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Hi folks. I was suspended for the last 12 days because I had this photo of my butt in my header, which violates the Twitter rules against non-artistic adult content. I stayed suspended so long because Twitter's email verification system was broken and refused to send email.
Normal @TwitterSupport channels being what they are, it took extended public complaint and 4+ Twitter employees working on my behalf to fix this. This is consistent with my other suspensions over the years, and folks like @jennschiffer have experienced it too.
Goes without saying that "being a distributed systems engineer with outsized influence on Twitter's engineering team" is not a privilege accessible to many folks out there, but I've got deeper concerns I want to address. Suspensions for content like this are increasingly common.
I was talking with my barber today about the Mapplethorpe obscenity trials. Turns out he was there, and protested in favor of the exhibition. "Some of it was out there, or not to my taste, but it was art, you know? People should be able to go and see it." https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-art-fought-law-and-art-won-180956810/
For us younger gays this might be hard to imagine, but well into the 90s, gay erotica was being seized and destroyed by customs and postal inspectors under anti-obscenity statutes. Here's an letter to the editor in Drummer Magazine, 1992: a recurring theme in issues I've read.
But the media landscape has changed since then; more of us are publishers, or maybe publishing is more like going to bars. Direct government censorship doesn't play as direct a role in many of our lives. More often, we come into contact with censorship by social media platforms.
Social media moderation requires unprecedented scale. Algorithmic methods help, but so much moderation needs precious human attention. Platforms prioritize by only evaluating what gets flagged for review--which leads to uneven enforcement. Some neighborhoods go unpoliced.
For instance, here's a few accounts I found by clicking randomly through gay twitter for five minutes. You can see that the norms here are a little different than you might find in, say, urban planning twitter.
Are these policy violations? Possibly. But nobody's complaining.
Are these policy violations? Possibly. But nobody's complaining.
I operate in a weird space though: I talk about computers *and* post my butt. I have a lot of straight male followers who might just be here for the tech stuff. This is a considered political choice, and it means being flagged for moderation on a weekly basis.
And I want to acknowledge at this juncture that there are people who are uncomfortable with images of male bodies, or talk about S/M, because of trauma. Some degree of moderation is good and right, to establish spaces where these people can be comfortable.
But there are other people who I think *should* see these images. Many of us grew up in a culture which objectifies women--but is profoundly uncomfortable with sexual images of men. A culture which rigorously denies queer intimacy. Which teaches us to feel revulsion and shame.
We internalize cultural scripts forbidding men to be submissive, forbidding men to be affectionate, forbidding men to be sexual with one another. We laugh nervously, we spit. "Fuckin' queers". "It's just not right." I came of age in this media culture, and it fucked me up good.
So I believe it's important for straight and vanilla people, in general, to see images of queer erotic desire. To have an understanding of S/M that goes deeper than "50 Shades of Grey". To see the many ways we can build loving & playful bonds, to rejoice in our shared physicality
I want them to see us as whole people.
And I don't think they're going to seek out those images on their own, especially if they're uncomfortable with gay shit to start. A big part of why I mix tech and gay material on one account is to expose straight dudes to a bigger world. To weaken & split stereotypes via contact
Another part of this is that it remains important, for those of us with the privilege to be outspoken, to hold the door wide open for all those faggots whom aren't yet in the right place to be fully themselves.
Sometimes y'all send me email and it makes me cry. <3
Sometimes y'all send me email and it makes me cry. <3
You can tell I have a liberal arts degree because I've somehow managed to conjure up an ethical case for posting nudes to main, ANYWAY, MOVING ON
Late last year, Tumblr moved aggressively to remove "adult" content from their platform. Roughly a third of my blog was nuked overnight by automated systems. Fully clothed images in neutral poses were flagged as adult. Appeals took months per post. The Gays migrated away en masse
In 2014, Facebook put in place the Real Names policy. Many of my friends were banned for using their trans names, drag names, leather names. The names their community knew them by. They said they were going to fix it, but four years later, I *still* have friends being suspended.
Facebook & IG's moderation policies have become aggressively conservative in the last couple years, as @PupAmp has chronicled. You can be suspended for using the peach emoji. For calling yourself--a gay person--"faggot". For nudity, even with genitals and nipples covered.
Instagram's content restrictions and aggressive enforcement means that many of us gays have a chain of alts, and are used to jumping from account to account as our mains are deleted or suspended. Our tights are too tight. The butt angle a little too direct. We skirt the edge.
When I brought this up at a party last week, almost everyone in the room had a suspension story. It's just a fact of life that every few months to years, you're going to be cut off from a good chunk of your friends and extended circle; perhaps lose your history permanently.
There's something here about how enforcement-on-report allows for suspensions to be weaponized against us when we piss someone off. I was suspended immediately after calling a white supremacist "horny". Who knows if that was what it took.
Anyway, some other time.
Anyway, some other time.
This is a shitty way to live. I'm tired of having the word "queer" push your tweet into the "potentially offensive" hidden realm. I'm tired of having our accounts banned from appearing in searches or autocomplete. I'm tired of losing my sole means of connection with many friends.
And I think it's going to get worse, for those of us out here on the edge. Tumblr's dead. Facebook and IG are write-offs at this point. Twitter's been the last platform where I felt like I had a decent shot at this kind of expression--and even here, I censored myself constantly.
But here's the agony for me: the communities we built on these platforms were *good*. So many of my friends are here. All I gotta do to keep in contact is... be less gay.
Don't show S/M. Don't show skin. Careful of that "repeated violations" clause, cuz it might get ya.
Don't show S/M. Don't show skin. Careful of that "repeated violations" clause, cuz it might get ya.
And oh lord, there are a million ways to be queer and assimilation is not a dirty word in my book, even if it ain't for me. If button-down flannel is the skimpiest thing you want to wear, I wish you ALL the best. You can probably be that here.
There are new platforms out there, like newtumbl, which say they'll be friendlier, more sexually open. I don't know. I worry they'll run out of money, turn to ads, fall victim to the same pattern we've seen with Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram. And I worry about SESTA/FOSTA too.
I think if we're going to have a place to speak that's less subject to those pressures, it can't be a global corporate platform. We have to own the space ourselves. I also think gay people are gonna have to be the moderators for gay spaces, and leather people for leather spaces.
And there's this kinda cool thing called the Fediverse: a constellation of these little software neighborhoods, each running Mastodon, Pleroma, etc. They talk to each other. It's like distributed Twitter: you can follow people on your own instance, or anywhere else.
I've thought a lot about Christopher Alexander's writing on subculture boundaries, on the importance of semi-permeable social spaces, on how Twitter following networks kinda get at that, but not quite.
I think Fediverse might be a good call. Independent, but not closed.
I think Fediverse might be a good call. Independent, but not closed.
So I've registered a domain, and set up a Mastodon instance at https://woof.group . It's intended for LGBTQ+ leather people, but we'll federate broadly; anyone can follow from any Mastodon, et al instance.
If you miss my tweets, I'll be here: https://woof.group/@aphyr
If you miss my tweets, I'll be here: https://woof.group/@aphyr
You can browse instances (think "neighborhoods") at https://joinmastodon.org/ .
If you're into leather, and you'd like an account on http://woof.group itself, you're welcome to join me there. I'm covering hosting costs out of my own pocket, and I'm volunteering to moderate as well. See https://woof.group/about/more .
It's been good, Twitter. Bye for now. <3
It's been good, Twitter. Bye for now. <3
