The Digital Closet, page 20
A number of YouTubers noted that simply including the word “trans” in a video title was enough to flag the video for demonetization.121 On the last day of Pride Month in 2018, YouTube took to Twitter to apologize to the LGBTQIA+ community, noting that they were proud to have their voices on the platform and to facilitate the role they play in the lives of young people and promising that they would do better in the future.122 This apology rang hollow to many, however, particularly the portion about the role these YouTubers play in the lives of young people given the previous year’s rampant problems with YouTube censoring LGBTQIA+ content for adolescents and children. To my knowledge, YouTube has made no announcement of specific changes that have or will be implemented to date.
YouTube has offered a Restricted Mode since 2010, which is meant to be used by libraries, schools, public institutions, and users “who choose to have a more limited viewing experience on YouTube.”123 There are only two ways that a video can become censored in Restricted Mode: (1) the content’s creator can apply an age restriction to any of their videos, and (2) an “automated system checks signals like the video’s metadata, title, and the language used in the video.”124 Videos that deal with drugs and alcohol, violence, mature subjects, use profane and mature language, contain incendiary and demeaning content, and, most importantly for our purposes, sexual situations are subject to restriction. YouTube describes these sexual situations as follows: “Overly detailed conversations about or depictions of sex or sexual activity. Some educational, straightforward content about sexual education, affection, or identity may be included in Restricted Mode, as well as kissing or affection that’s not overly sexualized or the focal point of the video.”125 This poses a key problem for people creating youth content on sexual health and sexual identity, especially when they attempt to make this material appealing to young people, as we’ve already seen in the instances with sex educators on Twitter and Facebook. Further, videos suffering from restriction offer a much more damning portrait of the company since, as their site notes, the only way a video can be restricted is by content creators self-selecting an age restriction or by an internal, automated content filter. In each of the cases we will examine, this is worth bearing in mind. This is not caused by an army of misogynist trolls flagging LGBTQIA+ videos as inappropriate—this is a fully automated function on YouTube’s platform betraying its hardcoded heteronormativity.
In 2017, a number of LGBTQIA+ content creators noticed that their videos were now being censored on Restricted Mode, and their hashtag #YouTubeIsOverParty trended on Twitter as content creators commiserated with one another and began protesting YouTube’s biased censorship.126 If you notice the timing, this came shortly after the passage of FOSTA, a veil behind which all internet platforms were ramping up their censorship of LGBTQIA+ content. For example, Rowan Ellis, a feminist and queer YouTuber who makes videos about pop culture, activism, and self-care, found that forty of her videos were now being censored under Restricted Mode. In her video on the subject, Ellis noted, “The sexualization of queer and trans people is still rampant. This kind of insidious poison which makes us seem inappropriate is still around. It is still having an effect.”127 In another example, Calum McSwiggan, an LGBTQIA+ lifestyle vlogger, found that all of his videos had been censored under Restricted Mode except for one. McSwiggan acknowledges that a number of his videos include inappropriate content for children but notes that even videos with clean language and no explicit sexual themes were taken down without cause. Examples of such videos include one explaining gay pride and why LGBTQIA+ individuals march every year, a video celebrating the gay marriage of two of his friends, a video he made in collaboration with Tom Daley in which they interview celebrities who speak about who their pride heroes are, and a spoken-word video detailing how McSwiggan came out as gay to his grandmother.128
