…Okay, so, activist Ashley Lake has a thread on the wretched bird site that explains it better than me, but let me give you the basics.
Basically, Lake noticed that Reddit has been slowly shadowbanning NSFW subreddits, hiding them from searches, and locking a whole lot of accounts that participate in 18+ stuff. Which, anyone who remembers Tumblr’s behavior foreshadowing their horny ban should have a whole lot of alarm bells going off.
And, she looked into it and found that it’s due to pressure from advertisers, specifically this sub-organization amongst them called GARM to push “bad behavior” off the internet. Which sounds like a noble goal, but amongst the things they term as “bad” is basically any explicit depiction of sex at all.
This is going to hurt sex workers so much, doubly so when you note that Twitter is a part of GARM, and this likely means they’re next to start doing this..
As people who experienced what turned out to be the first big salvo in this NSFW purge of the net, we know this shit is bad, so we need to push back and we need to do it now.
If you want to contact GARM themselves about how their policies hurt sex workers, they have an email address at GARM@wfanet.org . It’s not likely they’ll listen, but the pressure might do something positive.
For contacting Reddit about how they’re making a terrible mistake and they need to find a way to push back against adtech people’s demands… well, IDK much about the most direct line to contact about this issue, this one seems to be the best (tho it requires an account), but if you’ve got a better one please tell me.
And also, get the word out about this to tech activism orgs like Fight For the Future and the EFF, beat down their door to boost the signal that this is an issue they need to put their full weight behind, because this is yet another existential threat to the future of the net and we need to push back!
But most of all, boost this info wherever you can, because we know the horror of this shit, and we know we can’t let it fucking happen again!