As Prudes Drive Social Media Takedowns, Museums Embrace... OnlyFans?
from the didn't-see-that-one-coming dept
Over the last few years, we've seen more and more focus on using content moderation efforts to stamp out anything even remotely upsetting to certain loud interest groups. In particular, we've seen NCOSE, formerly "Morality in Media," spending the past few years whipping up a frenzy about "pornography" online. They were one of the key campaigners for FOSTA, which they flat out admitted was step one in their plan to ban all pornography online. Recently, we've discussed how MasterCard had put in place ridiculous new rules that were making life difficult for tons of websites. Some of the websites noted that Mastercard told them it was taking direction from... NCOSE. Perhaps not surprisingly, just recently, NCOSE gave MasterCard its "Corporate Leadership Award" and praised the company for cracking down on pornography (which NCOSE considers the same as sex trafficking or child sexual abuse).
Of course, all of this has some real world impact. We've talked about how eBay, pressured to remove such content because of FOSTA and its payment processors, has been erasing LGBTQ history (something, it seems, NCOSE is happy about). And, of course, just recently, OnlyFans came close to prohibiting all sexually explicit material following threats from its financial partners -- only to eventually work out a deal to make sure it could continue hosting adult content.
But all of this online prudishness has other consequences. Scott Nover, over at Quartz, has an amazing story about how museums in Vienna are finding that images of classic paintings are being removed from all over the internet. Though, they've come up with a somewhat creative (and surprising) solution: the museums are setting up OnlyFans accounts, since the company is one of the remaining few which is able to post nude images without running afoul of content moderation rules. Incredibly, the effort is being run by Vienna's Tourist Board.
The Vienna Tourist Board said its museums have faced a litany of online challenges. After the Natural History Museum Vienna posted images of the Venus of Willendorf, a 25,000-year-old Paleolithic limestone figurine, Facebook deleted the images and called them pornographic. The Albertina Museum had its TikTok account suspended in July for showing nudes from the Japanese artist and photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, CNN reported. And the Leopold Museum, which houses modern Austrian art, has struggled to advertise on social media because of the bans on nudity.
Even advertising the new OnlyFans account on other social media proved difficult, the board said. Twitter rejected links to the board’s website because it linked out to the OnlyFans account. (Twitter allows nudity on its platform as long as the account and images are labeled as such.) Facebook and Instagram only allowed ads featuring the Venus of Willendorf and a nude painting by Amedeo Modigliani after the tourist board explained the context to the platforms, but other images by artists Egon Schiele and Peter Paul Rubens were rejected.
This is all kind of ridiculous, but certainly falls into the Masnick's Impossibility Theorem collection of the impossibility of content moderation at scale. Of course, it also recalls the case in France where Facebook took down an classic 1866 oil painting by Gustave Courbet, in which the court initially ruled that Facebook could not take down the image. Facebook has (for many years now) had exceptions to its nudity rule for "art," but figuring out how to enforce that kind of thing is notoriously difficult.
And when you have prudish, moralizing busybodies like NCOSE pressuring companies to wipe out any and all nudity, it's no surprise that this kind of thing is the result. But, really, all of this seems likely to backfire in the end. Cordoning off even artistic nudity into sites like OnlyFans... also means that more and more people may be introduced to OnlyFans "for the paintings," only to discover what else is available there.
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Filed Under: content moderation, museums, nudity, paintings, pornography, prudes, social media, vienna, vienna tourist bouard
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'A bare ankle, fetch me my fainting couch!'
If it wasn't having very real, very damaging consequences it would be utterly hilarious how terrified some people apparently are of the naked body, something that they seem to spend more time and energy thinking about than those making actual porn do.
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The "praise the lord for keeping others from doing the things we wouldn't do" award goes to...
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Impossibility Theorem Proof by counterexample.
Here's the thing:
Gimme your fave prognostication on Tesla Stock, right? Doesn't matter if you love it, hate it, or see it as an interesting technical problem to have fun, or any other way.
