Doesn't it seem actually very bad that the corporate-algo internet has decided it's OK to censor all content for "language"? I know we have been here for a while now, but I just can't believe that an entire generation has grown up knowing if you use the word "sex" your video/post won't be seen by anyone. Or even if you're watching uncensored content, no "sensitive" words can appear in the closed captions, so they don't even make sense. Isn't that obviously discrimination?
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@evan It's been going on longer than Apple. IMO it's banks and payment processors in particular. Asshats like PayPal are particularly bad. But paying for porn has a long history of issues, like frequent chargebacks because some horny teen borrowed their parents' card. Or because some horny parent wanted to blame the teen for the charge when their spouse found out.
Maybe it all boils down to shame in the end ...
@evan @carrideen They have clearly been using Extreme's title track "Pornograffiti" from the 1990s as inspirational advice; take it away, Mr Gary Cherone: "IT CALLS ME ON THE PHONE! CAN'T STOP THIS RINGING IN MY EAAAARRRR!" /s
Seriously though, the faux moral panic meme is a persistent one. e.g. Google Search Console: "...The page itself is written in that bland corporate style recapitulating both Orwellian newspeak and utter mediocrity for which Google are so famed."
Surface-level censorship like this feels superficial if you are a worldly grown-up whose mind fills in the blanks. But if you are not a worldly grown-up, the blanks become these really gaping and potentially quite evil mysteries. We have decades of evidence that censorship like this leads to really bad outcomes for young people who encounter censored media and then come to feel like (especially but not exclusively) sex is unspeakably nasty or indescribable. They have no language for it.
A while back, I remember reading that in Australia there was this crisis of young women getting plastic surgery to alter their genital shape, and young people kept saying it was because of "porn." But of course the stuff they were looking at was softcore nude photos of women with genitals Photoshopped out of the image so that they wouldn't be labeled as porn, which made young people think that genitals are deformed if they are visible.
And I think something similar is happening to young people around the literal language of sex and body parts. We know for sure that having a clear, descriptive language for sex is crucial for establishing consent, and even for developing a sexual imagination not clouded by self-loathing or fantasies of oblivion. Growing up with algorithms that shame people for saying things clearly, without euphemism or coyness, disciplines young people by getting them to internalize adults' violent imagination.
I remember about 10 years ago a trans guy in one of my classes was explaining that OnlyFans was pretty much his social media now, to the shock of everyone in the room. He said that while he was transitioning and needing support from other trans people to know what was normal or not during surgeries and hormone treatment, the only place he had found where everyone could show photos and be honest and descriptive was OnlyFans. The censors drive young people to porn sites by nuking their language.
@carrideen so, I think this is because of Apple's App Store rules. If they decide that your app has even a whiff of sexual content, your app can get pulled from the store. Monolithic platforms have to censor their content so they don't get removed from the App Store.