Instagram is owned by Facebook, which is excluded from this list due to its recently updated community guidelines, which ban all mention of sex and arousal and read as a clear attempt to eliminate kinky people - and, presumably, private groups which may cater to people with specific kinks and fetishes - from the site. In under an hour, I received over a hundred messages from countless sex workers and adult performers - both queer and non-queer - claiming that, despite their diligent efforts to post non-explicit photos in accordance with Instagram’s guidelines, they were still kicked off the app, presumably because of their profession (many said this has happened multiple times in recent months). While working on an article about Tumblr’s ban for Out, our sister publication, I tweeted a question to the Twitterverse: Have any adult performers had their Instagram accounts disabled with greater frequency since the passing of FOSTA/SESTA? Browse the list, and list any I might have missed in the comments. The reality of the ban is something a bit more alarming, something everyone both inside and outside the sex worker community should be concerned about: It is sweeping censorship on a site used by queer people everywhere and is part of a censorship trend that is disproportionately erasing queer people.ĭon’t lose hope - there are other digital sanctuaries. Tumblr’s ban is more than a crackdown on sex work - indeed, the stated reason for it has little to do with FOSTA/SESTA, at least on the surface (child pornography has been found on the site more than once). The unsettling phrase “sex panic” rings truer and truer.
Many queer sex workers - myself included - view the ban as the latest bullet point in a disturbing string of events that include the passing of FOSTA/SESTA and the federal seizure and shutdown of, a site popularly used by sex workers to find clients. Tumblr was more than the best porn on the internet - it was a place where many of us discovered ourselves, discovered our interests, and found others. Overnight, there was one less place where queer men, and queer people, can be kinky, explorative, and curious. Unless you were living under a rock, you heard the news: Tumblr recently banned all NSFW content.