Now, lemme steal it, with your kind permission, and post it right here, this thread, this article on Techdirt. What's that? I'll be banned for that??? Darn right -- this isn't on the Tesla thread, and I'd deserve it, too.
But it was the fave of half of Techdirt's readership, what's this, why did I just win the comment of the week contest when I posted it after the Tesla article?? Of course it did, it made everyone smile, IN THE RIGHT CONTEXT!
Twitter and all are trying to do moderation without context. There's an entire class of posts, where it depends on where its posted whether its OK or not.
And expanding it to whatever silly thing one of us finds sexy? Easy! How is the doc supposed to learn about it? But it's Porn! Oh, what's this, you read medical texts for porn in college??? lol, why are they all the very same pictures??
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Re: Impossibility Theorem Proof by counterexample.
The proof would read a lot cleaner if you didn’t lie and claim you were banned.
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Re: Re: Impossibility Theorem Proof by counterexample.
Silly.... your humor and sarcasm meter is broken, all of the above is HYPOTHETICAL for the sake of argument! (all involved parties will say that what you just read NEVER HAPPENED!)
The borrowing of something you never quite see from "you" (and every other reader lol) should have cued you in...as should your knowledge of Techdirt, where the community generally votes to hide the bad posts, letting anyone check on them.
It would be quite a week when someone was both banned and won the comment contest!
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Well, one can see the prudes' point of view when one is faced with pictures like these, of three Shropshire lads in all their glory:
https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-rear-view-three-shropshire-sheep-meadow-rams-breed-wel sh-image78527096
Quite unVictorian!
The real danger is of course, that people might take to decorating their living spaces with pictures of nude animals ... one can finally see A.E. Housman's point in his notorious set of poems titled "A Shropshire Lad" ... and Hugh Kingsmill's commentary on them
https://www.liquisearch.com/shropshire_lad/parodies
/s
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Companies willingly choose to do moderation in degrees that are impossible at scale. They choose to ban nudes at the behest of moralizing busybodies, then try to craft a quagmire of subjective exceptions for interests like art and others. Seemingly without ever considering whether they can in practice enforce such policies fairly or accurately.
It's all very well to believe they should block "pornographic" nudes while allowing "artistic" or whatever, but they can't actually do that in the real world. It's too subjective. Even if it's judged by humans and not dumb algorithms, the decision comes down to the whim of the individual(s) making the call.
In the end, having overly idealistic moderation policies that fail in practice doesn't serve anyone. They really should reconsider something simpler they can implement better.
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Re:
And then they get attacked for "not doing enough". It doesn't matter that what they are being asked to do is impossible; if they don't claim to be trying to do it, they will never hear the end of it.
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'Either do it yourself or get off by back.'
The problem is that by humoring those demanding the impossible they've left themselves open to being called out for 'not doing enough', they should have made it clear from the outset that while they are willing to try to do better at moderating what's being demanded of them simply isn't possible and if those making the demands want to claim otherwise then they are more than welcome to create their own platforms and show everyone how it's done.
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Here they go with their principles again
Prudish moralizing busybodies wanting to suppress disfavored images: very bad, ridiculous even.
Prudish moralizing busybodies wanting to suppress disfavored speech: at worst, meh but probably it’s good.
It’s the same goddamn principle. THE SAME. The self-appointed suppressors, odd-couple partners in the Dept of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice are allowed to do these things, and both are awful for doing so and should be opposed by any person who thinks that freedom of expression is actually important.
And there’s no doubt that both groups are moralizing busybodies, getting the vapors and clutching their pearls because someone somewhere is doing something they loathe.
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Re: Here they go with their principles again
You are failing to distinguish between we don't do this on our site, and we will stop you doing that on your site. The latter often being achieved by force, such as convincing payment processor to stop serving a site.
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Re: Here they go with their principles again
Little Cupcakes, the anonymous coward above me isn't wrong.
