Originally Published at Mashable
By Mark Hay
A substantial portion of the adult entertainment industry lives in perpetual fear not of anti-porn activists or conservative legislation, but of a crackdown on their accounts by Twitter — a move many performers and producers believe is imminent and will be apocalyptic for them.
A concentrated wave of this fear spread through the industry at the end of last year, when reports began to circulate that Twitter appeared to be ramping up for a crackdown on NSFW content in 2020. A number of porn performers and producers promptly went into panic mode, decrying or lamenting this impending death blow.
“Every year, we are seeing more and more discrimination towards sex workers on all of the major social media platforms,” argues Tony Rios, president of the porn trade media house AVN.
Except for Twitter, that is. They have long banned nudity and simulated or unstimulated sex acts in profile photos and header images. They require posters to mark any tweets containing adult content, or accounts that frequently feature such material, as sensitive. And they have banned the delivery of unsolicited messages containing sensitive content to others. These are all fairly reasonable efforts to keep people who don’t want to see adult content on Twitter from chancing upon it incidentally.
But despite banning adult content on Vine (which they owned) in 2014, they’ve refrained from enacting restrictions anywhere near as stringent as the other social media giants. In fact Twitter has been so friendly to porn performers and producers by comparison that anti-porn groups like Fight The New Drug and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation treat it as one of the greatest abettors of what they see as a leading global health and safety menace.
The fact that Twitter has held out for so long as a porn-friendly space while the rest of the social media world has turned away from sex and sexuality leaves porn stars waiting for what many feel is an inevitable cave in and crackdown, explains adult star Cherie DeVille.
