Last week both Tumblr and Facebook announced changes to their terms of service, severely limiting sexual expression. Tumblr opted to remove adult content, while Facebook amended their policy on sexual solicitation to effectively ban talking about sex at all on their platform. As a queer person and a porn producer/performer, it has been a scary week.

But what’s behind it? Is it Apple’s removal of the Tumblr app from their store, is it payment processors again? Yes, in part, but this isn’t the whole picture.

I’ve been in this line of work three years and have seen platforms cave into demands to remove sexual content from payment processors, but this feels different to me. Facebook already didn’t allow sex workers on its platform, and I don’t believe Tumblr is beholden to PP’s the same way sites like Patreon are, because they aren’t charging their user base the same way.

So why clamp down now, and why did the announcements come so close together? To my eyes the answer lies in the twin-headed anti-sex demon that is SESTA/FOSTA.

These recently passed laws effectively poke holes in section 230, a 1996 addition to the Communications Decency Act, which states:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

For example, if someone decides to tweet a libelous rant about me, I can’t sue Twitter for allowing it on their platform. But under SESTA/FOSTA, sites are responsible for any sex work advertisements hosted on their sites servers, whether they know the content is there or not. To be clear, states can now sue tech companies who have content related to sex work on their websites.

Tumblr opted to tackle the problem of possible sex work advertisements by using an algorithm to flag any adult content. The problem is their algorithm is about as ineffective at spotting porn as my dear old Nan, who still thinks I work in photography, despite me telling her several times what I do for a living.

I’ve seen examples of it flagging anything vaguely human shaped, as well as various examples of people tinkering with images to prevent the algorithm from spotting the lewd nature of them. Here’s an example of it being defeated by an owl wearing a hat. They claim the algorithm will improve with time, but I can’t see it ever being good at its job.

This law was sold as a way to combat trafficking — which absolutely needs to happen — but lawmakers willingly ignored concerns from sex workers. Because those involved don’t believe consensual sex work exists, they opted to class any form of full service sex work as sex trafficking.

To the people behind this bill, the friends of mine who had other job prospects but went into sex work to better control their hours and make more money doing something they love, are no different than someone who has been trafficked into slavery. These same friends of mine are now all at risk because of this law because they can no longer use these sites to screen potential clients and keep themselves safe.

This law was sold as a way to combat trafficking, which absolutely does need to happen, but lawmakers willingly ignored concerns from sex workers.
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These laws aren’t even effective at keeping trafficking from happening. Freedom Network USA, an anti-trafficking organization expressed these concerns at the time the bills were being proposed:

Responsible website administrators can, and do, provide important data and information to support criminal investigations. Reforming [Section 230] to include the threat of civil litigation could deter responsible website administrators from trying to identify and report trafficking. It is important to note that responsible website administration can make trafficking more visible—which can lead to increased identification. There are many cases of victims being identified online—and little doubt that without this platform, they would have not been identified. Internet sites provide a digital footprint that law enforcement can use to investigate trafficking into the sex trade, and to locate trafficking victims. When websites are shut down, the sex trade is pushed underground and sex trafficking victims are forced into even more dangerous circumstances.

Evidence from the months since SESTA/FOSTA passed back this up. Law enforcement are struggling to find victims of trafficking online since Backpage shut down. If they can’t see the victims, they can’t find them. I really cannot begin to describe how monumentally ineffective at helping trafficking victims, and absurdly dangerous to consensual sex workers this law is.

SESTA/FOSTA was signed into law in April, and though it was reported that it would begin being enforced in January 2019, it looks like that’s already gotten underway. On October the 1st a lawsuit was filed against Facebook by a Jane Doe in Texas. It states that back in 2012, when she was 15, a Facebook friend messaged her with a way to make money as a model.

When she met with him he abused and trafficked her. It should go without saying that what happened to this person is awful, and she absolutely deserves justice against her abuser. Under SESTA/FOSTA however, Facebook may be charged with Negligence, Gross Negligence, and breaking Texas laws related to benefitting from trafficking.

So it makes sense that getting slapped with this lawsuit would make Facebook sit up and take notice. They know how terrible algorithms are at picking up sexual content, so they updated their sexual solicitation policy to effectively ban talking about kinks, fetishes, boobs, butts, anything that might get you laid from using their platform. How this will affect their new dating site venture I have no idea.

