I find it weird that "Silicon Valley" is to blame here. This is the result of DC's actions - not SV. Which is mostly coming from the religious right who are big funders/power-holders and dislike sexual imagery and non-fundamental norms in the public eye.
SV is just going with where the $$$ are at and complying with the law. They don't give a shit about anything else as long as stonkz go up.
SESTA and FOSTA are certainly DC's doing, but I think it's fair to say there is a serious aversion to sexuality and eroticism among incumbent platforms, that did not require any prodding from US lawmakers. For example, AFAIK, Instagram has never allowed "adult" content, since long before FOSTA; Steam has never allowed "pornography" on its platform, resulting in hundreds of games requiring patches [1] to play in the form the publisher intended.
Eroticism being a core component of art going all the way back to literal cave paintings, I am sometimes frustrated at the prudishness of the platforms we use in the contemporary age.
It has nothing to with "DC" (numerous anti-porn laws have been struck down by courts) and everything to do with the banking industry's moral codes, which is where the Christian Right shifted their moral crusade to after losing numerous legal challenges.
That's why you see platforms like Patreon crack down on adult content. The banking industry notices, the payment processors and merchant banks sit up and threaten to close the service's accounts, and the service instead capitulates and cranks up their rules around adult content.
They'll bray about fraud rates being high for adult content, but if high fraud rates were a concern, you'd think they wouldn't give the gym industry (for example) free license in credit card processing and ECH transfers...they're prolific scam artists. Ditto for all the as-seen-on-tv crap with outrageous shipping and "handling" fees and so on.
If the banking industry figures out that you're an adult media actor, you stand a good chance of getting banned from the entire system. What possible argument for fraud is there in that case? None. "Fraud" is just a cover for Christian moral code enforcement.
Edit: okay, maybe it's not the Christian Right influencing US banks rejecting porn stars for accounts for "moral" reasons. Must be the sentient Big Mouth Billy Bass units.
It’s the liberal that’s holding the power here, not the Christian that is fighting an uphill battle to preserve their religious lifestyle, and the right to parent their own children how they want.
It’s clear for all that opening the floodgates of porn into social media and platforms that both adults and _children_ use will cause this particular category of content to dominate the entire space. It’ll also lock out any children from most social media whose parents refuse (and rightfully so) to let them see porn. Not that this effort will always be successful, because children who don’t know any better will cave in to peer pressure from friends. This dystopia where what’s essentially filmed prostitution finds its way into almost all spaces in society, including children’s lives, is what the very powerful liberal wants.
Shouldn’t you be more concerned about the increase in women and girls forced to sell their dignity to survive? Is the suffering of people not more important to you than your cummies?
Outspoken Christians form 9 out of 10 members of Congress despite representing 65% of the US population [1]. Religiously motivated laws get argued and passed on a weekly basis, and Christian fundamentalist ideas are constantly in the media spotlight.
The point is in the US we do our best to avoid labeling people with religious beliefs as "tools of their religion" when they occupy political office.
You should try and see how many political leaders are Jewish and then compare that to the % of the population that are Jewish. Comes across as kinda shitty behavior no?
Plenty of government leaders are religious but that doesn't mean they rule according to those beliefs. To make the assumption they do is just a weak attempt to smear people based on their personal beliefs.
When laws are repeatedly passed that are consistent with a certain religious interpretation, at what point does it stop being an assumption? I'll grant you that it would still not be a good thing to point at a specific politician and claim that they're doing it (unless you have evidence). But that's different from speaking statistically about Congress as a whole.
Abolition? Christians in politics have done more good than bad, unless you hate America, which it honestly sounds like you do. Hating America is very hip in certain cliques but it’s pretty cringe to listen to from an educated adult who benefits greatly from the freedom they seem to hate.
"Christians in politics have done more good than bad"
Feel free to provide some actual substantive backing of that (correlation v causation is so much fun), otherwise you sound like another Xtian carnie with a very dull ax to grind.
I genuinely can’t tell if this is your legitimate view or if you’re moving the conversation along by making the religious right’s arguments for them. Either way, I’ll bite.
1. Nobody is arguing against a parent’s right to choose their parenting style. This is about altering society to fit their parenting style.
2. Permissive social networks (like Twitter) don’t have an issue with adult content overrunning the network. Furthermore, if adult content wasn’t roped off to all but a couple of mainstream social networks, isn’t it arguable that the reduced concentration will mitigate your hypothesised “overrunning”?