However, the real issue is the presence of the monopolies and oligopolies, per Cory Doctorow, because moderation is very context and audience dependent, and it's trivial to construct examples and contexts and audiences where the very same material can either win contests in a positive way or be banworthy in a negative way. A hello kitty logo, with its pornographic overtones in Japan, is an excellent starting point for this exercise; consider also an example post promoting fraud and what happens to that same post when you add your boldfaced FRAUD! warning to the front of the very same post.
Now, foolishly ignoring the law of unintended consequences for the sake of a good starting point, I think abolishing or greatly restricting copyright is the most practical way to redress the monopolies and oligopolies that enable anti-democratic behaviors like the heckler's veto over porn being discussed in the main article. I still haven't figured out how GPL enforcement might work with that, so maybe the best rule for copyright is "you may legally enforce attribution and availability of originals" on explicit notice within the work and registration.
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Re: Re: Here they go with their principles again
"Little Cupcakes, the anonymous coward above me isn't wrong."
And let's not forget that there is something monumentally wrong with the comparison of erotic imagery and - as he terms it, "undesired speech".
An anti-vaxxer spreading trying to fool people into eating horse dewormer or a bigot screaming that gays aren't people isn't a comparable situation to someone seeing a naked breast.
He is trying to compare someone throwing a fist to someone drawing a fist being thrown - as if they were equal.
THAT is the big loss of context here, way before we even get into the debate on who gets to moderate their own property and in which ways.
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Or run away, that's an answer too
Prudish moralizing busybodies wanting to suppress disfavored speech:
Which 'disfavored speech' would that be, and be specific.
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Re: Or run away, that's an answer too
That One Guy
I think you aren't living up to your own standards -- even an idiot like me can cite to the Backpage.com story, which is all about prudish moralizing busybodies wanting to suppress disfavored speech, with lots of harm to women resulting when the ones forced by economics into sex work no longer had a central place to rate their clients, and the harm to children when it suddenly got much harder to find sex traffickers scattered to the four corners of the internet away from that site.
Cupcakes was being satirical.
The disfavored speech and images could easily have been the sex and sex-adjacent ads on backpage.com
The busybodies were those that motivated first a sheriff to tell Visa or mastercard they couldn't work wtih Backpage, then the FBI arresting the site operators.
Same is now happening with Onlyfans through Visa or mastercard.
Interestingly, a group called Sedition Hunters may have a very similar take on Gab and Parler...which speech I and likely most of my readers and even Sedition Hunters (many liberal busybodies!) disfavor...but notice how helpful those sites have been to hunting down the traitors who invaded the US capitol on January 6.
My own take is busybodies suppressing speech (or images) is ALWAYS a bad thing, but the defense is diversity, a market, not an oligopoly, and we'll get there if copyright can't be used to prevent people from scraping sites and re-presenting them relatively freely.
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Re: Re: Or run away, that's an answer too
It depends what you mean by suppressing. Companies deciding what to host and not is good (and this is often what people making comments like yours are complaining about). Citizens, individually or collectively, advocating for what a company should or should not host is fine. Governments or other entities in a position of power (thinking of payment processors) telling other companies what they must or must not host is a problem.
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Re: Re: Re: Or run away, that's an answer too
Sir or Madam, I agree and thank you for the clarification, which may be needed by some of our newer readers.
"We don't do that here" is expected moderation.
"You can't do that there" is suppression.
We get into trouble with internet giants and payment processors because "here" has gotten too big.
For the wonks like you and me, notice that the word busybody requires a distinction between those directly involved with something and those who are "other" to that something and value judgements thereon. Techdirt and I are definitely directly involved in this post, though I think much of Facebook moderation might be considered busybodies because of the distant relationships involved. To some extent, you, nasch, are involved and would not be a busybody if you were to help remove my post by voting it spam; you financially support Techdirt and you would be supporting the site with your moderation effort as well.
