The internet’s NSFW summer
The web’s most suppressed content is bubbling to the surface.
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If we end up learning that all this porn I’m seeing has something to do with my own browser history, no we didn’t. —Kate
If the internet is a sinking ship, then porn is the Atlantic ocean. Because of our culture’s bizarrely conflicted attitudes about sex, platforms are constantly battling a proliferation of NSFW content—which means that when porn does successfully infiltrate a platform, the universe suddenly feels out of balance.
Last week, a friend of a friend sent a tip that the top video on their Facebook Live feed was porn.
“I thought it would be taken down immediately, but I’ve gone back a few times now and every single time I have it’s been some version of weird softcore porn, so it doesn't seem like much moderation is happening there,” they said.
I reached out to Facebook and didn’t hear back, and on its own this could have just been an amusing anecdote. However, this is not the first time in the past 30 days that porn has shown up where it doesn’t belong.
On August 3, Twitter officially retired their ill-fated version of Stories, Fleets, after less than a year, citing lack of use. In the day leading up to its shuttering, however, Fleets reentered the chat ... with porn.
I never glimpsed this phenomenon myself, but tweets suggested that users were taking advantage of Fleet’s impending exit to post porn without consequences (although, I should note, that Twitter’s policy on nudity is much more liberal than Facebook, and Fleets had been used for this purpose before). August 3, in particular, seemed like a free for all.
“Twitter engineers looking at the most Fleet traffic they've seen in months,” a viral tweet reads.
The official Twitter Engineering account even replied.
Both of these instances come just weeks after websites like Huffington Post, New York magazine, and The Washington Post were infiltrated by porn after the video hosting site Vidme let its domain expire, and 5 Star Porn HD quietly bought it. Suddenly, benign videos that accompanied news articles posted between 2014 and 2017 were replaced with ones with titles like “Getting Into Porsha’s Ass.” Vice has the full story.
When Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick wrote up the incident, he noted a recent prediction of his that “some kind of big NSFW viral event was headed our way.” I didn’t give too much thought to this until the Fleets and Facebook Live porn followed in such quick succession.
“I can’t shake the feeling that the internet, as a whole, is a ticking time bomb,” Broderick wrote.
It’s a weirdly dystopian thought that one day I could be logging onto social media not to see what’s happening, but instead, what’s become of the spaces that once tried (and failed) to regulate it.