3. The implication that all sex work is exploitative is in 2022 untenable. There are myriad women out there who consensually do sex work when they could do something else instead. Sex work has pros and cons for the worker like any other job. The characterisation of this as “selling their dignity” is indicative of a view of sex and sexuality that is increasingly out of step with the attitudes of the young people who typically engage in sex work. The implication that sex work is exploitative or even “sad” is driven by the US’s legal stance on prostitution. I live in a jurisdiction with more permissive prostitution laws and the difference is night-and-day obvious. The (il)legality of full service sex work fuels the stigma, not the other way around.
No one is stopping Christians from preserving their lifestyle. No one. None. Zero.
What they are doing is not being held hostage to same said Christians from force-feeding it to everyone else. If you like it, fine. Have a biblically awesome life.
"This dystopia where what’s essentially filmed prostitution finds its way into almost all spaces in society, including children’s lives, is what the very powerful liberal wants." As opposed to the Handsmaid Tale/Stepford/Leviathan-like dystopia every Abrahamic hardliner wants.
> Twitter has a lot of porn on it, and we don't see it as "overrun with porn"
That’s why I said “opening the floodgates”. Yes of course there is porn in social media already. It’s still a fact today that you wont see porn on Twitter/YouTube/Facebook/etc. unless you look for it. If you remove restrictions and push porn just like any other content, then all these platforms will essentially degrade into hybrid porn sites because this particular type of content will dominate the entire space. Some people here are upset that it’s even kept in check at all. SV are being called puritans for having some common sense and not letting this filth dominate their sites.
I'm actually more concerned about religion than i am about porn. Religion is a tool to manipulate the people through lies, and it relies on training people not to do any critical thinking. And the lack of critical thinking in the world today is very scary.
This is a classic case of an industry attempting to self-regulate in order to avoid legal regulation, with teeth. Even inconsistently-applied loose rules are good enough to keep the powerful Christian lobbyist pitchforks at bay.
There are actually strong, non-"puritanical" reasons for this. An oft-cited anecdote is the spouse or parent that finds mysterious porn charges on the credit card. Sex-related services carry an extremely high rate of charge backs. The transaction risks are much, much higher than other categories of goods and services.
So while Visa could simply charge more, there are numerous other headwinds that make this tricky. Political will, payments risks, brand risk, and deep rooted family/social stigmas that fuel the rest. They kind of all have to be dealt with at once for this to start making economic and business sense.
For proponents, it's going to take generational change to shake all of these network effects out. The first step of which is consumers (Gen Z?) publicly admitting that they see no harm in sex-related commerce and to begin showing this in their purchasing behaviors.
John Oliver recently covered this as it relates to sex work. Stigmas and dispositions are changing, but it's slow. A lot of signalling has to happen to a lot of people.
None of this explains why the banking industry blacklists porn stars from having checking accounts, nor why they allow other high-risk industries wholesale access...the gym industry, for example, is incredibly fraudulent and yet the banking industry has no problem letting them use ECH, a system so permissive it's a fraudster's wet dream....or why the banking industry has done nothing to self-regulate payday lenders.
> An oft-cited anecdote is the spouse or parent that finds mysterious porn charges on the credit card. Sex-related services carry an extremely high rate of charge backs. The transaction risks are much, much higher than other categories of goods and services.
I'm not sure how they're working things on the payment processing front but Steam has sexual content on it's regular storefront now without requiring external patches. Heck some are even Steam Deck verified.
“A lot of signalling has to happen to a lot of people.” More signaling makes all signals weaker until everything is noise. Probably not the desired outcome.
...steam is covered in ads, even opening them in a separate window when you launch the client. They're only for stuff sold on steam, and publishers (supposedly) can't buy ad space, but they're ads nonetheless.
It didn't "require prodding" because it was assumed from the get go that there was more money (and/or less scrutiny) to be made 'playing it safe' than much else.
That's not remotely close to being true. The US has among the strongest separation of church and state laws of any nations and they're well protected decade after decade. If the US were actually a light theocracy, the conservative majority Supreme Court would wreck the US promptly with crazy theocratic changes that would make Iran blush. It was the first nation in history to explicitly codify such a strict separation in its constitution as well. Those separation lines have, on average, been made stronger over time.
