Censorship sucks
Nobody likes censorship, especially couples trying to find other people like them. We have to tiptoe around social media to make sure you do not get put into “Facebook Jail” or, worse, have your group or profile permanently deleted (we have seen so many popular groups disappear overnight).
Recently Facebook changed its Terms of Service policy and we decided to give it a good review. We were surprised that it said the following:
Facebook is now banning any content in which it believes people are contacting other people on its platform to engage in any sexual activity, “including partners who share fetish or sexual interests.”
There are a ton of other things Facebook is banning when it comes to user content, including using “sexual slang terms” and even “sexual fetish items,” which we assume are photos of floggers, restraints, ball gags, and such.
It doesn’t stop there. Facebook won’t allow you to share links to websites they consider “Adult,” but it never specifies what makes a website adult. It is easy to say “porn sites,” but how is that defined? Who makes that determination?
Hint: it’s usually bots, not humans.
Either way, Facebook is really ratcheting up its censorship, and we know groups that had photos flagged that had been posted 10 years ago. It looks like the bots are working back in time to “clean up” Facebook and make all content from the past adhere to today’s new (more restrictive) policies.
This puts lifestyle, polyamory, BDSM, and kink groups in danger of being shut down unless they heavily moderate their spaces on Facebook.
If you want to see all of the restrictions, click on this link to view their current policies regarding sexually themed content.
Facebook is not the only one getting into the censorship game. Just this past week, we tried to send a test of our Naughty Newsletter on Facebook, and it was flagged because it had the word “Kink” in the title. We have never had this issue with Mailchimp before, but we did a little looking into it, and here is just one small part of their “Prohibited Content” policy for Mailchimp:
We may switch over to the Modern Lifestyle email platform to send out our newsletters, but that would limit our reach as we have a larger audience than our Naughty Members. We now see a real threat to being able to use Mailchimp in the future if we are ever audited.
Everyone who gets our newsletters has personally asked to be on our mailing lists. We do not buy lists or spam anyone. It is a shame that organizations like ours cannot freely share information with our mailing list because Mailchimp, Facebook, and other social media and email marketing companies restrict such speech if it is considered to be related to “swinging” or “kink.”
The Communications Decency Act was Congress’s first attempt to regulate pornography (in 1996), but it is very broad and vague (we believe on purpose) and open to interpretation. Luckily, the ACLU sued the government, and part of the act was struck down. Congress later amended the act to remove the portions that were struck down in the ACLU vs. Reno case, which sought to remove the indecency provisions.
Many forms of censorship are ushered in under the guise of “protecting the children.” Recently, states such as Louisiana and Texas have restricted access to pornography unless you sign in through a state-run website, which would prove you are over the age of 18, but who wants their state government to have a list of everyone who accesses pornography and how many times and for how long?
We do not want to turn the problem of censorship into a commercial for signing up for our Naughty Members website, but the main reason we started Naughty Members was to give attendees of our event a safe place to communicate with other attendees without censorship or government monitoring and as a backup in case we lose our social media and Mailchimp accounts.
We will spend more time on our Naughty Members website adding new features, content, contests, and discounts in an attempt to give our attendees somewhere to go where they can be themselves without worrying about corporate and government censorship.