Anti-Porn Lobbyists Pressure Reddit To Shut Down Its NSFW Communities

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: An anti-pornography group that claims all adult content is unhealthy is taking aim at Reddit, one of the biggest online platforms for sharing porn and sex worker resources. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), formerly Morality in Media, celebrated changes to policy that resulted in adult performers losing their incomes, taken credit for pressuring Instagram to ban Pornhub from the platform, and encouraged its followers to help them shut down sites that host legal adult content, causing real-world harm to sex workers and pushing them toward the exploitation they claim to aim to prevent. The letter, signed by 320 "anti-sexual exploitation and violence experts," according to NCOSE, accuses Reddit of not doing enough to prevent image-based sexual abuse. The letter's co-signatories don't just push for better protection against non-consensual imagery, but demand that all adult content be banned from the site. This would result in a massive purge of hundreds of subreddits, many of them run by sex workers for posting consensual, legal content. "Adopt strong policies against hardcore pornography and sexually explicit content, due to the inability for Reddit to ever sufficiently verify the age or consent of people depicted in such content," the letter urges Reddit. It also demands that the platform "ban users who upload sexually explicit material, especially if the material depicts child sexual abuse material or non-consensually shared intimate images, and prevent them from creating another account." "While these are steps forward, Reddit's failure to enact meaningful age and consent verirication[sic] practices and ineffective moderation strategy continues to allow such content to flourish on its platform," the letter states. "If they cause enough fuss in the media, over and over, eventually Reddit will decide it's not financially worthwhile to stand up for sanity, and they'll just nuke porn out of convenience," a moderator for r/cumsluts, a 3-million subscriber community for adult content, told Motherboard. "Eventually groups like NCOSE will get porn outlawed from the web in general. It's just a matter of time, and reintroducing the laws several times under different acronyms until people get tired of fighting. I'm very pessimistic about this. Unfortunately, mindlessly shrieking 'Won't somebody please think of the children?' over and over is a dangerously over-effective tactic." A moderator for r/18_19 told Motherboard that they don't expect Reddit to ban adult content anytime soon, but if it did, that it could push people to decentralized platforms, or platforms that are more difficult to moderate or search. "I don't think Reddit should ban porn or adult communities. In the short term, banning adult content would suck," they said. "A huge number of people come here for that. But it wouldn't be a big deal in the long run. Porn will be available, it would just take a while for it to consolidate around new locations."

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