The Tumblr side of things is a bit murkier, but it’s hard for me to imagine Verizon wanting to risk similar lawsuits given that they’ve had a lot of troubles with administrating Tumblr. So it’s just a lot cleaner and easier for them to remove adult content to make sure they get rid of any sex work related advertising, and hope Tumblr recovers from the mass exodus that is sure to occur.

So how does this affect you, the presumably non sex worker? The Tumblr and Facebook bans are just the start. As SESTA/FOSTA becomes more entrenched and more tech companies fall in line, I predict we will see other platforms begin to clamp down on any content related to sex for fear of being sued. It’s easier for them to ban all sex-related content than to try to screen for trafficking accurately.

Do you watch porn? Do you like to discuss sex on the internet? Do you use the internet to get laid? Those days are short-lived unless we fight to repeal this. And because most companies have operations in the USA, this will affect people all over the world. I live in the UK and this has already affected me, and this is without the version of the bill that the UK government wants to pass.

As SESTA/FOSTA becomes more entrenched and more tech companies fall in line, I predict we will see other platforms begin to clamp down on any content related to sex for fear of being sued.
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A lot of queer communities connect online, and because our existence is seen, to some, as inherently sexual, we can expect policies that limit sexual expression to hit queer people much harder. It’s difficult to realize certain things about yourself as a queer person without the internet, and sex education for gay, lesbian, and trans people is severely lacking without the internet. I really fear for the younger generations of queer people growing up in a world where talking about sex online gets you banned.

Are tubesites like Pornhub the answer? I can tell you as a creator that their platform is extremely bad. Any porn you watch on there without a verified tick is very likely stolen from creators such as myself and reuploaded (please stop using Tubesites). Also there’s no guarantee they won’t be affected by SESTA/FOSTA too, given that they make money off these videos, and they can’t prove people in them aren’t being trafficked, because they don’t verify many of their uploaders.

We need people to see this bill for what it is, a U.S. government-sponsored censorship law with far-reaching effects on the entire internet. It passed with bipartisan support; damn near every representative and senator voted positively on it.

We need to let them know loudly that this law is not only unfit for purpose, it’s incredibly dangerous. Stand up for sexual expression online, because if you don’t you might soon lose it for good. 

Thousands of years ago, the intricate physical and spiritual pedagogy of yoga was codified in the The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, but that book is outdated, and harder to understand than Shakespeare! As yoga has evolved into an international phenomenon no longer relegated to hot, dusty, far-flung countries, it’s become clear that yoga philosophy, too, is in dire need of an upgrade. Nourishing inner peace, and combining mind, body and all of creation still matter, of course, but the practice has shifted focus, and today’s yogis are all about building community—and self-esteem.

Enter Instagram, the digital ashram of the twenty-first century, where yogis gather to heighten their self-worth, celebrate their good health and fortune, and foster their flock of oh-so-flexible disciples. In case you’re keen to join the movement, we’ve rounded up the best advice from today’s hottest yogis on how to showcase your most supple, sinewy, ready-for-your-close-up self on the mat, on the ‘gram, and in the world.

1. Elevate your vibration. All the hype—all of it—is real. No more gluten, no more sugar, no more carbs. We assume you’ve already cleansed your karma of animal product. The more foods you eliminate, the higher you will hum, and the lighter you will feel #livingyourbestlife.
2. #Speakyourtruth. Once you’ve whittled your daily consumption down to the barest of leafy necessities, let the world know. Spread the good word on kale! It’s our collective duty to inspire the overfed masses to give hunger a try. You—yes you—can turn starvation into a social media movement! A little yogi birdie told us that Instagram ‘friends’ are buyable in bulk—and oh so cheap!—from Russian wholesalers. Simply get your new drove of followers to donate one dollar for every meal you renounce, and when they don’t respond, publicly denounce their spirituality void. #notsoblessed
3. Make your #soulsweat. Find a Power Vinyasa class that costs at least $25 per hour (it’s way easier than it sounds), and promises at least 25 chaturangas. You know, the yoga push ups? Otherwise you won’t bang nearly enough calories for your buck.
4. See yourself as you really are. Sometimes self-care is stretchy! Take a deep breath, steady your gaze, straighten your spine, and reward yourself with a pair of leggings that cost more than your weekly paycheck. You’ll feel so good about yourself, you’ll be bound to pop a handstand in the middle of rush hour traffic. Post that and #theywillcome. (To your Instagram page, that is).

