Foreword: The Profiteers of Repression

In May 2017 The Guardian published a leaked copy of Facebook’s internal rulebook on content moderation. Called The Facebook Files, the exposé revealed Facebook’s exceptionalism for harmful content. As long as its users didn’t run afoul of a slim set of edge-case rules, the company maintained a mainstream, protected platform for racist speech and hate groups. While Facebook ruthlessly policed what was posted and messaged about sexual content and artistic nudity, anyone characterizing immigrants as rapists or robbers got a free pass (as long as they weren’t technically “equating” them with rapists or robbers).

The Facebook Files also shined a bright light on the company’s disturbing Holocaust-denial protections. Namely, that the company enshrined in its policies a safe space for communities and Groups perpetuating and promoting deeply harmful Holocaust denial falsehoods. When media outlets came asking questions, Facebook doubled down. The company’s go-to response was that it disallowed Holocaust denial content only in countries where it was illegal, like Germany. This policy remains.

Facebook launched Groups in 2010. I often wonder what eleven years of fostering, growing, and protecting Holocaust denial has done to generations of kids around the world who have grown up using the platform.

A millennium ago, back in 2003, I formed an online group for women to discuss pornography on a now-defunct and mostly forgotten footnote of a website called Tribe.net. The premise of that group was that some women liked porn, some did not, others were curious, and some were offended by it: I wanted a place where we could talk about all of these things as explicitly (or not) as we felt. We called it the “Smart Girls’ Porn Club” and it was trans-inclusive.

It was a successful and popular group. The discussions would range week to week from “I think [this thing in porn] is gross” and “am I weird for liking [this one thing]” to exploring the topic of degradation, porn, and feminism; swapping tips on how to find videos to watch with a partner; and discussing why (at the time) it seemed that so few women made pornography. The group inspired a book, which landed in O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine and put me on Oprah’s show talking about women, porn, and inclusive female sexuality.

The free and open internet had made this unique situation possible in a way that had never happened before. Porn’s distribution had changed from specifically male spaces to the internet, where observing and exploring it was much safer. For the first time, women were able to privately look at porn online without gatekeepers or spies, without judgment or threat, and decide what we were seeing and feeling for ourselves. What’s more, we could talk to other women from all over the world about it: my group had women of all colors, genders, orientations, and backgrounds. But the real history-making part of it, in my eyes, was that the discussion group contained sex workers, porn performers, LGBTQIA+ and straight women alike, as well as women who made pornography.

Before that point in time, there had been no way for regular people to find out if popular media narratives in film, TV, and news media about the experiences of sex workers and porn performers was truth or fiction. Now, anyone could ask if what we were told about sex for work or entertainment was true.

Some of us who personally knew sex workers and performers were well aware that the stereotypes were incorrect, harmful, misogynist, anti-queer, and racist. But suddenly anyone could ask performers how they got involved in porn, if a sex act was painful, or how being a married porn star worked, exactly. Or ask sex workers if they were being forced to do it or what it meant for them to “come out” to family or friends. This naturally blossomed into sharing sex education resources and discussions of sexual health and discovery, as well as ofboundaries and informed consent.

As the women in my forum found out, the truths were equally fascinating (as sex often is) and as boring (and filled with practicalities) as any job can be. What we discovered is still true: they were as diverse as society.

I was excited that, for once, people were starting to speak for themselves about sex for pleasure or work in open, explicit, and honest ways. The conversation was no longer the sole provenance of those with agendas focused on control of our bodies—moral policing that restricted the “right” expressions of sexuality as reproductive-only, and then only within the confines of heterosexual marriage. The same morality that excluded and demonized LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC people by sexualizing them.

The internet back then felt like a weird, wonderful, creative, and exciting place for new discoveries, filled with art, provocative writing, and connection.

Before Google’s 1998 launch, the internet’s most popular website and social hub was Nerve.com (1997). A rival of Salon.com (1995), Nerve was primarily an online magazine with high-quality articles and erotic artists. Nerve’s personals were brimming and its forums were a 24-7 hub of activity; it launched one of the first blogging services and quickly became wildly popular. The company had an offline sex book-publishing arm producing terrific books by writers and photographers. For many years, Nerve was the most fun, exciting, sex-positive place to be and hang out online, bursting with creative communities, optimism, and hope that a vital future was being explored.