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Re: Re: Or run away, that's an answer too
I think you aren't living up to your own standards -- even an idiot like me can cite to the Backpage.com story, which is all about prudish moralizing busybodies wanting to suppress disfavored speech, with lots of harm to women resulting when the ones forced by economics into sex work no longer had a central place to rate their clients, and the harm to children when it suddenly got much harder to find sex traffickers scattered to the four corners of the internet away from that site.
Context and specifics matter. A person, group or company putting pressure on a platform because they are terrified of bare skin and want to scrub it from existence(or at least bury it so they can pretend it's gone) is quite different than say a platform deciding that they'd rather not host pro-insurrection, pro-plague and/or holocaust denial content, even if there are also people who would rather not see that content either and are making that desire clear.
(To head off a potential counter once the government gets involved and starts issuing demands or even 'suggestions' that's an entirely different issue.)
Cupcakes was being satirical.
Possibly, it can be hard to tell when conversing with simple text but given one of the regular trolls here like to use similar language, making vague claims of 'censorship' and 'suppression of speech' without ever providing details for some strange reason my first response to that sort of language is to take it seriously and make use of a question that a find is the quickest way to shut that sort of person up.
As for the rest of your comment I'd probably just keep pointing back to the 'context and details matter' part of my response so to keep from repetition I'll just leave it at this.
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Re: Re: Or run away, that's an answer too
"I think you aren't living up to your own standards -- even an idiot like me can cite to the Backpage.com story, which is all about prudish moralizing busybodies wanting to suppress disfavored speech..."
Except there's a closer example to hand where "disfavored speech" is those "conservative values" being "suppressed" by Facebook and where not being able to say the N-word on a social platform is being compared to the silly situation of clutching your pearls and heading for the fainting couch at the sight of a bared breast.
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Re: Here they go with their principles again
"It’s the same goddamn principle. THE SAME."
Bullshit it is.
"disfavored speech" - as currently defined on major social media, either directly endangers people or actively demonizes people for being, well, gay, trans, black, jewish etc.
Whereas disfavored images of the nude body can only reasonably do harm to the actual observer or the one depicted. Barring the latter's disagreement it follows that the first can simply choose not to visit that site. This fixes every problem.
Cars aren't airplanes even if both are vehicles, a can of bleach isn't a jug of water even if both are liquid, and nude pics aren't hate speech.
"...both are awful for doing so and should be opposed by any person who thinks that freedom of expression is actually important."
Know how I can tell where you're coming from, bro, when you argue that not giving the nazi a safe space is tantamount to being a pearl-clutcher headed for the fainting couch over someone seeing a naked breast?
Or were you really making that titanic whopper as an earnest mistake?
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Re: Re: Here they go with their principles again
Hey Scary Devil,
I personally disfavor erotic pictures, especially if they show up on Techdirt, as I have ideas you may find strange in that department.
There's other speech I generally disfavor -- until exactly the right context comes along. Take, for example, a video showing, say, someone dying violently, let's use George Floyd. I've still not seen it, probably won't unless its the right medical training course. I'm very pleased, however, that it lead to Derek Chauvin's murder conviction.
YMMV, more examples are easy to construct!
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Re: Re: Re: Here they go with their principles again
"I personally disfavor erotic pictures, especially if they show up on Techdirt, as I have ideas you may find strange in that department."
And if you disfavor them you are free to either flag them, not go where such imagery would be displayed, or ask the webpage owner to adjucitate moderation. No problem.
However, there's a vast gulf of context between disfavored speech which you, personally, don't like...
...and speech which tries to make the statement that <demographic X> is a lesser species. Something which were it aimed at individuals would be actionable slander.
My point is that "LittleCupcakes" is poisoning the well when they try to equate these two scenarios. Deliberately or not the implication is that the one tossing the nazi out on his ass is as unreasonable as the one heading for the fainting couch at the sight of bare skin.
And that is not and never has been true.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Here they go with their principles again
I like erotic pictures. But that’s not the point.
If a site chooses to let nazis have a thread/topic that’s their choice. And if they don’t, that’s their choice.
