure do great journalism for someone who refuses to self identify as a journalist…
Justin, interesting. By the way, please don’t be offended when I remove those links from your comment after a little time; I’m not linking to Tumblr (by policy) any more, especially the links that require login to view. But I’m leaving these for a bit to illustrate your point. I’m not at all clear why you’re seeing what you are definitely seeing; the one test account where I play with Tumblr for a client still gets images flagged if you put two grapefruits too close together, although the appeal process is very quick and usually successful.
You weren’t kidding. This is a long ass piece but good. One thing I got out of it is (using L’s jargon) targeted harassment campaigns work.
No worries.
While I Am seeing a lot of coquettish content that obeys the new rules, there’s a huge explosion in content that’s not shy at all.