“For many, Nerve represented a new era in which we could finally, freely talk about sex, gender, orientation, sex culture—and exchange ideas,” I wrote for Engadget in 2019. “Thanks to Nerve’s ‘literate smut’ tagline and ethos, private acts of creation could make tortured people feel valid and whole. People don’t make sites like Nerve anymore. No one can.”

The internet back then was not a place where Nazis, incels, Holocaust-deniers, or “alt-right” terror-mongers were emboldened, tolerated, and given a platform to organize attacks as if they were any other Facebook community resource. They were certainly online, but they had not been handed power, mainstream platforms, or credibility. You might ask, so what happened? This book, The Digital Closet, holds the answers.

Our adult video discussion group flourished for two years with hundreds of members. Much like Tumblr before its infamous and badly bungled “porn purge,” Tribe had become a popular, busy social site where everyone shared interests from archery and politics to erotic art and queer mental health, and beyond.

In 2005 Tribe.net banned sexual content under the banner of protecting children from obscenity. Everything deemed sexual—from LGBTQIA+ communities to discussion groups like mine, and more—was removed or hidden through automation, and lost forever: automation created by the same demographic that would create and test facial-scanning automation on 5,000 people yet result in an AI that can’t “see” Black faces; a demographic that would’ve put a stop to this obvious problem if they had only considered Black faces as things that belong to people.

Turns out, things about “porn” are also things that are about censorship, sexual and mental health, business trends, discovering and setting boundaries, sex work, politics, gender, online attacks, art, news and history, LGBTQIA+ people, and women. Things that center our humanity.

In well-documented public arguments I repeatedly explained to Tribe.net’s representatives that in a court case for obscenity, the accused is held to whatever the local community’s standards are for obscenity, as determined by a jury. Pardon me for generalizing, but it was not lost on anyone that the people setting and enforcing Tribe’s policy were all people representing a demographic of conservative Caucasian men, and not a community of its users’ peers.

I attempted a women’s porn discussion group again in 2008 on Facebook. We named it “Our Porn, Ourselves” in a reference to Our Bodies, Ourselves, a revolutionary, self-empowering book that provided clear, accurate, explicit, and nonjudgmental information about female sexual health. A book that had changed all our lives (and certainly even saved a few) with its explicit illustrated diagrams and frank talk about sexual pleasure and its crucial role in sexual health. Once again, women of all orientations and identities from around the world joined our gender-inclusive erotic video discussion group.

Anti-porn groups on Facebook openly organized to get our group removed. Facebook, already cultivating a safe haven for hate speech, readily complied. It was clear to all, including reporters who covered the group’s targeting and removal, that some kind of sexual speech was allowed on Facebook—but only the “right” kind.

As a reporter with bylines in Financial Times, CNN, Forbes, CBS News, Engadget, O magazine, and many other outlets, I documented the exact repeat of this anti-sex, anti-woman, and anti-gay discrimination online over the course of fifteen years. Anti-sex censorship continued to silence and disappear communities sexualized by right-wing conservatives, often to disastrous, and sometimes deadly, effects that were sadly not difficult to document, both from myself, and others, with journalistic rigor. You will find that work extensively referenced throughout The Digital Closet.

The result is that women, LGBTQIA+ people, and sexualized BIPOC demographics exist online in a culture of fear. Not just from online trolls, but also from right-wing conservative groups and digital platforms who mutually benefit from assumed power that facilitates controlling, silencing, and oppressing at-risk populations via sexual repression.

Anyone falling outside evangelical fictions about sexuality—or runs the risk of being perceived as sexualized—has learned to live in a digital twilight of fear. We would come out of the closet to find community on one platform, we would try to use online business tools for payment processing that should be legally available to us, or we’d emerge from isolation seeking pleasure-focused (nonreproductive) sex information, and we would be forced off platforms and back into closets. Repeatedly.

As you’ll read in The Digital Closet, the levers rendering us invisible and silent once again sexualized and infantilized us, put us on secret lists, and banned us (sometimes by name). Healthy adult content became systematically banned on platforms that has allowed far-right extremist content to remain and flourish. This is no coincidence, as the values of anti-sex misogyny and far-right extremism are not just in line with each other: they are one and the same.