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   A little yogi birdie told us that Instagram ‘friends’ are buyable in bulk —and oh so cheap!—from Russian wholesalers.
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5. Expand your practice beyond the mat. Yoga isn’t just about pushing through painful micro-tears in your hamstrings until you can finally extend your leg 170 degrees. A beautiful way to expand your practice is to become an essential oils advocate #wellnesswarrior. With the right brand of oily aromas, you’re not just enhancing your wellness, you’re curing and preventing chronic diseases that have stumped Western science for decades. Build your business by pushing shockingly expensive — but very worth it — oils on friends, family, and unsuspecting strangers. (And no, we know what you’re thinking you naughty thing — those organic, discount Whole Foods oils just won’t do!)
6. Don’t be afraid to #shineyourlight. Go ahead: sign up for that 200-hour teacher training. It’s an inundated, but growing field, and the best part is you don’t have to learn the Sanskrit names for poses anymore! (Why waste precious breath on fumbling through adho mukha svanasana when you can just say D-Dog?) You’re never too young or inexperienced to teach yoga.
7. Manifest your spirituality. Don a bhindi and hop on a flight to the Motherland. Take a handstand pic in front of the Taj Mahal. Find rebirth by bathing in the Ganges, or any of India’s multitude of holy rivers. Pay no mind to naysayers, the laughing locals or human feces floating by. Experience the magic of kirtan and chant to bloodthirsty Bronze Age deities alongside other soul-seeking Westerners. Just don’t forget to bring your own mat, as many rolls of toilet paper as can fit in your suitcase, and plenty of hand sanitizer. This is India, after all, not Equinox!
8. #Yogainfluencer. Yes, you too can change the world by posting daily photos of yourself nailing inversions, breathtaking backbends, and strenuous arm balances against idyllic backgrounds. Don’t forget to round out your page with inspirational sayings (preferably by the Buddha, or people with Indian-sounding names), luscious pics of bright green smoothies, and simple silhouettes of yourself meditating in the pink glow of a sunset.

In this wild and wooly world, we all need the occasional reminder to look inward. #yogaeverydamnday. Now hurry up and hit that handstand. The Taj Mahal awaits!

By Kim McAuliffe

Content warning: discussion of pregnancy loss

I vaguely remember the first time I was bombarded with Facebook and Google ads for a pair of boots I’d added to a shopping cart but never bought. I was creeped out, uneasy, a bit annoyed. My computer was spying on me, whispering about my habits and preferences to various interested parties behind my back.

Now, it happens so often that I don’t bat an eyelash. I find myself managing how Facebook advertises to me by purposely clicking on comments for ads on things that marginally interest me, not because I want more of those ads, but to minimize exposure to ads I don’t want to see. To make its algorithmic analysis of me smarter. I can’t stop seeing ads, so I try to avoid ones that will hurt or annoy me.

This kind of marketing will never go away. At this point, maybe most of us don’t notice, or don’t care. But there are some subjects, some products, that can be triggering, emotionally challenging, even devastating. There are some topics that should be treated with more care.

I find myself managing how Facebook advertises to me.
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I’ve written about pregnancy loss before. Twice. I mentioned in the first piece that in my positive-test excitement I downloaded multiple pregnancy apps only to find later that one or more had sold my information to Similac, which continued to send me unsolicited email long after the pregnancy itself was gone.

What I haven’t written about until now was how shortly after the second loss I got a physical package in the mail from Similac with formula samples and other crap. It seemed so random — until I realized Similac had obtained from the app not only my email address, but my projected due date from the first pregnancy. I was getting this formula right when I should have had a newborn in my arms. I was so hurt by this unexpected reminder, it sent me back into a morass of dark thoughts I had only just started to escape. I was angry; shouldn’t something like a due date have been considered “personally identifiable information” (PII) or protected medical data? How was that even legal?

Hi @AbbottGlobal after 2 miscarriages it’s v sad 2 get surprise #Similac via info u bought fr preggo app I installed

— @EnameledKoi

You can see in the Twitter thread that the company responded, asking me to DM them.

@EnameledKoi Our sincere apologies Kim. Please send us a direct message with your contact information. Thank you.

