Maria Gara, known as SnakeBabe, poses at the 2010 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo. Ethan Miller/Getty Images
The accessibility of pornography on the internet has always been a huge concern for some factions of internet users — parents and religious groups, to name two. The constant, ongoing battle between users, internet service providers, and content providers regarding the control of pornography will likely never dissipate as long as the internet exists, because porn will always exist on the internet. But certain countries and private companies have taken their own initiatives towards at least filtering public access to porn, and social media has historically been caught in the middle.
VISUAL CONTEXT: GLOBAL INCREASE IN USE OF PORNOGRAPHIC SITES
Source: Pornhub
Twitter announced on March 6 that it would officially, immediately ban pornographic content from its six-second video application Vine. Vine’s user base soared last year, tallying 40 million users by the end of summer 2013. While that does not seem like many subscribers as compared to other behemoth mobile applications, it’s a solid figure considering the company was founded in 2012, when it was acquired by Twitter. Its percentage of pornographic videos has escalated with its rising user base; porn stars created accounts and distributed six-second clips of sexually explicit content. Twitter has now issued rules describing what is permitted and what is not through the social video application. Nudity is not entirely being shut out, and will be permitted in a documentary, artistic, or not-sexually-provocative context. On a more specific note, the site describes the allowance of “clothed sexually suggestive dancing”.
But Twitter’s efforts are one of the more concerted ones in the social media world. Yahoo faced opposition last year after its purchase of blogging site Tumblr as Tumblr users bemoaned the future restrictions on access to adult content labeled “not safe for work” or NSFW. It was anticipated — and somewhat made a reality by Yahoo — that a new parent company would try to eliminate the prominent porn community in existence on Tumblr. While Tumblr never revealed how much of its site is used for pornographic content, and Yahoo will likely never try to rid Tumblr of pornographic blogs for fear of alienating users, it did do its best to make adult content blogs on the site invisible from searches on itself, Google, and Bing. This action was noticed by Tumblr’s community, which has enjoyed what is considered one of the most liberal approaches to porn in the social media world: The site once merely asked bloggers of adult content to label their blogs “NSFW” so as to notify users who would otherwise choose not to view such content.
While porn is getting more of a strict approach to access from some content providers, it is getting a very specific one from internet service providers in the U.K. The government mandated a filtering system across its ISPs in late 2013 that has just finished going into effect this week as Virgin Media turned on a filtering system aimed at helping parents to restrict the adult content visible to their children online. All four of the U.K.’s major ISPs have now implemented the filtering system that includes blocks to not only pornography, but hate speech, and drug-related content.
Many proponents of the open internet insist that blocking pornographic content, or reconfiguring search algorithms to make it invisible violates the notion of the open nature of the web — an argument that seems impossible to reconcile with anti-porn advocates. But pro-filtering, anti-porn groups will likely always have their hands full as viewing pornographic content has historically been one of the top uses of the internet since its inception.
