Censorship in Social Media

Naturists are constantly censored in social media. Naturism itself gets lumped in with pornography despite the fact that Naturists oppose it, fight for body acceptance, against hypersexualization, and are trying to stop the objectification of the naked form. Yet social media censorship is increasing. “Community Standards” are ethnocentric, vague, and inconsistently applied. There seems to be one set of rules for celebrities and big advertisers; another for Naturists. When rules are erroneously applied there is essentially no appeal process.

We interview a number of victims of social media censorship:

• Amy, a mom who is not a naturist but still has had several pictures of her children deleted
• Felicity and Jordan of Young Naturist America, who were one of the first naturist social media influencers and experienced incredible frustration as the constant nonsensical censorship. https://shitthatgotmebanned.com/
• Héctor Martínez, from Mexico, who promoted body acceptance had well over a million followers on YouTube. His entire account and all his work was deleted without notice.
• Cleo, who runs Topless Topics, is a feminist who fights for equality. She discusses anything while topfree. While a man would have no problem, she has been censored, deleted, and banned so many times she can’t count it. https://www.toplesstopics.org/banned/
• Nick and Lins of Naked Wanderings, who try to make a living as social media influencers in naturism. As Europeans (they’re from Belgium) they are dumbfounded by the puritanical rules and their income has been deeply affected by the censorship and bans. In 2019, their Instagram account was deleted without warning – they lost 50,000 followers!

Links to items mentioned in the show:

• “The Trauma Floor – The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America”, The Verge
• “Content moderators at YouTube, Facebook and Twitter see the worst of the web — and suffer silently”, The Washington Post
• “The Underworld of Content Moderation”, The New Yorker
• CBC interview of Kevin Chan, global director and head of public policy for Facebook Canada on government regulation
• Mark Zuckerberg’s March 2019 Op Ed in the Washington Post on regulation
• Felicity Jones
  • Felicity’s Blog
  • https://ShitThatGotMeBanned.com/
• Héctor Martínez
  • YouTube
  • Video response to the deletion of his YouTube channel
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Patreon
• Topless Topics – Cleo
  • Website
  • Every time Topless Topics has been banned
  • YouTube
  • Twitter
  • Patreon