— @AbbottGlobal

They agreed to remove me from their mailing list, but showed no inclination to take any action that might prevent future harm to others.

I won’t share them here, but the responses to my original tweet make it clear that I am not the only one to have been harmed by similar marketing. I found out that this is so common, in fact, that loss-support groups warn people about it.

@EnameledKoi Have unfortunately suffered the formula samples in the mail too. Luckily we attended a loss support group and were told it would be coming. When your hurtful actions are so common that decent people warn each other, you have a problem. Thanks for posting this.

— @mescad

I also never wrote about the third pregnancy loss a few months later. It was too much, and there were too many other terrible things happening at the same time.

But imagine this for a second: You are nine weeks along, but instead of a heartbeat, sonograms reveal only an empty gestational sac that doesn’t grow. You hope it was too early, a miscalculation, but that hope bleeds away a bit more with every passing day. You spend an indeterminate amount of time waiting to miscarry. You end up traveling with a “specimen kit” because there’s a family emergency — it could happen in the shared bathroom of someone’s AirBnB, but genetic testing on the “products of conception” might be the only way to figure out what’s been going wrong all of this time.

Meanwhile, you suddenly start seeing ads for baby products, nursing bras, pregnancy workouts, and whatever else you can imagine on Facebook. After the initial emotional kick in the gut, you’re angry, because you weren’t stupid enough this time to install any apps. You can’t figure out what happened, until you realize that every desperate Google search for “slow-rising beta hcg levels” or “possible blighted ovum” in your quest for miracle stories has only told the data gods that you are (sort of, not really) pregnant and now is a good time to market baby-related things at you.

You realize your devastation is immaterial in the bigger picture, that you’re an edge-case scenario, and that the gain for all companies involved is too great to care about the heartbreak they’re causing you, right this minute. As if you didn’t already feel so absolutely alone.

It shouldn’t be this way.

If advertising your product has the potential to cause harm, you have the responsibility to try and mitigate that harm.

How The Medical Community Is Pushing Invasive Procedures On People Who Miscarry
theestablishment.co

Asking product manufacturers, marketing departments, and social platforms to think humanely might be a tough sell. How will people buy their products (or ad space) if they aren’t made to feel they are not thin enough, not hot enough, not smart enough, just not enough? Companies are not in the business of making people feel good about themselves.

But hurting those who have experienced tremendous loss already is a breach of human decency so severe, I have a hard time imagining no corporate executive or employee cares. Surely at least some are upset that their products, upon showing up unexpectedly in inboxes, are re-breaking fractured hearts and shattering any tenuous illusion of normalcy.

There is a solution here, and it’s simple: Pregnancy and baby-related companies need to stop using projected due dates for marketing purposes. They must find better and smarter ways to market their products to consumers more likely to have carried to term, like baby registries or Facebook birth announcement posts. They mustn’t presume that everyone browsing a pregnancy forum is there for positive reasons. I can assure you, from three doomed pregnancies’ worth of reading desperate thread after desperate thread at 2 am in bed, unable to sleep — they are not.

At the same time, app developers need to be more sensitive with user data they share for marketing purposes. They must allow pregnancy-app users to remove themselves from all marketing when they experience a loss.

If your app profits from the hopeful journeys of pregnant women who’ve allowed you into their lives, you have a responsibility to care for them when that journey is cut tragically short. Please, avoid causing additional pain when there is already so much.

Please, do better.

Social Media Has Its Pitfalls But You Can Use It For Positive Change — Here’s How

Together, we can build the future we need.

Unsplash/Jonathan Denney

By Alaina Leary

Originally published on Everyday Feminism.

I t’s easy to think that social media is a force for negativity — that it’s bad for our mental health to be constantly exposed to a stream of news and avenues for comparing ourselves to others. But social media can also be a platform for creating and sustaining positive social change, and it’s something that we can all be a part of.

Hashtag movements like #MeToo, which was started by activist Tarana Burke and later amplified online, have lasting consequences. RAINN (The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network) reported a 21 percent increase in calls to anti-sexual assault helplines after Harvey Weinstein allegations and #MeToo exploded, showing that online conversations can persuade people to seek help offline.

The 2014 hashtag #WeNeedDiverseBooks launched a nonprofit of the same name that now offers internship grants, mentorships, awards for authors and booksellers, and an app called OurStory that helps connect people with vetted diverse books. And Marley Dias’s #1000BlackGirlBooks has helped continue that conversation while proving that young people can become activists and create change.