You can dislike the Christian culture that exists in the US, certainly. It hasn't made any consequential inroads into state in two centuries, in fact the opposite is the case: Christianity (and religion more broadly) has been pushed back out of US life in numerous significant ways (and properly so; eg: gay marriage, abortion rights, making it illegal to discriminate based on religion, acceptance and ease of divorce, sunday alcohol sales & business activity, drug legalization laws, press dominance and positioning (the press is ~95% left-leaning now and very much not religious in nature)). That there have been occasional set-backs in things such as abortion rights, doesn't nullify the overall point. Religion has been losing political and cultural ground in the US for a long time and that's likely to continue. Religion used to dominate US life and heavily factor into US politics, as recently as the post war 1950s-1980s era, and that is no longer the case (the left for example is drastically less religious than it was just 40-50 years ago).
The fact that the US has strong separation of church and state laws is what prevents us from being a true theocracy. It doesn't disprove my point whatsoever.
The fact that the vast majority of politicians that get elected talk about doing what they do in the name of God more than shows that.
Or try growing up in a small country town as one of the only families that don't attend church service. Until you've been suspended public school for "spreading Satanism" because you said church sounds boring, you haven't experienced the same America as the rest of us.
Laws don’t mean anything unless they’re enforced. You proved we’re not a hard democracy, but haven’t proven we’re not a soft democracy, per OP’s point.
The fact that religion is losing ground doesn’t make the point any less true.
I do not live in the US. Looking in from outside, it’s obvious that religion plays a material part in lawmaking, including maintaining a status quo that is increasingly untenable. Of course, you need to read between the lines. Even though it is becoming increasingly hard to do so, the US obviously relies on historical prestige to get away with saying one thing (“separation of church and state!” being drilled in to all kids as part of their Freedom Class) and doing another.
To expound on this, we've still yet to have a president who doesn't identify as Christian. I don't think we're particularly close to a point where a self-professed atheist could get elected president either, although I could see someone of another mainstream religion getting elected in the not too distant future.
As a non-American, can anyone please tell me how the media reacts to Tulsi Gabbard not being Christian? (She's Hindu ... and religious, so this is not relevant to the atheist part of your point.)
I actually don't think I was aware of this! Most of the media coverage I've seen on her is about her coming across as fairly unconventional for a Democrat in the debate performances, but I think the field was so large then and then narrowed down quickly enough that she didn't get much extended attention. I imagine if she makes it further into a national campaign, it might end up coming up though.
Yeah, I specifically said "identify as Christian" when thinking about this; he's said a number of things that make it clear that is how he's presenting himself politically (e.g. something about how the only book he liked better than his "The Art of the Deal" was the bible, and like, I certainly don't know how devout, say, Rutherford B. Hayes was, so it seems reasonable not to count him separately.
>Seemed to be loved by people who call themselves Christian but seemingly don't follow any of Jesus' message.
That describes most Christians, honestly. Trump identifies as a "non-denominational" Christian (as opposed to atheist or any other religion), employs Christian symbols in his politics (likely not in good faith, but again that isn't unusual) and has strong support within the Evangelical Christian community, who clearly find something within him that resonates with their faith.
In your experience, perhaps, but it's exceptionally dishonest, and frankly hateful, to say that describes "most Christians." I know more Christians than non-Christians and the behavior discussed here describes maybe 4 of them (out of about a thousand).
That'd be like someone saying "most LGBTQ are pedophiles." I'm sure it's true in some cases, but is highly unlikely to be true for "most".
Honestly, I get tired of everyone using hyperbole so flippantly. It gives your opponents easy targets to completely discredit the point you were making. So, just...stop.
Ok, but that doesn’t remotely address the rather obvious question of why so many self-described followers of Christ voted for and advocated for a man who is so deeply and obviously un-Christlike.
>In your experience, perhaps, but it's exceptionally dishonest, and frankly hateful, to say that describes "most Christians."
It isn't hate, it is experience, and it's something a lot of Christians would admit about themselves. Even the Bible says most followers of God are hypocrites who fall short of their own principles.
I'm not getting into a religious argument here, but you shouldn't talk about giving your opponents an easy target. Christianity is one hell of a glass house to live in. Maybe instead of attacking me, you should consider why so many Christians believe so deeply and fervently in a man of such excremental moral character like Donald Trump. You can't simply dismiss the question by claiming none of them are real Christians. Take the plank out of your own eye before pointing out the speck in someone else's, as the man said.
Exactly. The whole goal originally was to counter online sex trafficking which is easy to be for, not for religious zealots to "censor nipples" as some here who probably didn't read the wired article think. It's just that like everything there are unintended consequences.
