Censored and banned

How social media censorship effects the adult industry and sex education

Adult/sex tech companies face a number of problems. But, one of the most frustrating, especially for any new company entering the space, is social media censorship. Adult companies are not allowed in the app store, they aren’t allowed to run a Google or Meta ad. It is also challenging to find any mainstream PR agency that will take you on, or a newspaper to write an article about you, because they’re worried about positively promoting any porn company out of fear for their advertisers. When you are cut off from most traditional forms of marketing this means that you only really have social media to rely on. However, adult companies and performers are heavily censored and frequently banned on social media. 

How this effects performers:

I have met multiple performers who are on their 2nd to 15th Instagram account. Sometimes, there are performers who cross the line with the rules, but there is a large number who do not but who are still discriminated against. For example, I have seen performers post nothing more than a bikini photo and they get that post taken down or their account cut. The issue with this is that it is incredibly discriminatory, but also hypocritical. Most performers do not post any nudity. But, then you will see a mainstream celebrity post actual nudity and it’s allowed. It’s pretty clear that the rules don’t apply to everyone, and that is what is most frustrating. 

You might be thinking, what’s the big deal if you lose your social media account, and have to start again. But, for performers this is a loss of income. Most performers make money on fan sites nowadays, but a lot of the mainstream fan sites do not have global discovery, you need to know the individual URL code of the performer to find their account. Therefore, their promotion of their fan sites heavily relies upon their Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok. And so, if you lose one of these accounts you can lose existing and new customers. 

What is also odd about social media platforms' strategy towards performers is shadow banning. Shadow banning is essentially when they will make it hard for your content to show up in global suggestion pages, and will also move your account down the list on global search. However, what doesn’t really make sense is how the performers who are shadow banned will have their profiles listed below their catfishes. These catfish accounts are usually scam accounts, and actively take money from users. This is a huge issue for fans who can easily get scammed, but also for performers who actively are having their content stolen, and some of their fans taking their anger out on them. Despite a lot of evidence that these accounts are fake, social media platforms refrain from taking them down because they are labeled as ‘fan pages’ which therefore, doesn’t go against their community guidelines. But what then doesn’t make sense is that these fake profiles usually have the same photos as the original, so why do they also not get taken down and shadow banned? 

How this effects companies:

For companies it is also very frustrating to lose your social media account as you spend so much money on influencer marketing, graphics & more, just to lose the account. That’s thousands down the drain. Likewise, it is hard to gain credibility in this space as there are so many scam sites. So, if you lose your following, it puts you back to square one. What is also frustrating about this censorship is that it makes it very challenging to even explain to people what your company does, because you cannot. One of the largest issues we’ve had is that people are sometimes confused as to what we do. We don’t just receive this complaint from users but also from the occasional investor (who's not knowledgeable about the industry) who will then reject investing in us other than ‘unclear social media messaging’. Yet, this is not because we wish to be unclear about our messaging or ourselves unclear, it is because we simply are not allowed to, and would rather think of creative ways to market, rather than be clearer on messaging and lose our accounts.

As an adult company, we’ve had to get very inventive. At first, we did just go for the classic ‘corn’, ‘seggs’, or ‘s*x education’. We also were running multiple influencer marketing campaigns with sex educators and porn stars. But we got a shadow ban pretty quick. We decided to entirely change our strategy, because it just wasn't continuing down this path as at that rate we might as well not even had social media. Therefore, we decided to make a pivot in our social media strategy, and started producing street interview, dating  and comedy content. We thought about what we ourselves were watching. Luckily this strategy worked well for us. I definitely wish we had done that from the beginning. 

Will social media platforms change their policies? 

There are a couple areas where social media can change. For example, they can start to allow women’s wellness products to advertise and then can loosen their rules on transgender nipples. Some people may be hopping out for social media platforms to change their nudity/pornography rules but this is infrastructurally unlikely. This is because these platforms simply do not have the infrastructure to be a porn site. To be a porn company you need investors who can legally be invested in the space, the right payment providers, the right banking partners and more. If Instagram wanted to allow porn today they simply could not. They would lose their entire payment gateway service, risk losing some of their bank accounts and would piss off some investors. Similarly, you don’t want them to allow it. This is because they don’t have the safety infrastructure or effective moderation system for this type of content which means that it is a recipe for illegal & harmful content. AKA a recipe for disaster. 

If we want to solve these discrimination issues, then the solution is a new social media platform. It needs to be a new platform as it needs to have the right pornographic and safety infrastructure from the beginning. This is the way to stop harmful content and unfair censorship simultaneously.