These are only a few examples of how movements like #BlackLivesMatter use social media alongside grassroots organizing as a catalyst for activism. It’s worth noting that many current policy changes — like the recent repealing of net neutrality — are particularly tough on marginalized people who rely heavily on the Internet for agency, education, and activism.

One of my earliest experiences with activism was when I started using an LGBTQIA+ youth forum in middle school to spread information about safe and consensual sex with our international online community, and later became a moderator for the group.

If you’re interested in using social media as an agent for positive change but you’re not sure where to start, here are some tips that may help:

1. Take advantage of interactive activism opportunities in online communities.

Research shows that people are more likely to participate in causes with social or interactive aspects that have a personal feel. This was what helped the ALS Association Ice Bucket Challenge go viral.

If your friends and family see you posting about a cause — whether it’s a call for donations or a simple action they can take — they’ll be more likely to participate because you’re a part of their personal social network. It also helps if it’s interactive in some way like the Ice Bucket Challenge was.

Last year, a friend of mine organized a call-to-action for people to write to representatives about the Affordable Care Act. She used social media to get the word out and designated a specific date for people to do it. She then invited local folks to her home to write out postcards for mailing and encouraged people to join in virtually via social media if they weren’t able to attend.

If your friends and family see you posting about a cause, they’ll be more likely to participate because you’re a part of their personal social network.

Many people might be informed about causes like affordable health care or net neutrality, but they don’t know what they can do. Since social media is social and somewhat intimate by nature (depending on how many people you connect with), it’s a great platform to spread awareness and get other people excited about a cause.

2. Make sure your activism is accessible and inclusive

The best thing about social media activism is how accessible it can be. Actions like organizing, going door-to-door for a campaign, or showing up for an in-person protest can be expensive and dangerous — especially for people of color and other marginalized people. They can also be downright inaccessible for people with disabilities.

A successful campaign for change is accessible to everyone, like the creation of the Disability March website as an online counterpart for the Women’s March. It’s also tied to offline change; not everyone can physically attend a march, but everyone can voice their concerns about the political administration with the chance to be heard. There is more than one way to get involved, so it’s inclusive of a wide range of people. The Disability March website offers examples of how people can organize online as part of their activism.

How Do You Keep Social Media From Destroying Your Mental Health?

The Women’s March was a great example of how social media helped organize an event, and disability activist Mia Ives-Rublee spearheaded the effort to make the event more accessible and inclusive to the disability community. Online efforts like Women’s March on Washington — Disability Caucus and #CripTheVote aim to sustain this momentum through finding accessible ways to get disabled people politically engaged.

No matter what your cause, there are ways to tie simple actions to real change — like encouraging people to take next steps to protect and restore net neutrality, or sharing information about how people can get registered to vote in an upcoming local election.

3. Remember that small steps are critical to getting the work done

Particularly with our constant access to information, it can be easy to lose sight of how small pieces of the puzzle are crucial to effecting larger, long-lasting change.

But small steps — like voting in local and state elections, calling your representatives, or creating a community group for political education — have a major impact. According to Harvard Business Review, easy-to-replicate, low-risk tactics are the most likely to succeed.

Small steps have a major impact.

It’s powerful if you share with your community that you’re going to get registered and make voting in the next local election a group effort, and you all get together to achieve that goal. It might seem like a small action, but state and local elections matter — they often help decide things that will have an impact on your life and the lives of those in your community. And because local elections typically have lower voter turnouts, every vote counts.

Don’t discount local protests or smaller national protests because you’re not seeing the turnout that the Women’s March had. Get invested in grassroots organizing online: What issues are communities talking about? Is there a call-to-action that you can participate in? Especially if these are communities that are typically ignored in politics and the media, it’s time to listen and get involved.

4. Share the work that other activists are doing

If you’re feeling a little lost or defeated — or you just need some time for self-care — that’s okay, too. Remember that you can’t do everything, be a part of every cause, and commit to every possible social or political action.

Amplify the work that you see other activists doing, even if you can’t take part personally. Maybe there’s someone you know who’d love to donate to a fundraiser, or maybe you can connect with someone who needs help calling their Republican Congress member.

Whether it’s showing up for a local community workshop, volunteering for a nonprofit, or retweeting activism-related information to your online network, there are so many ways to use your social platform for good.