A popular LGBTQIA+ YouTuber named Tyler Oakley similarly complained on Twitter that his video “8 Black LGBTQIA+ Trailblazers Who Inspire Me” was blocked by YouTube’s Restricted Mode.129 A number of Sal Bardo’s videos were restricted, including his contribution to It Gets Better, a campaign meant to prevent at-risk youth suicide.130 Bisexual YouTuber neonfiona noted that on her channel, all the videos about her girlfriends were blocked while all the videos about her boyfriends remained visible in Restricted Mode—thus toggling the Restricted Mode settings effectively transforms neonfiona from a bisexual woman into a straight woman.131 Another bisexual YouTuber named Melanie Murphy reported the exact same thing happening to her channel.132 YouTuber Gigi Lazzarato had all of her videos about coming out as transgender and many that discussed gender identity and sexuality restricted. She notes, “[I]t’s scary on so many levels because I know when I was younger, YouTube was my family, YouTube was the place where I found a community of people that understood what I was going through.”133 Seaine Love’s video about coming out as transgender was restricted as well.134
In response to the complaints of these YouTubers, the company sent out a tweet noting that “LGBTQ+ videos are available in Restricted Mode, but videos that discuss more sensitive issues may not be.”135 In an emailed statement, YouTube representatives noted that their automated system may be incorrectly labeling some LGBTQIA+ videos as violating their community guidelines for Restricted Mode. They noted, “[W]e realize it’s very important to get this right. We’re working hard to make some improvements.”136 Within a month, YouTube claimed to have fixed a problem on the “engineering side” that was incorrectly filtering twelve million videos, hundreds of thousands of which featured LGBTQIA+ content.137
In 2018, a year after YouTube apologized for “accidentally” blocking, demonetizing, and/or age-gating the content of YouTubers like Rowan Ellis, Tyler Oakley, Stevie Boebi, and neonfiona, Chase Ross noted that any of his videos that contained the words “trans” or “transgender” in their titles were being demonetized or removed completely—the same videos with different titles were left alone. Ty Turner similarly tweeted that his channel was penalized for a video he posted about picking up his prescribed testosterone.138 Not only do LGBTQIA+ videos continue to be censored, demonetized, and age-gated on YouTube, but the company has also since allowed extremist anti-LGBTQIA+ advertisements to be posted alongside LGBTQIA+ content on its platforms—a number of which came from the Alliance Defending Freedom, which has been deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.139
The Women of Sex Tech conference, which contains presentations and talks by a group of entrepreneurs in sex and technology industries, had its first-ever, live-streamed conference censored by YouTube in 2020. SX Noir, the vice president of Women of Sex Tech, told Motherboard, “I think this indicates that there will always be a moral judgment on these platforms. . . . When cis, heterosexual white men create these digital worlds, you see these moral judgments leading to more discrimination for people who are brown, black and queer.”140 In 2021, YouTube’s overblocking of LGBTQIA+ content is still palpable, and LGBTQIA+ content creators still complain of censorship. For instance, as I write, you can still go to neonfiona’s channel, toggle the Restricted Mode, and watch as her sexual identity appears to shift from bi to straight. By leveraging the rhetoric of protecting children and combating criminality and sexual deviance, YouTube is complicit in silencing LGBTQIA+ discourse for the youth and anyone poor enough to need to access YouTube through public computers. And, from their own admission, this is an instance of pure algorithmic bias.
