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Sweeping bans to social media means no more sex education.
A number of sex educators have already had content flagged and banned on Facebook and Instagram. It may become nearly impossible for sex educators and podcasters to share their content on any social media platform because of FOSTA/SESTA.
If you want to stay in touch if the show gets banned across the board, please subscribe using the links up above. Get your email address to me ASAP so I can save it offline and stay in touch.
Important articles:
FOSTA/SESTA piece is here, A new law intended to curb sex trafficking threatens the future of the internet as we know it
Tumblr Porn Allowed Women To Be Sexual Architects Instead Of Objects. Now It’s Gone.
Tumblr Was a Safe Space for Women to Consume Porn. Now It’s Banning Adult Content.
Tweet by anarcho_slut about Facebook changes.
Facebook Community Standard updates.
Follow Dawn on Instagram.
About Host Dawn Serra:
Dawn Serra is a therapeutic Body Trust coach and pleasure advocate. As a white, cis, middle class, queer, fat, survivor, Dawn’s work is a fiercely compassionate invitation for each of us to deepen our relationships with our bodies and our pleasure as an antidote to the trauma, disconnection, and isolation so many of us feel. Your pleasure matters. Your body is wise. Dawn’s work is all about creating spaces and places for you to explore what that means on your terms. To learn more, visit dawnserra.com or follow Dawn on Instagram.
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Episode Transcript
Dawn Serra: Hello. This is a special breaking emergency episode of Sex Gets Real. I have never done this before, which tells you it must be important. And it is! There is a very high chance that you are going to soon find it very difficult to connect with me. So today, we’re going to talk about why.
First, I want to let you know that I’m doing a super fun holiday giveaway. I want to mail you a holiday card – handwritten by me and sent directly to your home with a Merry Clitmas card from the Vulva Gallery. I got ten Merry Clitmas cards that feature the beautiful hand-drawings of vulvas from the Vulva Gallery and I want to select ten special listeners to receive a hand-written holiday card from me. So if you want to enter the drawing, I’m going to randomly select ten people on December 18, which means, get your information in before then. It’s totally free. Plus, signing up gets you on the newsletter and you’re about to hear why that is going to be real crucial. But if you want to enter the drawing to get a holiday card from me, you can go to sexgetsreal.com/holiday. There, you can put your information in and then hopefully, you will get picked and I will send you a fun little note just from me to you with this beautiful vulva painting on the cover.
Dawn Serra: So why am I doing this special episode? You have probably seen some people talking, not only about the Tumblr ban, but now the changes to Facebook. This is all thanks to the FOSTA and SESTA laws that were signed earlier this year. We talked about it on the show, and it’s rearing its ugly head.
Here’s what’s up: I’m going to link to an article that’s from April all about the FOSTA/SESTA laws. You know Craigslist recently killed its personal section a couple of months ago and it’s because of this law. Essentially, the law used to say that the people who housed the sites that we used weren’t responsible for what the individuals who used those sites would do with it. So essentially, Facebook’s like, “I created this platform, but the people who use it are going to use it for all kinds of things and I can’t be responsible for every single human that interacts with it.”
Dawn Serra: FOSTA AND SESTA, in their very aggressive approach to eliminating sex work and sex trafficking, which they also see as sex work, has actually changed the law that says that “Anyone who misuses any website, the website owner is now the one that’s going to be liable.” If someone posts about sex work or sex trafficking on Facebook when this law goes into effect, essentially, the government could sue Facebook for the way users are using it. Which means that, pretty much, all owners of social media sites are going to become super, super, super conservative because they don’t want to deal with the fallout of what these laws are going to potentially cause for them. It’s highly restrictive, completely ridiculous. It’s making conditions so much less safe for sex workers and for sex educators.
We’re actually starting to see some major changes and it could potentially mean that I won’t be able to use social media for the show anymore. I may not be able to use it for my business at all anymore. And it might mean, eventually, that itunes even pulls sex shows from their platform. So, I have a whole bunch of resources that I’m linking to in the show notes if you want to go read all about it. There’s a couple of articles about Tumblr and the impact of Tumblr pulling all pornographic materials from their website, including everything to do with nudity, nipples. Basically anything other than old school historical oil paintings, there isn’t going to be anything allowed that’s explicit – no images or videos or gifs showing any kinds of adult content whatsoever, which is a huge, huge blow to many of us.
Dawn Serra: The bigger impact, specifically, to the show is that Facebook has now changed their community guidelines and they are ridiculous. The new guidelines include sexual solicitation. They have very, very broadly defined sexual solicitation to include content that attempts to coordinate or recruit for adult sexual activities, so that means you can’t be recruiting for porn, massages, strip clubs, live sex performances, any kind of play parties, for any filmed sexual activities. It also means that you cannot post content, now this is anyone, including you, listener. You cannot post content that engages an explicit sexual solicitation by offering or asking for sex or sexual partners, sex chat, sex conversation or nude images.