I’m An Activist — Am I Allowed To Unplug From The Internet?

Sometimes I’ll see fantastic work that I know I can’t physically be a part of, like the Climate March in Washington, D.C., and I share the work of activists who were involved in organizing or attending. I know that I’m an individual person and as much as I contribute to causes that I care about, I can’t feasibly do everything, but what I can’t do, I can amplify.

There’s something positive and empowering about sharing our collective wins with the community, too. When you see an effort that’s affecting positive change — especially if it’s a cause that’s not often reported in mainstream media — share it with your social networks and friends. Tell them about some of the best activism victories you’ve witnessed or been a part of in 2017 — you never know, it may just encourage someone to get involved.

Social media activism is great for so many reasons: It is more widely accessible, it gets conversations started, it sustains momentum, and it helps empower people who may have never thought of themselves as activists.

As a multiply marginalized person, I always wondered what I could actually do to create real change — to work on issues like disability rights, marginalized voices in the media and publishing, accessible health care, sexual assault and consent education, or LGBTQIA+ rights.

Through online communities, I’ve gained access to invaluable resources, like learning how to distribute safe sex and consent education on campus with Great American Condom Campaign, help get college students registered to vote with Rock the Vote or report on accessibility in public transit.

Some of my activism work is fully online while other aspects have an offline component. But, regardless, there’s one thread of connection: Every time I speak up and share about these issues on social media, people reach out to me. They let me know that they feel empowered to share their own story, or that they’ve connected with a nonprofit I recommended to donate or do volunteer work.

Together, we can sustain all this momentum and build the future we need.

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Connectedness leaves us feeling exhausted and, for activists, can lead to quicker burnout.

By Alaina Leary

Originally published on Everyday Feminism.

A s activists, we often feel like we need to be “on” at all times.

We have to be informed about any injustice that’s going on so we can help fight it. We need to be a part of the action. We feel called to be doing something that will have positive effects.

Because we live in an Internet age, that can come with a feeling of responsibility: that we should never back away from social media. That we need to always be online. FOMO — or “fear of missing out” — is ever-present.

But research suggests that, as humans, we aren’t prepared for what often amounts to an onslaught of 24/7 global news aided by the Internet age. This connectedness leaves us feeling exhausted and, for activists, can lead to quicker burnout.

When I first heard the news about Kevin Spacey coming out after being accused of sexual violence last week as I was doing my daily email and social media check for work, I panicked.

On Spacey, Weinstein, Milo, And The Weaponization Of Identity

A lot of my activism is centered on LGBTQIA+ rights and rape culture, and this conversation is right at the intersection of the two. There was plenty of activism work I could do, but I also knew that I had a lot of work to do because it’s Monday and I’ve got several ongoing projects at hand.

There’s already plenty on my plate, and I really only had time to read about the situation and amplify a few voices online.

We need to remember that we’re absolutely allowed to unplug from the Internet and take a step (or five) back from social media — and not just during times when we’re already feeling fatigue and burnout creep in, but on a regular basis to maintain our mental and physical health.

Getting away from social media is actually an important and necessary part of self-care. Here are some reasons why, as activists, we do need to unplug from the Internet and tips on how we can (realistically) do that:

1. We can’t do the work if we’re exhausted or overwhelmed

Between Facebook’s push for users to get more of their news on the platform and people’s tendency to share things that make them outraged, consuming the news is a big part of the online experience in today’s society.

Many people I’m connected with on social media are also invested in similar causes — disability rights, anti-racism, universal health care, environmental protection.

It’s fairly common for me to be using social media as a leisure tool and come across upsetting news, petitions, protests, and long articles or videos on important topics like sub-minimum wages for disabled workers or the effects of climate change on the bee population.

It’s easy to feel burnt out after just a few minutes online. So much on social media has a call-to-action attached, and it’s not possible for us to do anything effectively if we’re putting too much pressure on ourselves to do everything.

Why Should You Become An Establishment Member For $5 A Month?

To avoid this, we need to prioritize self-care. It’s easy to feel guilty for spending even an hour — never mind an entire weekend, week, or longer — away from social media and from activism work, because there will always be more we can do.

But we need to remember that taking time to recharge regularly helps us come back to activism with fresh enthusiasm, ideas, and the mental capacity to handle challenges.

