The Digital Closet, page 24
Patreon has for years provided a frustratingly vague definition of what constitutes pornography and whether or not pornography violates their terms of service.138 As Liara Roux notes in her open letter to Patreon, the company’s definition is similar to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s—“I know it when I see it”—in its ambiguity and ad hoc nature. She writes, “This is an outdated, legally unclear, and importantly, extremely problematic view of adult media.”139 The problems that arise here are multifaceted. First, as we have seen, vague definitions and case-by-case determinations inevitably lead to biased content moderation, often skewing toward the heteronormative. Second, the frequent changes of policy combined with conflicting messaging leaves sex workers, adult entertainers, and erotic artists unable to make stable financial plans or formulate long-term business strategies. These are already extremely precarious sources of income and the lack of stability Patreon is introducing is a catalyst for life crises like homelessness or physical and mental health complications. Lastly, as Roux also notes, this new policy inordinately affects queer, trans, disabled, POC, and people whose first language is not English.140 In particular, porn versus art distinctions are mobilizations of class warfare, as only those adult content producers with the discursive fluency and educational background to successfully situate their content as artistic stand a chance to escape censorship. Lower socioeconomic status correlates strongly with content creators who are queer, trans, disabled, POC, and who do not speak English as their first language. This class status only gets reinforced by cutting primarily these content creators off from sources of revenue.
Prior to the post-FOSTA ramp-up in suspensions, Patreon CEO Jack Conte published an email sent to adult content creators in response to Roux’s open letter. In his response, Conte both notes that it breaks his heart that content creators are afraid for their pages and doubles down on the argument that Patreon “never allowed pornography or sexual services.”141 After reading it over, Roux noted that Conte only exemplified more clearly that Patreon is more committed to its own image in the eyes of investors and banking partners than to maintaining the well-being and safety of its legal content creators.142 By banning sex workers and adult entertainers, Patreon forces the production of erotica, pornography, and sexual expression into the mainstream market so heavily dominated by mainstream heteroporn. Content producers are forced to implement their own web services, seek the few financial services left available to them, and market individual pieces of their content through platforms already dominated by mainstream heteroporn. This essentially shuts down the economy of patronage in which alt-porn and queer content can be produced and disseminated for free, with creators being supported by those in the community who have the means to donate funds to their cause.
It is hard to isolate a discrete cause or responsible party for this system-wide denial of financial services to small businesses and self-employed people whose work focuses on sex toys, sex work, adult content creation, and erotic art. Every financial service provider involved tends to invoke “high-risk” profiles and argue that the next person higher up in the chain prevents them from servicing these “high-risk” customers. WePay, Square, Patreon, and PayPal not only blame each other, but they also blame credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard and banks like JPMorgan Chase particularly. Visa and Mastercard have both denied all responsibility, claiming they had nothing to do with the decisions made by companies like PayPal to refuse service. This is all despite the fact that both a federal appeals court and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have declared that it is against federal financial regulations to refuse business or close accounts based on a “high-risk” assessment determined solely on the customer’s work being related to human sexuality.143
Some of the pressure is coming from the US Department of Justice under what it calls “Operation Choke Point,” which requires banks to identify any customers engaging in what the government defines as “risky” activity and “choke off” those customers’ access to financial services. According to Frank Keating, CEO of the American Bankers Association, “Justice is pressuring banks to shut down accounts without pressing charges against a merchant or even establishing that the merchant broke the law.”144 If banks refuse, they are penalized by the government, regardless of whether the bank committed any wrongdoing or whether the customer was engaged in illegal activity. While Operation Choke Point primarily targets payday lenders, evidence has been surfacing since 2014 that it has also targeted those in adult industries and may be connected to the glut of adult film stars whose Chase accounts were closed around the same time.145 In short, the only thing that is clear is that there is a system-wide felt sense of urgency to not only avoid any transactional relationship with but also to punish any person whose work is connected to sex, sexuality, or sexual expression. As I—and others—have demonstrated repeatedly, this inordinately impacts financially disadvantaged and marginalized groups, who for that very reason do not have strong enough advocacy to alter this trend of systemic discrimination. It is this cultural context that helped incubate a law like FOSTA, which has in turn only amplified this felt sense of urgency among financial service providers.
The result of this legislation is to make financial services less available to smaller market and independent sex workers and adult content creators. As we have seen repeatedly, this inordinately impacts LGBTQIA+ content creators, making that content less available to those who might benefit from it and forcing its creators to enter marketplaces already dominated by mainstream heteroporn. Additionally, this new internet-wide impetus to police sexual expression more heavily offers opportunities for alt-right misogynist trolls to wage campaigns of harassment and oppression on sex workers and adult entertainers. As we will see below, these opportunities were quickly recognized and taken advantage of, as the alt-right mobilized on 8chan and Reddit to develop new strategies and tactics for waging their anti-sex war on porn.
