Both Daily Dot and Gizmodo acknowledge that the updates they reported on were implemented in May but, for some reason, still opted to stoke hysteria by running their new stories as if there would be some changes coming in 2020. “The only thing updated in November was the reporting instructions,” the spokesperson confirmed, referencing two Twitter threads and a blog post detailing those changes.
Reached by Out this weekend, a separate Twitter spokesperson held to that, stating that there actually had been no update to the company’s TOS “sensitive content” section, where adult content is regulated, since the initial reports in July, and that users can expect porn to be treated the same in 2020 as it had been in 2019. “Accounts that simply post adult content either to express their sexuality or their interests will not be suspended,” a Twitter spokesperson said in July. At the time, Out followed up on that reporting, speaking to a Twitter spokesperson, for clarity on the changes and was assured that the app was not going after adult content, and had no plans to. In July, XBIZ ran a story about a Twitter TOS update that featured the exact same language as this.
The stories cited an update that banned “violent sexual conduct” and “gratuitous gore content.” Tweets embedded in the story alleged that the platform was “getting ready to ban sex workers and fetish artists en mass,” citing a line that defined “cartoons, hentai, or anime involving humans or depictions of animals with human-life features” as adult content if they are “intended to cause sexual arousal.” The Daily Dot story also included a tweet from its author which said that “accounts dedicated to posting ‘sensitive media’ will be banned.” But … all of this sounded too familiar. “Twitter’s NSFW Purge Looms,” Gizmodo warned. “Twitter NSFW Ban Could Be Coming” Daily Dot wrote in a headline. As such, the news about Twitter trickled around social media, was amplified by Daily Dot and Gizmodo, and then exploded. YouTube similarly doesn’t allow sexual content. Twitter has become a slight Wild Wild West of major social platforms given that Facebook and Instagram have completely banned not only sexual content but most content that could in any way be construed as sexual. Last week, reports begin to surface that a new Twitter Terms of Service (TOS) update set to be implemented in January 2020 signaled an impending ban on pornography on the famously open social platform. So it's understandable that people are incredibly sensitive when it looks as if another platform is headed in that direction.
The most impactful assaults on this type of content were the dismantling of the Craigslist personal classifieds section and Tumblr’s full out ban on adult content. The past three to five years have seen a widespread darkening wave of censorship in terms of sex-related content on the internet.