Over on the guardian the headline reads, “

Adult performers picket Instagram HQ over company’s nude photo rules

 

But then later in the article it reads:

“In the large majority of instances, there was no nudity shown in the pictures. However, it appears that the accounts were terminated merely because of their status as an adult performer,” James Felton, the Adult Performers Actors Guild legal counsel, told the Guardian. “Efforts to learn the reasons behind the termination have been futile,” he added.

That suggests that people are not just being banned from sites for what they do on the sites themselves but for who they are and what they do on other sites and even in their real lives. Now mind you, it is true that a lot of adult performers use Instagram for traffic and to make money. Some cam models charge their fans tokens before those fans are given access to their Instagram or Snapchat accounts. That is true. Some may have crossed lines and Instagram may have received complaints. Though I think that is doubtful in many cases given that the banning was done in mass. The banning of many of cam models seems to be part of something company driven and not user driven.

I am reminded of twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, in an article, calling the internet a separate country. That may seem like a harmless statement within the context of the internet being global and without boundaries. It may sound like a harmless comparative statement. But the statement is not correct. The internet is a global utility. It is not a country.

The internet isn’t just a utility in the US or UK or Mexico or whatever. It is global. But then when you consider the large internet corporations are basically trying to write their own laws, create their own currencies, and are deciding who they want to kick out of their own “country” it gets rather scary. Why? Because the internet is not a separate country. People don’t live on the internet. They live real lives in real places and in many cases are trying to make money on the internet from their own home. The internet is a very important utility that serves planet earth. It is not a separate fucking country.

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Now some people say the internet is “the Wild West. It has to be tamed.” First, again, the internet is not a geographic location. It is not a separate country. It is a utility and neither the government nor the Corporate Police State should dictate legal behavior when using that utility. If you are breaking laws there are already laws that can be enforced against you. Allowing the corporate police state trying to control the internet to write their own laws and use those laws to discriminate against people is NOT acceptable.

Imagine if AT&T  or Verizon were to put filter spyware AI on your phone.  Now imagine, if in conversation you are half drunk, get excited, and tell someone in a joking insult, “Yo, motherfucker, Georgia is going to beat Alabama hands down.  If you think otherwise, you can suck my cock.”  Now imagine if at that point the AI kills your phone and kills your account and the phone companies acting in collusion will never allow you to have a phone account again.  Now obviously AT&T and Verizon could get their asses sued off if they were to try such a thing.  Neither they nor their AI should be listening to your conversation or reading your texts anyway. But should Google or Facebook or Twitter or whoever be allowed to basically do exactly that and still be treated as a utility.

Some people will say that Instagram has the right to say what people can and can not do on their service. That is true to some degree, but if they police content on their system and say they have the ability to act as an editor and chief of the content on their system then they are a publisher. They aren’t a utility. If they are a publisher then all immunity from what users do on their system should vanish. They should be held to the same standards as any other publication.

Now you may not like cam models. You may thump your bible and point to the fact that there are local decency laws. Understand, Pinterest censored Christians by putting them in the same class as porn. (As I understand it, opinion.) So religious people should understand that when they are promoting censorship they may be promoting the censorship of themselves and silencing their own voices.

The point of the local laws is to protect the local streets and neighborhoods. The internet allows adult entertainers to make money, for the most part, invisible from the streets of your neighborhood. I would guess most people consider that a good thing and not a bad thing. Do cam models on Instagram intrude into your enjoyment of the system? Do preachers on Pinterest intrude into your enjoyment of the system? If the answer is yes in either case and real people are complaining (not hit brigades using bots or elite media ass wipes trying to gain control of the internet) then of course the given internet company has a right to try to protect the system for their users. No one is saying that don’t have right to remove hurtful, drunken post, from their systems that they have received legitimate user complaints about. But banning people from the site for things they aren’t even doing on the site and therefore can’t possibly be guilty of intrusive behavior as far as their offsite behavior, it is problematic. That level of policing people should raise the question to whether the internet company should lose their right to be treated as a utility and instead be treated as a publisher and subjected to more harsh laws.

The degree that internet companies act in collusion with their shared data to ban people raises very real antitrust issues. Especially when they are doing it to censor free speech and cause economic harm to small businesses with that censorship. It does not matter whether you are a cam model or a preacher or someone with a political opinion or yes, even someone overly excited about a football game, free speech is important. FREE SPEECH IS IMPORTANT.