If you think the above statements are an exaggeration, read this book. It contains all the documentation you will ever require for proof.

Obscenity is determined by community standards. So when Tribe erased “obscenity” in 2005, Google’s 2013 AdWords sex purge removed breast cancer topics, Facebook banned sex workers and “sexual slang” in 2018, and eBay purged all content perceived to be sexual or LGBTQIA+ while carving out exemptions for Playboy and Penthouse in May 2021—it is all under the banner of removing obscenity to “keep our community safe” (as Facebook states in its policies), which begged one question to be answered: Whose community, exactly?

The Digital Closet unpacks and answers the question of “whose community” is being kept safe when so-called community-safety policies regarding human sexuality are imposed onto online communities.

There is a moral gravity here. Our experience of the internet, and therefore our ability to work, play, grow, heal, and love, has been warped by structures of power only accountable to themselves. The Digital Closet documents in painstaking detail the hideous agenda behind anti-sex censorship online. This agenda conflates adult women with children, sex work with rape, and LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC people with sex objects. In these pages we see that the people behind both algorithms and FOSTA don’t care about the consent and safety of women or LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC people. What we learn proves that the intent of sex censorship is to subvert the consent and safety of the very people they police and to place them in harm’s way.

The agenda of online sex censorship becomes particularly sadistic when applied to sex workers, adult performers, and queer youth. How can the arbiters of sexual speech care about their own slogans of “saving women” or “protecting children” when they so brazenly silence, ignore, and eliminate access to public spaces for the very people they claim to save? How are people handed unquestioned authority about a subject when they so obviously refuse to engage with the people they claim to be “saving”?

These arbiters have been handed exactly that: unquestioned authority. In The Digital Closet we see that this authority, and the standards of censoring sensible sex-positive discussions about situations from basic to explicit, is built on an unaccountable, performative assumption of power.

This assumption of getting away with anything because of assumed authority surely registers with everyone after a lifetime of police violence on Black citizens. The authority is handed to conservative techies, evangelicals cosplaying as protectors of children and saviors of adult women, peddlers of pseudoscientific “cures” for “sex addiction” and masturbation, and policers of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC sexuality. With this authority, a bloodthirsty mob is able to drive LGBTQIA+ people back into the closet and sex workers back onto dangerous corners. It illuminates the logic behind anti-abortion laws that terrorize and traumatize women who miscarry; behind the literal whitewashing of trans- and kink-inclusive queer history about Stonewall and the AIDS crisis; behind Pennsylvania Republicans’ refusal to repeal a state law that makes books, pictures, and videos about gay topics a crime in May 2021.

As The Digital Closet makes painfully clear, the motives of sexual censorship and denial of basic services based on sexual discrimination should no longer be above suspicion. In fact, it should have never been above suspicion. Especially now that the full horror of the app and platform sector’s surveillance state unravels before our eyes.

It’s here in these pages that we dig deeper in stats and data to make the connections between anti-sex conservatives and their extremist alt-right brothers. The Digital Closet calls on us to understand how the silencing of sexual speech online is foundational in weaponizing and furthering the agenda of far-right extremism and its handmaidens: systemic racism, systemic misogyny, and the erasure of queer culture.

This book is also a stark reminder that the internet was made for communication.

It’s hard to imagine what it would have been like to survive the pandemic’s first year without our ability to stay connected to each other via the internet. Remotely staying in school and maintaining jobs, or finding new work when laid off. Enjoying an overwhelming sense of shared experience from a COVID-19 meme, or amplifying links for those in crisis. Yearning to create a better tomorrow and expanding ourselves through online research about the environment, social justice, and vaccine equity. Via video we reassured frightened family members, helped loved ones through hardships, found bright spots with friends in a dark and isolating time, and sometimes bore the unbearable: saying goodbye for the last time via iPad.

Yet for all its connectiveness the internet has fractured us. Put more accurately, the internet’s stewards have nearly shattered us. For all its fiefdoms offering community and the equalizing opportunities of open communication, the platforms most everyone regards as “the internet” are steered and architected by those who have utterly failed to understand that communication is centered not on bytes and bits, nor on blind profit, but on humanity.

All of humanity. Not just the parts of it most profitable to advertisers, appeasing to misogynistic evangelicals, or palatable to far-right, conservative tech executives.

—San Francisco, June 2021