Social media is porn without safety
How social media has the same issues as porn, minus the regulation
When I started Freyja we sat mainly in the adult sector, but overtime we began to have more non-adult creators using our platform as a social media alternative. We therefore, had to make a small pivot to cater towards this. When making this pivot I came to the realization that adult sites and social media platforms are really the same in many ways. But, the main difference that I noticed was that because social media platforms ‘intended purpose’ is not porn, it doesn’t matter if there is pornography on there, they can escape the same safety standards, regulations and essentially receive a ‘get out of jail card’.
Here are the main similarities/differences that I discovered:
Function/business model
Adult sites (tube sites/fan sites) and social media platforms are similar in function. They both have third parties uploading content onto their site, that they then host. They are legally under section 230 not responsible for third party content. Their business models essentially work on advertisement and subscriptions.
Types of content
The major difference is that adult sites are built for adult content to be uploaded, whereas social media sites are not built for adult content, they ban it, but they are filled with adult content anyways. But unlike adult sites, social media sites do not have the safety infrastructure to handle this type of content. For example, they have no KYC/ID verification for adult content, no consent checks and they have not verified if the content is illegal or harmful.
Guidelines
Adult sites obviously allow adult content. On the other side, something that should be noted is that the majority of social media platforms ban pornography such as Meta platforms. However, pornography is not banned on Twitter. In fact, Twitter is filled with adult content that is unverified and often illegal or harmful. I interviewed many individuals at the Venus porn conference in Berlin and also learnt that most of them were watching their adult content not necessarily on Pornhub, but on Twitter. In addition, there are also floods of adult content on other social platforms such as Tumbler and Reddit.
Regulation
As adult sites host pornographic content, there are regulations that they have to follow. To name a few, all reports must be dealt with within 7 days and consent and ID checks must be showcased for every piece of content uploaded to the site. However, even though social media platforms also have adult content, because their ‘intended purpose’ is not porn, they are not faced with the same types of regulations that adult sites are given from governments, investors and banks. In addition, platforms like Twitter and snapchat are allowed in the app store, but due to regulations on porn, adult sites are not. Likewise, I had a conversation with UK regulators, where they were saying how they want ID verification on every single user that visits an adult site, I then asked if they’d have Twitter do the same. They replied, “Twitter is different’. But when you really look at it, the only real difference is safety and approach.
Investors
A large proportion of investors and VC funds legally say that they cannot invest into the adult industry because it goes against their LP’s. This is rather hypocritical because the same investors that have said to me ‘we can’t invest in porn’, also have social media platforms such as Twitter or Snapchat in their portfolio. And the only real difference between Freyja and Twitter is that we acknowledge what type of content is on our platform and do something to make it safe for the user and creator.
In sum, there are many similarities between social media and adult sites in their business model, function and content. However, the major difference is that one industry acknowledges the type of content on its platform, and has the safety infrastructure in place to deal with it, however, as a result of acknowledging the reality they are faced with regulation and restriction, whereas their counterpart does not have the safety infrastructure, and pretends the content does not exist even if they do allow it. Overall, I think that social media platforms could learn from pornographic platforms. Indeed, it appears as though the only way to make a safe social media platform is to build it as though it is a porn site.