https://m.facebook.com/communitystandards/sexual_solicitation
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sex-trafficking-facebook-lawsuit-idUSKCN1ME038
https://thenextweb.com/tech/2019/11/01/its-impossible-to-exist-on-facebook-as-an-nsfw-artist/
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/facebook-policy-ban-sex-educators-769551/
I love art, always have, ever since I could remember. My earliest artistic influences were Rob Liefield, (creator of Deadpool) and Jim Lee, (90’s artist for the X-men) which explained my love for drawing leggy super model looking pinups with big boobs.
As a child, I was denied my right to a public education, and was sentenced to a deprogramming behavior modification school. We had a class project where we had to make sculptures from the movie Narnia. My sculpture was of the Snow Witch, and I was very proud of this sculpture. When I came to class the next day, I was pissed to find that one of the staff members in the program defaced my artwork. Her reasoning was that she was a feminist, and that boobs were offensive. So I called her a bitch, said “she wished she had titties like my sculpture,” and torpedoed a chair at her head.
Now mind you, before going to this school, I never used the B word or threw a chair, it was learned behavior from the program. We were gaslighted, filmed, and tortured. The school still exists today, it just changes it’s name and location.
The point to all this is that years later, I ended being CMO of a non-profit social media company, called worldie.com. We were trying to learn from Facebook’s mistakes, and come up with easy solutions in our TOS to prevent things like cyber bullying; hate groups, sexual exploitation, etc.
The issue of artist expression came up, and my first thought was Tumblr’s machine learning problem with flagging all my artworks that were flesh toned.
How the heck can we solve this I thought? What even defines sexuality in the 21st century?
The network originally was going to be all about free speech; anything goes, but looking back at all the hatred caused on sites like 4chan, and Reddit, not to mention all the revenge porn on Tumblr; we wanted to make it more PC.
However, what are we gonna do, erase history because there’s boobs showing on too many painting’s at the Detroit Institute of Arts lol? 😄
We couldn’t on one end say we support women’s rights and anti human trafficking laws, then on the other allow them to be pimped because they’re 18, and it’s their choice.
I was then reminded of what happened to my Narnia sculpture as a child, and how frustrating it was for being demonized as a pervert for appreciating the female body, which is natural. Really they were the perverts for sexualizing my art, I was 10 years old, I didn’t even touch myself yet.
The conclusion of this dilemma is to do exactly what Facebook just did. Enforce a simple policy that is non bias on the “backend at least” to eliminate confusion as to why posts are being flagged. If you want to sell sex, sell it on a decentralized platform.
See my original post documented here:
Other reasons not be transparent about policies, it hurts man.
Better to just be honest about what you’re really flagging for.