Conclusion/ASMR
One of the oddest victims of FOSTA has been creators of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos, called “ASMRtists.” ASMR is a sensory phenomenon “in which individuals experience a tingling, static-like sensation across the scalp, back of the neck and at times further areas in response to specific triggering audio and visual stimuli.”141 These auditory phenomena are wide-ranging and most often nonsexual. Browsing the most frequently viewed ASMR videos on YouTube brings up content like whispering, ear cleaning, massage, tapping, peeling, brushing, crunching, squishing, and eating sounds. People who experience ASMR report a pleasant feeling and relaxation while listening to and/or viewing ASMR content, and this is its primary purpose rather than supposed sexual enjoyment. For instance, research has shown that these same people experience reduced heart rate and increased skin conductance levels while listening to or viewing ASMR content, which may indicate that it has therapeutic benefits.142 There is evidence it may be useful in treating everything from depression to chronic pain.143 This is the most frequently cited reason for accessing ASMR content online. In one survey, 82 percent of people used ASMR content to help them sleep, 70 percent to deal with stress, and only 5 percent for sexual stimulation.144 It has also become remarkably mainstream. Rapper Cardi B noted that she listens to ASMR content every night, Ikea made ASMR advertisements for its furniture, and automaker Renault made an ASMR advertisement for one of its new cars.145 Michelob even ran an ASMR ad for its Ultra Pure Gold beer during the 2019 Super Bowl.146
ASMRtists have long had to contend with the assumption that ASMR is a sexual fetish, and it has recently become a new target of the war on porn. In 2018, China cracked down on ASMR, calling for its leading video sites to “thoroughly clean up vulgar and pornographic ASMR content,” a directive that sites like Youku, Bilivili, and Douyu complied with by removing all ASMR content writ large.147 While the response in the United States has not been as extreme, it has certainly been troubling and betrays a heteronormative paranoia about queerness. YouTube began demonetizing the genre in 2018. For example, the YouTube channel ASMR with MJ got a notice from YouTube for violating its community guidelines, as nearly a third of its videos were suddenly considered improper for monetization.148 In another example, the woman running the channel Be calm with Becca took to Reddit after having a number of her videos demonetized, such as videos where she is fully clothed and talking about clothes. As she notes, YouTube’s appeals policy requires a video to get 1,000 views in a week before they will review it, a near impossibility for many ASMR videos that were banned because they are older and have niche audiences.149
This reaction quickly spread to PayPal, which began banning ASMRtists for life and freezing their funds for 180 days. Content creators like Sharon DuBois (ASMR Glow), Scottish Murmurs, Creative Calm, and RoseASMR all had their PayPal accounts banned and funds frozen, though two of them were able to successfully appeal the decision.150 As Violet Blue has explained, there was an odd correlation between the ASMR accounts being demonetized, censored, and banned online and the gender of the content creators that can only be explained by looking to the manosphere, which had begun mobilizing against (female) ASMRtists on an 8chan forum called “PayPal Lowering the Hammer on ASMRtits [sic].”151 The 8chan forum’s name is a pun on the term ASMRtists, used to describe the predominantly female content creators. The censorship of ASMRtists betrays an assumption that all LGBTQIA+ and female-created content is automatically sexual and ought to be subject to stricter scrutiny on the part of internet platforms, which is all too easy for alt-right misogynists to exploit.
Despite the censorship crackdown, a number of companies have rushed to begin capitalizing on ASMR content.152 The recent app and ASMR platform Tingles is rushing in to supplant both YouTube and Patreon, hosting ASMR content and monetizing it for ASMRtists on the same platform. Tingles tries to lure ASMRtists to its platform by promising to quadruple their ad revenue and offering incentive gifts for reaching certain numbers of supporters.153 However, ASMRtists have reported that the company is a scam. By registering, content producers automatically have their entire YouTube portfolio uploaded to the Tingles platform, which disables their YouTube ad revenues and severely decreases their overall income.154 Another similar attempt at commercialization is Monclarity’s integration of ASMR content into their Mindwell meditation app, which is produced in-house. Mindwell now offers voices that pan across speakers to make users feel a sense of companionship that can aid with calming and relaxation, often offset by music.155 It is worth noting that neither of these apps has been banned in the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, and there are no murmurs among the alt-right community of targeting them to get them censored in app stores. Perhaps this is because both companies are owned and operated by men? In a heteronormative internet rife with biased censorship, it seems only men are allowed to control the sufficiently vertically integrated and capitalized companies that can push their content through the content filters and community guidelines to reach a user base at web scale. Anti-porn organizers only rest once digital prostitution is placed under the control of digital pimps.
