"Skin-Tone Binders"

Funny thing happened in August, friends.

We put the Nude binders on sale.

And our income tanked.

Nobody seemed to see the sale posts. Facebook barred me from uploading a short video thanking customers. Twitter was suddenly full of glitches and empty of retweets.

It took several days to figure it out: the word “nude” is completely verboten. A URL with “nude” in it is dead in the water. I can’t prove it, but I’m fairly sure we were showing up lower in Google search results. I’m sure having an ~obscenity flag~ put next to our did not help, either.

So that’s why they’re all labeled “skin-tone”, now.

Two days after we made that change, the numbers bounced back up.

FOSTA/SESTA has hurt many, many people way more than us. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be a sex worker on the internet right now. But I thought you all might want to know how the wider culture of greater internet censorship is hurting us, too; we’re delaying a new hire, working late hours, and making hard choices on the personal budget side besides.

All this because the Google-Twitter-Facebook triumvarate has decided to err on the side of “everything is obscenity, except, perhaps, the actual porn bots.” And, of course, because these three companies own the internet now.