Over the past few weeks, Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and other marquee journalists have taken part in publishing the illuminating Twitter Files. With Elon Musk’s permission, the reporters dug through the social media company’s internal records, exposing the censorship of New York Post reporter Emma Jo Morris’ Hunter Biden reporting, Stanford medicine professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya’s COVID-19 beliefs, and other findings, sharing them via lengthy tweet threads and Substack posts.
The revelations were particularly terrifying for me and my fellow porn stars and sex workers because we know firsthand what it’s like for tech giants to censor our free speech, often for opaque reasons. For years, we’ve faced censorship on platform after platform, only for critics to yell at us that “social media isn’t the public square” and “you should build your own adult platforms.” When we’ve succeeded—on adult sites like OnlyFans, for instance—we’ve faced conservative groups trying to destroy those platforms. We are one of the most censored groups and depend on the spirit of free speech to survive; after all, free speech protects the people you disagree with and/or dislike, and many people disagree with and dislike porn stars (even though they likely masturbate to our content).
We are the perfect group for the Twitter Files to analyze, but thus far, the Files have failed to divulge how the company handles sex workers, despite plenty of avenues for these reporters to investigate. For one, Taibbi and Weiss were able to prove that Twitter was guilty of “shadow banning,” i.e., preventing certain accounts and tweets from appearing in users’ feeds and searches. Other sex workers and I have complained about shadow banning for years, only for liberals and conservatives alike to dismiss us as conspiracy theorists. I’ve struggled to find my sex worker colleagues’ accounts. I’ve seen search results hide my own account. Even since Musk bought Twitter, my account will not appear in the search box for users who aren’t already following me. By examining Twitter’s internal communications, reporters could identify how and why the company has seemingly restricted legal adult stars.
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For years, many porn stars felt like Twitter treated us as criminals—even though the law protects our occupation—so these reporters could also examine how Twitter classified porn stars. Were we seen as criminals? Were we grouped as one monolithic body? Did they treat some porn stars differently than others? Why were some porn stars deplatformed even though they didn’t break company policies? Twitter has offered little clarity on how they shape their policies around porn stars, and the public deserves to know how the company came to its conclusions.
More than anything, I would like to know if Twitter colluded with conservative groups to decide how to censor porn stars. So far, the Twitter Files have revealed that the Biden administration lobbied Twitter to bar anti-vaxxer accounts. (I disagree with anti-vaxxers, but it’s still disturbing that the government directed a corporation about who to censor.) It’s plausible, given that level of oversight and outside influence, that Twitter received information from one of numerous conservative “anti-sex trafficking” groups. In the past decade, Evangelical groups like Exodus Cry have conflated sex trafficking with legal pornography as part of an attempt to ban all porn. Exodus Cry went so far as to launch the hashtag #TraffickingHub, which confused the public and led MasterCard to stop processing payments on PornHub—a direct threat to my industry.
Much of the conversation about porn as sex trafficking has originated on Twitter. We’d welcome a free-speech warrior to rush to our defense, but it’s not even clear that Musk’s iteration of Twitter won’t continue to censor porn stars. Since taking over the platform, Musk has screamed about the importance of free speech, only to deplatform an account that tweeted about his plane. Most troubling for my industry, Musk has posted gushing conversations with Eliza Bleu, a self-proclaimed human trafficking survivor advocate who has occasionally lumped the porn industry in with trafficking. In one tweet, she highlighted how convicted sex trafficker Ruben Andre Garcia called “the porn industry an ‘evil business,’” and she has alluded to the conspiracy theory that porn is part of sex trafficking.
Bleu’s views are troubling enough, but they’re even scarier considering Musk loves her account. The CEO remains vague about his internal policies; it often seems he makes decisions via public Twitter polls, and it’s possible he could rip access to the Twitter Files from reporters at a moment’s notice. Given the unpredictability, Musk’s newfound adoration for Bleu is frightening and points to the problem the Twitter Files have exposed: Social media giants decide what we can see with little oversight.
It’s more important than ever to know how and why Twitter treats sex workers the way it does. We need the journalists with access to these records to report on it now before it’s too late.
