So, I woke up this morning to a series of email notifications indicating that three of the posts on this very blog have been "flagged for review", and "put behind a warning for readers" because they "contain sensitive content". And I'm just trying to wrap my head around it. I've been posting regularly or semi-regularly (as in the last few years) to this blog since the spring of 2010. That's thirteen years ago. And the very purpose of this blog is to discuss controversial subjects (while sharing my own, at times sexually explicit, photography). The entire blog has been behind a "sensitive content warning" page - voluntarily - since the beginning. Which leaves me with a few questions.
Like, what's the point of putting a sensitive content warning on a post that already has one? Why were these three posts singled out, when this blog contains 13 years of sensitive content? How were they flagged? Am I being punished for advertising my blog more on Twitter, in the form of a larger audience leading to malcontents coming in and complaining about what they see? Or is this yet another case, as is becoming disturbingly common these days, of bots running rampant and creatively interpreting their directives? Were there even any humans involved in this decision at all?
Which leads me to my most important question: will I ever get any answers? The emails don't offer any kind of option to get feedback on this administrative decision. I can't even ask someone, "hey, what's going on? What's this all about?" The most they'll give me is a link back to the post editor where I can request to have those posts re-reviewed. But I don't see how that would accomplish anything. Nobody's going to tell me why these posts were flagged (other than a vague link back to the entirety of their Community Guidelines, so I can play a guessing game), so it's not like I can fix anything. And reviewing them again won't accomplish anything, because we both already agree that they contain sensitive content. That's why I already put a warning on them!
But let's play the guessing game anyway. One of the three posts is about foot fetishism. Like, really? Come on. Another is a discussion of pornography law which broaches the subject of bestiality. Ok, that one's obvious. But it hardly stands out on a blog like this one (I'm surprised they didn't find the post that discusses necrophilia). Moreover, I didn't describe any explicit acts, or even say that I support bestiality. I just wanted to have a discussion that's evidence-based and non-judgmental. Can we not even do that about taboo topics anymore? This is EXACTLY the thing that freedom of speech is supposed to protect. Here's a quote from that very post:
"But if we're more concerned with truth than politics, and wish to be consistent in our beliefs and ideologies, then we must be willing to extend the principles we apply to the popular issues to the unpopular issues also."
And on the subject of thoughtcrime, the third post is one that tries to build a bridge between prudes and perverts, on the subject of having sexual feelings about pictures that weren't designed for that purpose. I really think it's a stretch to define that as "revenge porn", since we're not talking about explicit images, nor are we talking about sharing them.
But again, my blog is filled with discussions of sensitive subjects. And they're already behind a warning filter. Why these three all of a sudden? And what's the point of filtering an already filtered post? I just want to understand how this process works, so that I can work within it most effectively, to the benefit of both myself and the platform. And I'm never gonna know, am I? How does this make any kind of sense? And yet, this kind of Kafkaesque social media bureaucracy is becoming more and more common. Are we going to have to start thinking of algorithms as an unpredictable force of nature, capable of random and senseless acts of digital destruction?