You also can’t post anything that includes vague suggestive statements such as “Looking for a good time”, sexualized slang. You can’t use sexual hints such as mentioning sexual roles, sex positions, fetish scenarios, sexual preference, sexual partner preference, any state of arousal, an act of sexual intercourse or activity including sexual penetration or self pleasuring, commonly sexualized areas of the body such as breasts, groin, buttocks, state of hygiene of genitalia or buttocks, and content that is hand-drawn, digital, or real world art that depicts explicit sexual activity or suggestively posed persons. You also can’t share content that promotes commercial pornography or partners who share fetish or sexual interests. Literally, you can’t post about any kind of kink or sexual interest, and any sexually explicit language that adds details and goes beyond a mere naming or mentioning of sexual arousal or sexual intercourse.
Dawn Serra: Kirsten Schultz of Chronic Sex Ed was blocked from posting to any of their pages for multiple days because of this, and Elle Chase also got hit. There’s going to be no way for any of us, especially sex educators and podcasts to quote people from our show to share resources, to make jokes or share memes that have anything to do with kink, sex, preferences – any of it. We are, essentially, completely neutered. Somebody wrote on Facebook that now they’re coming after the bathhouses, the orgies, the sex parties, the fetish parties, the specialty sex, and our fetish groups. Pervy people, poly people, pervy-poly people. And this is a note that this is consensual, non-commercial sexual conversation and collaboration between adults that Facebook is banishing.
So whether you are in a Sexgeekdom group or you’re on the Explore More group, or you’re sharing anything on your page all about wanting to hook-up with someone, or trying to organize a fun sex-positive party, those things are all now considered sexual solicitation under Facebook’s community standards and can get you deleted and/or banned.
Dawn Serra: Essentially, it’s going to be very difficult for any sex educator to communicate with the world using social media. I want to make sure that we can stay in touch. I have no idea if at some point FOSTA and SESTA are going to impact web hosting companies. The place where I host sexgetsreal.com might eventually decide that I need to be shut down, my email provider that allows me to email my newsletter, at this point, might also shut that down. But at least for now, the major impacts are to Facebook and Instagram, Tumblr.
I want to share that Sunny Megatron has shared that some of her tweets have also been deleted. She shared some tweets recently trying to give people alternatives to Tumblr, and those tweets were purged from Twitter without her consent and without any kind of warning. They just disappeared. So censorship on any of the social media channels is at an all time high and I want to be able to stay in contact with all of you.
Dawn Serra: Please, not only me but everyone that you admire, please sign up for their newsletters. Give us your email address so that we can let you know when cool things are happening, so we can let you know if we’ve been banned or if we’re blocked from certain sites, so we can tell you about new episodes, new events. And just in general, stay in touch and share ourselves because social media isn’t going to be the place where we can do that without using some really vague language.
In fact, Yana Tallon Hicks posted today, “Because of the new Facebook rules, all I can tell you is that a workshop on the topic that I usually do workshops around is now available and if you go to my website which is myname.com, you can learn more.” And that’s all she was able to share.
Dawn Serra: So please go to dawnserra.com/books – that’s where you can sign up to get immediate access to my recommended book list and it adds you to the show’s newsletter. You can also go to dawnserra.com/holiday if you want to enter for the Merry Clitmas card giveaway, that also adds you to the newsletter. If you go to exploremoresummit.com and sign up there, that also adds you to my newsletter, just through Explore More Summit so that you can get notices about all of those talks and those events. All of these things are free.
I don’t mail often, but being able to stay in touch with you, especially if the show gets blocked from any of the social media channels and even from itunes, is really really important to me. So please do this for me and please do this for anyone else who’s in the realm of sexuality that you admire. Reach out, subscribe to their newsletters, get their information, so that if the worst happens and we all end up getting completely banned, we’re not all just scattered to the wind. I really want us to be able to stay in touch. I will fight this. I will do everything I can as I hear of activism work happening in these spaces, I will pass that along on the show and via the newsletter.
Dawn Serra: Basically this special episode is just to let you know that the massive massive purge of all things consensual sex is starting to happen because of FOSTA and SESTA. And it could be a while before those things get lifted. So I want to be able to stay in touch with you. Please go to dawnserra.com/books, exploremoresummit.com, dawnserra.com/holiday, subscribe on Patreon. I actually have a strong suspicion that at some point, Patreon is going to purge us from their platform as well. But as of right now, it’s still available so support us there as much as you can. Because that might go away and we might really be hurting for the next couple of years as all of this bullshit gets shaken out.
So click all the links in the show notes to educate yourself, spread the word, speak up, call senators, call congress people, call elected officials if you live in the United States. Know that this is impacting us globally. So, even though I’m in Canada, this is impacting me because Facebook is having to adhere to the laws of the United States and that’s going to have a global impact. It’s so shitty. It’s so shitty. People are really freaking out but if you start noticing that the things I’m sharing are super sanitized, now you know why.
Dawn Serra: Thank you so much for listening. Spread the word, subscribe, follow along. I will do my very, very, very best to make the show as accessible as I can and to stay in touch. Thank you and I will be back on Sunday with a new episode featuring Andrew Gurza. Bye.