No sex please; it's the internet

http://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2015/mar/03/no-sex-please-its-the-internet

Version 0 of 1.

Last week sex bloggers, porn performers, and their “readers” took part in a strange virtual hokey cokey. Google declared that it was updating its terms and conditions, and that any sex bloggers should pull their adult content out of its Blogger network. Later in the week, after very vocal criticism, Google declared that, in fact, naked pictures could stay in. Now that the decision has been reversed, many of those who are hosted on Blogger are breathing a sigh of relief. But with someone as big and omnipotent as Google hosting the internet party, its important to ask on what basis something gets declared “in” or “out”.

I don’t expect the average Guardian reader to worry about whether that blurry snapshot of their genitals has had more views than the one they published last week. What I do think you’ll care about, though, is the power that corporations have over us – power that we’d never dream of giving away to a government. While governments might (to a certain extent) have to prove that they’re doing something for a good reason, corporations aren’t held to the same standards of evidence. If a given decision is within the law, the company only has to care if it’s good for business – which often translates as “good for their brand” – and no amount of bleating from those of us it affects will make the slightest bit of difference.

You are technically free to publish naked pictures of yourself on the internet – hooray! But before you get your phone out, let’s have a little look at what you’ll have to do if you want to make sure that your pictures don’t get deleted.

If you want to share your genitals with the world (and why wouldn’t you? I’m sure they’re magnificent), then you need a host. This could be something like Google Blogger or Wordpress. But while both of these platforms technically allow adult content for now, there’s no guarantee that they’ll allow it tomorrow. Like all privately-owned companies, neither Google nor Wordpress are obliged to continue hosting your images if they decide they don’t want to.

So you self-host: you buy a domain, set up a web server (beware prudish web companies here – some of them will cut your blog off if there’s even a vague pubic whiff about them), you build a website, and you put your picture online. Ta-da! You’ve made it. Except not quite. Because at any point your host could change their Ts and Cs, and decide that they no longer want to be associated with your explicit – albeit spectacular – genital display.

What’s more, if you want to start making money from your website, you’ll run headfirst into another set of bizarre and complex restrictions. Google’s AdSense restricts advertising to “family-safe” websites. Amazon affiliates – one of the quickest and easiest ways to make money from a blog – can’t be used on sites which:

promote or contain sexually explicit materials

so that is a bit of a problem, and one I’ve personally grappled with for some time. As a sex blogger (warning: that link is not safe for work), my content isn’t deemed appropriate for the programme, even though Amazon is happy to sell my book, which contains a similar brand of pervy filth. Given the discrepancy, I can only conclude that Amazon itself wouldn’t qualify to join its affiliates programme.

What about direct payment? Well, there’s Paypal, except Paypal’s always been reasonably puritanical when it comes to adult content - even threatening to pull support for Patreon unless they drastically restricted use of the platform by anyone offering ‘adult’ services. There’s CCBill, which is one of the most commonly used payment processors in the adult industry, and which takes a whopping 40% cut of transactions, and even this comes with a bizarre list of rules and restrictions. The fact is that with most services like this, while you can cross your fingers and hope for the best, you have to accept that at any point a company could decide that you need to either edit or delete your content. Not all of these decisions will be based on evidence of harm or illegality, but on a subjective interpretation of a fluid set of rules.

The science bit

I could go on, but I suspect by this point you’re wondering what any of this has to do with science. When it initially announced that it would pull adult content, Google specified that:

we may make exceptions based on artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific considerations

Although it’s a relief that the fear of naked bums doesn’t extend to buttocks with footnotes, the way in which we censor adult content is itself deeply unscientific. It has to be, because there is no objective distinction between what counts as “artistic” and what’s “pornographic”.

The fact that most censorship isn’t based on evidence is something Dean’s covered here before – pulling apart the key arguments that were wheeled out when certain types of porn were banned in the UK. I think most people are happy to accept that when it comes to deciding what’s hot and what’s horrible, barring a measure of direct harm, there’s often little scientific basis for decisions which place a particular image into one camp or another.

These distinctions are tricky enough when it comes to decisions in which we have a say – namely those made by the government. Although not all policy is evidence-based (please stop bitterly laughing at the back), by their rampant misuse of statistics, we can see that politicians are trying to do the right thing. At the very least they accept that there should be a snifter of proof that this shiny new policy will make society better: here’s the 52-page report to prove it. While policy and lawmaking is not always evidence-based, it aspires to be – our government accepts it will be held accountable on the basis of the real-world effects of its policies.

Corporations, on the other hand, have a very different measure of success. They’re looking at bottom line: often money, but with a platform like Blogger they’ll initially be looking at their user-base and the use of that particular platform. Google wants your data. So if Google believes that hosting your genitals will damage its brand and prevent more users from giving up data, that’s all that matters. Google doesn’t care about whether adult content is beneficial or harmful - only about whether potential users perceive it to be.

That fact remains, even if Google’s playing ball for now, that’s a big problem. Because although we can aspire to evidence-based decision making in government, corporations increasingly hold the power when it comes to our right to free expression. They own the platforms that we write on, and that we use to communicate and share content. Google has every right to dictate what happens on its channels, of course – there’s no law stating that it should host anything people throw at it. But while we’ll quite rightly call a government to account when it does something questionable, and ask for the evidence that a given measure will prove beneficial, we don’t hold companies to the same standards.

If it’s one picture of one person’s genitals then the end result isn’t that harmful: no one ever died because they ran out of porn. But censorship of adult content often covers far more than just your cheeky genital snaps – it covers art, opinion, expression, in fact anything which could be deemed “explicit”, no matter what its cultural value. It’s great that Google has gone back on its decision around adult content, but while Google owns channels of communication that influence every part of our lives, I want more than just a cheery “thanks for your feedback” - I want to know that future decisions like this won’t be taken lightly. I want to know that the next time Google declares our lives would be better if they were ‘family friendly’, we’ll be given a really good reason why. Not based on perception or assumption, but on evidence.

Girl on the Net’s first book is available now.