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 [LGBT Business tags] 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.