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How can social media platforms be more sex positive?
Author Kathy Nickels and Zahra Stardust
Date 31 August 2022
Social media platforms have the capacity to shape broader attitudes towards sex and nudity through decisions about what can and can’t be posted online. And yet, it will be of no surprise that the community standards and content moderation practices of dominant social media platforms are not very sex positive.
Platforms currently make private, arbitrary and unaccountable decisions about the kinds of sex and sexualities that are visible in online spaces. These decisions have seen plus-sized profiles, top surgery fundraisers and chestfeeding people flagged for “excessive nudity” and “sexual solicitation”.
Platforms have pre-emptively shut down spaces that have been safe havens for systemically marginalised communities and actively shadowbanned, demoted, de-monetised, suspended and deplatformed groups as diverse as sex workers, people of colour, LGBTQIA+ folk, disabled people, fat activists, women and sex educators.
Current trends in regulation create a hostile environment for those for whom sex is an active, visible part of life, especially when state legislation incentivises platforms to remove all sexual content.
Seeking positive change to social media policies, ADM+S researcher Dr Zahra Stardust and fellow academic and community experts brought together the voices of stakeholders and advocates to develop the Manifesto for Sex Positive Social Media.
The Manifesto originated from a community lab on Alternative Frameworks for Sexual Content Moderation hosted at the 2021 RightCon Summit on Human Rights in the Digital Age where the group considered how social media platforms could better understand sexual content, communication, expression, and representation.
Dr Stardust is a socio-legal scholar working at the intersections of sexuality, technology, law and social justice.
Dr Stardust says “We believe platforms can learn from a long history of sex-positive thinking. Taking a sex positive approach to social media will require structural changes to the current assemblage of power, labour and value, including contesting existing practices of surveillance capitalism, online gentrification and sexual stigmatisation.
It will also involve building up the generative work currently underway among independent collectives and cooperatives, who are designing new spaces, ethical standards and governance mechanisms for sexual content.”
The Manifesto sets out guiding principles that platforms, governments, policy-makers and other stakeholders should take into account in their design, moderation and regulation practices.
These principles are:
- Destigmatise sex
- Integrate sexual cultures into social media
- Value the labour of sexual content creators
- Build safer spaces
- Cultivate consent
- Be accountable
- Dismantle structural oppressions
Authors of the Manifesto: Dr Zahra Stardust (ADM+S, QUT, Australia), Dr Emily van der Nagel (Monash University, Australia) Professor Katrin Tiidenberg (Tallinn University, Estonia), Jiz Lee (Pink & White Productions), Em Coombes (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), Associate Professor Mireille Miller-Young (University of California Santa Barbara).
Artwork and illustrations by Jacq Moon
Read the full Manifesto of Sex Positive Social Media on the APO website
Show your support and sign the Manifesto at Change.org