The #ThotAudit and Alt-Right Exploitation of FOSTA-SESTA
The impact of FOSTA was immediately felt across the internet as sex workers and adult entertainers found themselves under systematic attack, being banned from online platforms, having their content removed, being denied financial services, having their accounts and funds frozen or seized, and being doxed by digital misogynists and thus receiving a glut of hate mail and death threats. This was in addition to facing real-world consequences like losing their jobs. The long-standing efforts of anti-porn grassroots activists to use standard governmental and financial channels to disrupt the political economy of adult entertainment and sex work have been coupled with a campaign by alt-right internet trolls to punish “e-whores.” It is worth noting that this very term belies the penetration of NCOSE’s “intersectional” articulation of sexual exploitation. The lines between prostitution and digitally mediated dissemination are blurred such that cam models are considered prostitutes. This campaign is nowhere more visible than in the response to David Wu’s November 2018 Facebook post calling for a campaign to report self-admitted sex workers to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in an attempt to get them audited. At the time, Wu’s Facebook page contained a depiction of him as Jason Voorhees, the murderer from the Friday the 13th movie franchise, dismembering a sex worker.146 Wu’s call quickly spread to Reddit, 4chan, 8chan, and Twitter and went viral after subsequently being dubbed “thot audit.”
The word “thot” is an acronym that means “that ho over there” and was most often used in Black communities. It has been prevalent in hip-hop lyrics for many years, for instance.147 The word has obvious misogynistic overtones. It near universally refers to women and analyzes them purely as sexual objects. Thots are women who are easy to sexually possess and thus can be dismissed as worthless. Just like the term “slut,” thot is wielded with obvious class antagonism as well.148 Thot status is primarily an aesthetic designation based not on any real information about a woman’s sexual history but on her consumption habits (i.e., style, tastes). As Amanda Hess writes, “If women are products, then thots are cheap goods. More than that, they’re knockoffs: low-quality merchandise that attempts to masquerade as luxury items.”149 As with most alt-right memes, thot also contains a racial component, as it is a term from Black communities primarily used to designate Black women as cheap imposters of high-class, hard-to-sleep-with, white women.
As I have mentioned, the original strategy behind the campaign was to report “thots” to the IRS in hopes of getting them audited. Roosh V championed this effort early on, arguing that anyone who managed to get a thot audited would be awarded 30 percent of any taxes recouped by the IRS after the audit. Roosh wrote, “There is actual financial incentive to defeating thottery.”150 In his YouTube video on the “thot audit,” Roosh gave voice to what he described as the “righteous anger” of online male communities, like gamers on Twitch, who were enraged by the “boobie streamers” taking over their digital communities—women who have nothing to offer to society but their bodies—and the “paypigs” that support them.151 Increasingly prone to blending religious rhetoric with his outbursts, Roosh argued, “God is gonna judge these hoes” with his “cleansing fire.”152 In the same video, Roosh echoes complaints that video games are incorporating homosexual and transgender propaganda, thus showing queer materials to young people, demonstrating concretely the intersection between the biologization of gender roles and the reification of heteronormativity. He argues that sexualizing people at younger ages turns them into homosexuals, that sex education is meant to turn people gay, and notes that he would be on the verge of murderous violence if people were trying to “homosexualize” his children. Roosh argues, “Giving the women the right to vote, the right to choose their careers, everything, was such a mistake. It goes against the natural order. Women were never designed to have choice in anything, except what color clothes her baby gets to wear.”153 Roosh borders on viewing the situation as a conspiracy to “disconnect the sexes,” lower the population, and turn all men into homosexuals and all women into sluts. His response is right out of the alt-right playbook, as he reiterates throughout the 150-minute video that he is not telling men to do anything, but he won’t blame them if they report sex workers to the IRS. The entire video is an effective endorsement and catalyst of this sort of behavior despite these lines intentionally placed to offer plausible deniability of inciting it.