And they can have an erotic picture topic or not. Also a private choice for the site.
And those choices are legal regardlof your preference.
Given I’ve seen Parler toss free speech out the window when far left dems started muckraking, I don’t trust anyone who claims “free speech”.
But:
I’ll say this. One site has proven to be somewhat consistent in their lack of removal.
Bitchute.
And that shows minimal hands off still can work.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Here they go with their principles again
"If a site chooses to let nazis have a thread/topic that’s their choice. And if they don’t, that’s their choice. And they can have an erotic picture topic or not. Also a private choice for the site. And those choices are legal regardlof your preference."
Do note that no one has even raised the question of "legal".
We're talking about the difference between a person who objects to nazism, racism and bigotry, Another person who hollers in moral outrage over a bared breast.
...and some commenter who tries to imply that there is no difference between these two types of people.
The rational person realizes that commenter to be an asshat who deliberately tries to make a civil rights activist look like a westboro baptist church member.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Here they go with their principles again
Understood. But the aspect I get stuck on is their right to exist. Their right to believe. And that fits both those classes.
If it’s not front and centre main page… I say whatever.
If you don’t want to see tna don’t go to the bare boobs thread. And if you don’t want to see anti white racism don’t go to the black power page and if you don’t want anti colour racism don’t go to nazisrus.
I never understood the need to demand. If you don’t like it don’t visit.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Here they go with their principles a
That would be fine (or at least less bad) if all the racism were confined to the racism area, and so on. But it isn't.
Nobody is suggesting revoking either of those.
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"Onlyfans" is not our hero - Wikipedia and Archive.Org are!
Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf ) and Archive.Org ( https://archive.org/search.php?query=venus%20of%20willendorf ) have images of the statue, and you don't have to pay any $3 a month for access to the account! (Sorry if you miss out on the free tourism coupon for the next time you visit some random European city)
While I am glad to see any companies fight the censors, we have to recognize that corporate internet has proven itself monopolistic and abjectly cravenly wretchedly useless. We let those creeps slither into our internet and promise us goodies and for the next 20 years they have done nothing but degrade and destroy it. We can either accept that "internet is censored" or we can accept that "capitalism has no future on internet". Let's go for plan B.
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Well, it doesn't exactly come as a surprise.
I've been saying for years that once you overlegislate popular and hard-to-reach phenomena - like porn and piracy - what you get isn't meaningful enforcement. Instead you first just get a safe space to which the undesired phenomenon migrates and when those rules are tightened they suddenly impact legitimate phenomena - who are then forced to migrate to the same place.
Museums suddenly being served in the same storefront as porn is a good and early example of this.
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A bit late?
Glad it got covered but this story broke some time ago. End of September.
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Re: A bit late?
This is an opinion blog, not a breaking news site.
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Re: Re: A bit late?
True.
I just actually wondered if it would come up here.
It’s an intriguing turn of events. After the fu of payments they get actual museums on board. Lol.
Whodathunk
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Re: Re: Re: A bit late?
"After the fu of payments they get actual museums on board. Lol.
Whodathunk"
Sadly it's been predicted. Once you start widening the rules required for moderation algorithms, false positives become unavoidable.
Statue of Lady Justice with one breast exposed? PORN!
Statue or imagery of 15th century cherubs? CP!
Youtube vid with music in the background or an unfortunate hashsum? Copyright infringement!
Let this spread and you end up with the most openly legitimate businesses having to join the shady guys living under the digital overpass.
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Re: Re: A bit late?
I'd call Techdirt a "slow news" site...with some definite, but well-understood and useful biases. Full time staff looks like 1 or 2 people, stuff gets missed, time gets taken to think, stuff gets pushed on the stack, maybe you should have tipped Mike off earlier to a good story. YMMV!
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Re: Re: Re: A bit late?
Just surprised. I had actually forgotten about it as new reading pushed it down the stack and I forgot to forward the link. Mof.
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