4
Pornotopia Bound
When Tumblr Became Straight
On December 17, 2018, the social media site Tumblr banned “adult content” from its platform. For many years, Tumblr had been a safe haven for purveyors of alternative, feminist, and LGBTQIA+ porn, most commonly referred to collectively as “alt-porn.” It also offered sex-positive and body-positive blogs and several curated archives of sexual expression not readily available elsewhere on the web. The changes worked to eradicate this safe space and renew a long-standing effort to cleanse the platform and better monetize it. Tumblr had been purchased by Yahoo in 2013 for $1.1 billion dollars with the promise that Yahoo would not “screw it up” by altering the platform.1 Despite this pledge, shortly thereafter Yahoo moved to shadow-ban adult content on the site, with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer describing adult Tumblrs as not being “brand safe.”2 This was despite Tumblr supporting a robust alt-porn community, with its own analysts at the time reporting that less than 1 percent of its adult blogs were spam-based mainstream heteroporn advertisements.3 Despite this, Yahoo exiled its adult blogs to what Violet Blue has referred to as a “non-searchable ghetto,” de-indexing them from both internal and external searches and making an estimated 12.5 million adult Tumblrs unfindable. At the same time, Tumblr rolled out its app for iPhone, which led to even more intense efforts to combat pornography on the platform, banning the hashtags #gay, #lesbian, and #bisexual from the app because it associated these terms with searches for pornography.4 As we’ve seen, this heteronormative overblocking that so sexualizes people’s existences that they can be considered pornographic is nothing new. After severe backlash from its user community, Yahoo announced that it would roll back these policies. By many accounts, Yahoo did not understand Tumblr or its users and ended up leaving the platform to its own devices after the failed attempt to cleanse it.5
This changed when Verizon acquired Yahoo for $4.48 billion in the summer of 2017 and began attempts to better monetize its holdings.6 From the beginning, it was expected that Verizon would again look to crack down on sexual content on the platform. As Katrin Tiidenberg, a professor at Tallinn University in Estonia who studies adult content on Tumblr told Quartz, Tumblr’s new owners understood the intermittent adult content as making it more difficult to sell ad space to potential advertisers.7 This is despite the fact that adult content constitutes over 20 percent of all the content clicked on by Tumblr’s desktop users, demonstrating the deep entanglement of the platform with pornography.8 Within months of its purchase by Verizon, Tumblr rolled out a new “Safe Mode” on the platform so that users could browse content on the site without running into pornography. However, it appears that this did not suffice. In November of 2018, the company got the chance to further ramp up its censorship efforts when Tumblr’s app was removed from the Apple App Store after child pornography was found on the platform.9 As we’ve seen in the previous chapter, Apple maintains a strict anti-pornography and more generally anti-sex moral stance and polices its App Store based on those morals. Apple forces companies like Tumblr that want access to iPhone users to regulate their platforms in accordance with Apple’s biases. As a recently purchased company looking to better monetize its platform, Tumblr had the excuse to ramp up content moderation on its platform and ban all adult content whatsoever, though, oddly, far-right extremist content continued to proliferate unchecked on the platform.10
Tumblr’s new definition of adult content primarily included “photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts.”11 The company made exceptions for images of breastfeeding, people giving birth, and “health-related situations” like mastectomy and gender confirmation surgery, as well as for written content, nudity as political speech, and nudity in art. Tumblr acknowledged that its content moderation system was being implemented on the fly and that there would certainly be mistakes as it worked to develop automated features to cut down on the human review labor necessary to maintain its platform.12 Its computer vision-based automated content moderation system led to a comedy of errors in its debut, likely due to the short time frame in which it was implemented. The system flagged user drawings of dragons, images of crocheted candles, of tights, a vase, and of NHL-player Alex Ovechkin sleeping with the Stanley Cup trophy, among others.13 A number of art and anatomy Tumblrs had a large portion of their posts censored on the site.14 Even a post about LGBTQIA+ content getting censored on Tumblr that was posted to the platform got flagged for violating its new adult content policies.15 As we’ve seen, overblocking is a frequent result of any attempt to filter or moderate digital content and one that inordinately impacts LGBTQIA+ communities in its failure to distinguish the context of sexual speech and nudity, as well as its hypersexualization of female-presenting bodies. And similarly, this overblocking can have disastrous consequences, as having too many pieces of flagged content on your Tumblr will de-index it from Google Search and thus hurt your ability to monetize your digital content.16