Men’s rights activists like Roosh’s followers and members of the incel community—incited by tweets from the official Twitter account for incels.is—quickly organized to begin reporting sex workers to the IRS. The trolls found out that using the IRS’s whistleblower program is extremely tedious. You have to submit, in paper via physical mail, a person’s physical address, full legal name, date of birth, taxpayer identification number, and specific information about the alleged fraud being committed.154 The organizers of these “Right Wing Tax Squads” worked largely via 8chan and the r/ThotAudit subreddit, which had nearly two thousand followers before it was banned on November 27, 2018.155 One Reddit user responded to the problems with IRS reporting by posting, “Find the thots paypal email, send them money, and then report them for selling goods against paypals services. . . . It’s against Paypal’s rules to solicit digital sexual content. All of their funds will be locked pretty quickly.”156 The dissatisfied trolls quickly turned from reporting sex workers to the IRS to abusing the content moderation policies of online platforms to damage the livelihoods of sex workers, a tactic that has been used by foreign governments and partisan groups to, for example, silence the Syrian resistance movement and the Catalonian independence movement.157 On one thread of the subreddit users described a way to expedite the reporting process, “including spamming webforms with multiple reports, including links to illustrate the breach of the company’s terms of service, and threatening to report the breach to the media if the company did not immediately ban the sex worker.”158
To further streamline this process, these digital misogynists organized via 8chan the construction of what they termed the “ThotBot,” a web crawler that would automatically crawl the web to capture the screen names, full names, locations, links to wish lists, individuals’ payment processors, and bios of online sex workers, which it would then compile into a spreadsheet to make reporting them for violations of terms of use easier. By December, ThotBot had already captured the information of more than 166,000 sex workers.159 An 8chan poster wrote, “Find every piece of law breaking action that the left does. It’s fucking easy since they broadcast it all on social media for the public to find. Get their dox, use it to report their illegal activities to the authorities, rinse and repeat.”160 The creator of the ThotBot told WIRED via direct message that the intention behind the crawler was the “total excommunication or extermination of whores in society” and noted that they ought to face the death penalty.161
Where the first leg of the ThotAudit campaign of reporting sex workers to the IRS was an abject failure, this second leg has led to serious consequences for sex workers and adult entertainers online. Take, for example, Lily Adams, who makes and sells pornographic photos and videos online. In the wake of the thot audit, Adams took to Twitter describing the campaign as a witch hunt. Within a minute, her account was flagged and added to a review list. On the same morning that her account was reviewed by thot auditors, Adams’s PayPal account was frozen indefinitely with $256 left in it. By the end of the day, she was banned by every cash app she was using.162 Porn performer Ela Darling was doxed, and her family received calls from internet trolls at their workplaces to harass them about her vocation.163 Stories like these are increasingly becoming the norm among online sex workers and adult entertainers. They find themselves in a renewed state of precarity that is culturally invisible because so many of us have bought into the Pandora’s box of porn myth, assuming that sexual speech and content flows freely across the internet. Instead, the internet has been canalized to facilitate the flow of heteronormative content at the expense of queer communities. And this new heteronormative infrastructure is being viciously exploited by digital misogynists to renew their violent crusade against queer and female bodies.
Conclusion
On March 5, 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was dominating news headlines, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham introduced the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act—known as the EARN IT Act—to Congress. The EARN IT Act intends to radically expand the surveillance of sexual speech online, calling for the formation of a nineteen-person commission to develop vaguely defined “best practices” that ISPs and content platforms like social media sites will be strongly incentivized to institute—facing hefty fines and potential criminal charges if they refuse.1 As the ACLU noted in their opposition letter to the Senate, the proposed commission developing these best practices will be constituted solely of Department of Justice officials, elected officials, and industry representatives, with no representation of LGBTQIA+ communities, sex workers, or other marginalized communities that will be impacted by the bill.2 As the ACLU noted,
After SESTA/FOSTA, platforms censored a great deal of legal sex-related speech, disproportionately harming the LGBTQ community, and the speech of sex workers, generally, harming their ability to organize and engage online. The EARN IT Act will incentivize similar censorship efforts by platforms. Platforms will again ban and censor sex-related speech, especially if it relates to youth. These sex-related speech censorship regimes are particularly harmful to LGBTQ communities and to sex worker communities because their advocacy often discusses or relates to matters involving sex and sex education. Furthermore, censoring the online speech of the LGBTQ community also harms LGBTQ youth, who often first explore their identities by seeking information and building community online, before engaging with their identities offline, especially if their friends or family may not accept who they are.3
Beyond the further expansion of censorship of LGBTQIA+ communities, the EARN IT Act also threatens to enact backdoors through encryption protocols in digital communications technologies. Riana Pfefferkorn, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory, described EARN IT as a “bait and switch” that attempts to mobilize people’s anger at “Big Tech” toward a long-standing governmental desire to ban strong encryption.4 The ACLU has identified strong encryption as essential not only to the political protests demanding racial justice in the United States but also to less visible efforts to organize the LGBTQIA+ community, institute HIV prevention, deliver public health resources to marginalized communities, and safeguard domestic violence victims.5 These impacts will reverberate internationally. As has been seen time and again, social media companies and ISPs that are either (1) headquartered in the United States or (2) are dependent on doing business in the United States tend to implement rather uniform content moderation procedures across their entire platforms. The standards set here will impact people across the world. And further, as Ruane notes, offering a backdoor to encryption for the US government will make it difficult for these companies to resist similar requests from foreign governments, including those that actively criminalize or persecute the LGBTQIA+ community.6
