Is social media turning us into prudes?

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No doubt you’ll have heard about the popular children’s sex education book Welcome to Sex being pulled from Big W’s shelves after mainstream media outlets compared it to “child abuse material”. The full story, as I reported, is that it was the end result of a month-long campaign by online anti-LGBTQIA+ conspiracy theorists. Just another normal week in Australia’s culture wars!

But the whole saga prompted me to think about what we’re allowed to post online, how that doesn’t always match expectations about what is harmful, and whether today’s moral panic about sex and children is one of the unintended consequences of big tech’s business model.

On most major tech platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, it’s totally fine to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories. Sure, the platforms might limit your reach, but for the most part, you’ll have no problems accusing the LGBTQIA+ community and sex educators of being “groomers”. You can even film yourself abusing staff members! But if you tried to post some of Welcome to Sex’s content — educational material created by young adult sexual health experts — you’d fall afoul of the platform’s rules against nudity or depicting sexual activity. We’re all about freedom of speech until it involves genitals.

Big tech’s war on sex is nothing new to WebCam readers. Last year I wrote about a push to make the internet into a more sex-friendly place and how it would have flow-on benefits beyond just improving our relationships. But what of the inverse? How are restrictive online rules about sex changing what we think, say and do offline?

Swinburne’s Professor Joanna Williams, who is researching how platform content moderation is impacting digital sexual health content at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), drew a line between book furore and the boundaries set by tech companies.

“I see [the Welcome to Sex controversy] as a continuation of that,” she tells WebCam. “It’s puritanical, anti-sex rhetoric being imported from the United States because content moderation policies — particularly from companies like Meta — are defining the way we talk about sex online, which flows to offline conversation.”

Last month at the ADM+S conference, Williams explained how sexual health organisations have adapted to tech companies’ rules to distribute health information on platforms like Instagram. But the real-world consequences go beyond that. On the lighter end of changes, we’ve seen TikTok users come up with their own “algospeak” to discuss topics like sex (“seggs”), LGBTQ (“leg booty”) and homophobia (“cornucopia”) without having their content removed or restricted. More seriously, the consequences of removing tech platforms’ protections under the United States’ FOSTA-SESTA laws, which saw tech platforms force sex workers off their services, were linked to a “significant increase in street-based sex-work crimes”.

Bringing it back to the Welcome to Sex crusade, it’s not a coincidence these movements have emerged from the internet of today. While the popularisation of the internet opened up access to unlimited sexual content, the most popular online spaces currently are mostly run by a handful of predominantly US-based companies that overwhelmingly rely on advertising business models at scale (and, as such, are at the behest of creating advertiser-friendly content).

These tech companies’ rules are ostensibly shaped by community expectations — although it’s worth questioning which part of the community is given the most weight. Yet it’s clear that it goes the other way too. These rules are signals to communities about what is and isn’t acceptable. It’s not a stretch to suggest that Facebook, Instagram and TikTok users would take cues from the platforms where they spend their time.

Perhaps if we were allowed to post sex-positive, research-informed information online, there wouldn’t be such loud backlash against it.

Hyperlinks

AFP suspends use of controversial surveillance tech found in Woolworths, Bunnings (Crikey)

Big tech misinformation reports ‘not working’: ACMA (InnovationAus)

Byron Bay breach victim told to pay Adidas, National Basketball Association US$1.2m by US courts (ABC News)

How a viral Channel Seven clip that had nothing to do with the Voice was co-opted by the No camp (Guardian Australia)

Neo-Nazis have taken over Senator Ralph Babet’s Telegram channel (Crikey)

That’s it for WebCam this week! I’ll be back in two weeks in my new regular slot on Thursday afternoons.

If you’d like to talk about anything — tips, leaks, even just for a chin-wag — please get in touch. Here are a few ways. In the meantime, you can find more of my writing here. Bye!