You have cause and effect backwards. Historically 'trafficking' meant human trafficking for the purposes of prostitution. The terminology creep to extend that to any kind of organised prostitution (for example brothels), is absolutely the result of the Christian right, as is the war on porn. Here's one piece Wired ran in 2015 exploring that - https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/03/christians-and-sex-...
Unfortunately, normalizing organised prostitution creates what amounts to a safe haven for human trafficking - this is a key part of the debate. It really seems to be the case that a voluntary mass market in "organized prostitution" is in fact unsustainable because any such attempt will be abused by human traffickers. Niche escorting services may survive, but only because their focus on perceived quality makes them less vulnerable to being taken over in this manner - and it's not clear so far how a separate, more permissive regime for these more resilent services could be created as a matter of law.
it was never clear that FOSTA / SESTA was the solution. Law enforcement came out against the law because the law makes their job harder. Before Craigslist and Backpage cooperated with them in turning over data and traffickers. Now the traffickers are using other methods or working with less LEO friendly operators.
> Which is mostly coming from the religious right who are big funders/power-holders and dislike sexual imagery and non-fundamental norms in the public eye.
The Religious Right? Nicholas Kristof of the NYT, is probably the most powerful individual sex censor - the guy singlehandedly got Pornhub financially de-platformed!
Pornhub's problem wasn't sex. It was revenge porn, authentic rape videos, and all the other content you will host if you allow anonymous uploads.
Not seeing that there is a difference between content intended for public distribution and content that is not is arguably part of the problem here. (Or, even worse, considering someone having sex and someone being raped to be morally equivalent.)
> Pornhub's problem wasn't sex. It was revenge porn, authentic rape videos, and all the other content you will host if you allow anonymous uploads.
Meta/FB/Insta/Whatsapp/Messenger were & are responsible for facilitating significantly more of all of the above terrible things. Of course the problem was sex and that they are a vice company, it made them an easy moral outrage target.
It wasn't hard to de-platform them because they are a vice company, not because of what was on there servers unintentionally. By your standard Meta/FB/Insta are much worse perpetrators of hosting child pornography
Those companies don't actively give people money to produce that content though.
I'm not denying that being a porn company made it easier, but let's not compare what was going on there to what goes on in the private messages of nearly any website large enough.
> I find it weird that "Silicon Valley" is to blame here.
Even before FOSTA/SESTA companies like Facebook, CloudFlare, and PayPal have fought far, far harder for the rights of far-right groups than they even have for sex workers.
> Which is mostly coming from the religious right who are big funders/power-holders and dislike sexual imagery and non-fundamental norms in the public eye.
The universe of people who “dislike sexual imagery” is a lot broader than the (evangelical Christian) “religious right.” Left-leaning Black and Hispanic Christians, non-Christian socially conservative groups (Muslims, Hindus), non-religious socially conservative groups (many East Asians), and also sex-negative feminists have similar attitudes toward sex and sex work.
That’s why these laws have broad bipartisan support. “Sex work is work” is an area where (generally sex-positive) progressives and libertarians agree, but those two groups combined are still a pretty small constituency.
I agree with this. It’s easy to point to some other group to blame on this but I don’t meet many people in any group in the US who would be okay with children seeing nudity on TV. Contrast my experience with Scandinavia, where nude saunas are the norm and maybe it seems like the US just hasn’t yet progressed to sexual normalization.
Is that even a bad thing though? Who’s to say the Scandinavians aren’t messing their kids up with all the nudity? Who’s to say the Americans aren’t messing their kids up with their Puritanical approach to sex? I feel that nobody knows the answer right now and we’re most comfortable not changing anything until we do.
It is not that lawmakers censor nipples. it is google that is demonetizing them, even though it has the power (by virtue of controlling both sides of the ad market) to change those attitudes. Yet they have only been becoming more restrictive , not less
It is the politicians that pass laws to punitively punish companies like google is they ever allow any kid to see anything that isn’t ideologically pure.
No law prevents google from placing ads almost wherever they like. Late night TV shows always had advertising on them, yet even remotely referencing sex on the net is unmonetizable
Could you provide an example of such a law? To my knowledge the US courts and legal systems have been fairly consistent that sexual content is protected under the First Amendment.
The main culprit appears to be the prudishness and conservatism of large companies, somewhat big tech companies but especially credit card companies and payment processors.
That’s normal. Silicon Valley is the only part of America that makes anything or does anything worthwhile. As a result, people have built up an expectation that that is where they should go to get things done.
SV is just going with where the $$$ are at and complying with the law. They don't give a shit about anything else as long as stonkz go up.