Why the pornocalypse is happening
So I’m seeing a lot of people getting (rightfully) pretty upset about the NSFW artist purge that’s happening on Tumblr, but a lot of the focus of that anger is on the tumblr staff. You hear a lot of people saying that tumblr is incompetent or that they have a vendetta against porn or NSFW artists. People are wringing their hands wondering where to go and lamenting that any site will inevitably ‘turn’ on porn, too.
What I don’t think folks realize is that the likeliest reason this is all happening has nothing to do with some grand anti porn conspiracy and everything to do with FOSTA-SESTA.
Obscenity laws (the laws that govern the distribution of porn in the US and other countries) are, in general, a shitshow. What does and doesn’t constitute 'obscene’ porn is and has been pretty vague. This is a problem to the NSFW art community because 'obscene’ means 'it is a federal crime to distribute this over state lines, including via the internet’. To give you an idea of how sweeping this designation can be, a lawyer who explicitly created a list of acts and themes for porn to avoid to safely not run afoul of obscenity laws included interracial porn as an obscene topic. This was decided in the far off dinosaur time of… the aughts. For additional reading google 'the Cambria list’ or check out our podcast ep on why porn is political.
Garbage obscenity laws are traditionally the reason that payment processors want to avoid NSFW artists. If you’ve had trouble with PP, it’s probably not because of some moral panic, it’s because they can’t be sure they’re not helping you get paid to distribute illegal shit.
Anyway, for years it seemed like this was easing up or people were just assuming stuff was fine and posting NSFW online w/o a care. Then FOSTA-SESTA made it hella worse.
To save you a lot of reading, the core of FOSTA-SESTA is that the law takes away the ability of a website, ISP, app, or service to use the defense 'we can’t be responsible for the actions of our users’ when it comes to ads for sex work. This used to be enshrined in law, but this protection was explicitly taken away to ruin literally 1 website. It’s wild - do some additional reading if you want more info.
Anyway, an additional problem of this is that what constitutes an ad for sex work is very poorly defined. A lot of the porn bots that advertise camming probably run afoul of this law. That means that tumblr is legally liable for all the shitty porn bots, not to mention any real people trying to use the site to find an audience for that sort of business.
Hopefully now you can understand why they’re freaking out.
If it seems like the internet has gotten worse for porn in the last 5 or so years, that’s because of bad laws passed by people who had no idea what they were doing. This is not unique to the US. The U.K. has an age verification law for all porn coming down within the next year that is likely to be even more of a garbage fire, ESPECIALLY for small sites w/o the resources to comply. It’ll also pose a huge security risk for a lot of reasons I won’t go into.
Anyway, if you make or consume smut it’s in your best interest to know this stuff. Porn is political.
Fuck the moral majority. Happy thanksgiving.