As the spoiled man-baby tries to destroy Twitter to prop up the ego that tech bros have inflated beyond his actual talents and intellect, I joined Spoutible, which was started by the guy behind BotSentinel as a harassment- and disinformation-free alternative to Twitter. (It turns out Christopher Bouzy is also something of a thin-skinned man-baby, and I should not be surprised. But whatever.)
Of course I didn't actually READ the terms of service, because who does? But since I've never been suspended, even temporarily, from any social media platform, I assumed that I am pretty well-behaved and wouldn't need to worry.
NO, I haven't been suspended!
But I did end up in a Spoutible spat. (It's like a twitter argument, but with 50% less racism.)
One of the activist romance writers I follow on Twitter–yes, there is totally such an awesome thing–criticized Spoutible's policy on sexually explicit content. Spoutible's beta testers evidently voted overwhelmingly against allowing sexually explicit content at all. 🙄 I think it's prudish pearl-clutching, but since I have no intention of posting or looking there for porn, whatever. Their platform, their rules.
However, Courtney Milan publicly criticized the vagueness of the policy, with all the reasons that the sex-positive have for being wary of censorship: my "erotic" may be your "pornographic." Where is that line? Who draws it? More importantly, the right-wing is aggressively trying to use "family values" as an excuse to silence and persecute the LGBTQIA+ community. Also do policies against "sexually explicit" material effectively ban sex workers from discussing their work? There are lots of issues that a vague, hand-wavy "no sexually explicit material" does not address.
I posted, in my own tiny little Spoutible account with 20 followers, my disapproval of the ban in general, because I don't believe sexual content should be treated the same as harassment or disinformation. I didn't even curse for once!
And a user who must have either been following me or looking for a fight told me that "unsolicited sexually explicit material IS harassment."
Hmmmm....
I asked how posting in one's own feed counts as sending unsolicited content when we have the ability to choose whom we follow. I used the analogy of a person walking into a clearly marked sex shop and yelling about being offended.
I was told this was a false equivalency because *I* don't understand how timelines work. Um.... Pretty sure I do. Spoutible has yet to start showing me promoted posts from anyone I don't follow, so if I see something, I signed up for it. On social media, I always read the bios and a handful of posts, including re-posts, or Echos in the Spoutible parlance, before I follow someone, and I only occasionally, somewhere down the line, get surprised or offended by them. And then there is always a handy Unfollow option rather than jumping salty with someone over what they said on their own tiny virtual soapbox.
I asked if I should be expecting to see posts from accounts I don't follow. One could call my response Socratic or choose to interpret it as genuine failure to understand. I was not rude. I did not curse. I did not flash my tits or vag at her.
Karen...uh...Wendy then told me I was "clearly here to create chaos." She followed that with a thoroughly hypocritical "be well" and probably blocked me. I don't care enough to check.
*I* create chaos? I posted a pic of my crocheted blanket and a sex-positive opinion, and I replied to someone who came into my house, so to speak, to try to school me.
She picked an argument with a stranger, lost, and flounced. Tale as old as...the internet itself.
Perhaps I have a snowflake-level uniqueness. I have been on the internet so long that I remember before Amazon.com was even just a bookstore, and yet I have never stumbled across or been sent unsolicited porn. In the mid-90s I had heard so much about how there was porn everywhere, but I had never seen any, so I went and searched for it, probably using webcrawler or early yahoo. It was...eh hem...not hard to find when I looked. But I had to actively look.
In the late 90s I worked for a startup that was trying to organize usenet, one of the early message board systems, before the search engines made human sorting totally unnecessary. I categorized a lot of porn groups, some with content that even I found disturbing, and I am unwaveringly sex-positive and against kink shaming.
But never any accidental porn.
I've also never been sexually harassed. I've been called an SJW, been told to shut up, and been told nobody cares what I think more times that I can count, but I've never been threatened with rape or other violence.
I am not discounting the stories of women who post their disturbing and threatening DM exchanges, or even just the random, tasteless, unwanted nude, and any of that is a problem, but I wonder how common it actually is. Is your aunt with the moderate drinking problem and the six cats batting away dicks every day? Maybe I've just never had a high enough profile to attract scary attention? I think I peaked at about 300 followers on my most popular account, and a good portion were probably bots whom I didn't follow back and so never saw whatever content they posted.
I even have a twitter account specifically for selling my written erotica and THAT has never gotten so much as a single dick pic. I've had a couple of guys slide into my DMs to try to chat me up, but not a solitary, lone penis. I'm almost offended. If advertising that you write monster porn isn't an invitation to some kinky shit, I don't know what is.
So the idea that every woman on the internet is constantly swarmed by creeps sending blurry photos of their junk? I don't think so.