I try to take social media breaks for several hours daily, although I do usually check in at least once a day on the current news cycle to keep informed.

There are times I dedicate to self-care and recharging, often an entire weekend or longer, where I commit to not checking social media or reading the news (or my email!).

I usually find that I come back to the cause feeling even more ready to do the work that needs to be done, whether it’s organizing, educating, or attending an in-person protest or rally.

2. We can’t fight every single battle all the time

My family and friend circles are full of activists who tackle a variety of issues, from local politics and environmental activism to anti-racism and domestic violence. Because I’m so involved in the activist community, I know people who are involved in what seems like almost every issue.

I’m often surrounded by other activists and reading about what they’re working on, and I think about the things I’ll never have time to be a part of. I often find myself overwhelmed by the sheer amount of what I can’t accomplish as a single individual.

We need to remember to be realistic in what we can accomplish, and this is a huge part of learning to unplug.

I often find myself overwhelmed by the sheer amount of what I can’t accomplish.

I’m not advocating for being completely naïve and uninterested in causes that don’t personally affect us. What I am suggesting is that we try to stick to a few different niches and remember that there are folks doing the work that we can’t.

They may even be better prepared through lived experience and education than we are. Instead of feeling fatigued that we aren’t able to fight for every cause we believe in, we can amplify the work that people are doing and focus on our own strengths.

Most of my activism work revolves around disability and LGBTQIA+ rights, which are both communities that I’m a part of. I also do a lot of work on diversity in publishing and media, so I’m constantly paying attention to conversations about the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement and the fight to diversify publishing staff.

How To Help The Cause When You Need Help Yourself

There are, however, many causes that I believe in but know I don’t have the time, energy, or resources to fight for, so I spend my time amplifying people and organizations that are leading the way.

In my day job as a writer, editor, and social media manager, I am often in a position to shed light on issues and potential solutions, distributing information about activist causes to key influencers who I know will help get the word out.

Even if you don’t have access to these outlets, you can amplify other activists and causes on your own social media channels and by word-of-mouth locally.

3. Activists are frequent targets for online harassment

Particularly if you are marginalized or multiply marginalized and in any type of visible position, being an activist also comes with targeting online. If you’re speaking up for a cause, chances are high that there will be trolls and other folks online who disagree.

“Disagreement” may mean a comment here or there, but it can also escalate into things like being harassed, doxxed, and threatened.

If this happens, make sure to practice immediate self-care in the moment, but also use it as a reason to regularly recharge and step back from the Internet and social media. Build these breaks into your routine.

Depending on how often you engage online, you might take a 15-minute break for every hour spent online or take 2 full days per week to go off the grid. Check in with your own mental and physical health, and your energy levels, to see if these breaks are working for you.

Being an activist also comes with targeting online.

I started taking planned social media breaks about two years ago. I was already working at least part-time in a social media capacity for organizations, as well as using the web as a resource for my freelance and volunteer work, which is frequently activism-based.

At the time, I was exhausted and had no idea how to navigate this. After my “official” work hours ended, was I expected to be online at all times in case I came across a political story I could pitch it to an editor?

Should I be there retweeting hashtags as soon as they started, before they were even viral? If I didn’t know about the latest news in disability rights and health care, how could I put together an action plan?

Planning daily and weekly breaks into my work week became absolutely critical to remaining healthy and engaged.

You might also want to consider checking in with your community to see if there’s a way other people can support you so that you’re able to take breaks when you need to.

If you’re managing social media for a nonprofit or organization — or as a public figure yourself — you might see if there are other moderators who can step in at least a few times a week so you’re not the only one doing the work.

A Brief History Of Behind-The-Scenes Activism With A Big Impact

Asking for help can be difficult, but support from your community can be really beneficial when you’re trying to recharge, particularly if you’ve been subject to harassment.

When activism is a big part of your work (and possibly even your identity), it can be hard to separate yourself. You might feel like you need to be engaged at all times.

For example, I often feel the pressure if I see a call for pitches from an online magazine looking to publish a themed issue on consent and I don’t send in options related to the causes I care about, such as campus sexual violence, inclusive sex and consent education, or rape culture.

I need to remember that I won’t do effective, good work if I’m constantly exhausted because I’m pushing myself to be involved 24/7 in so many things. Like anyone else, I need time off and breaks from the constant flow of work, whether it’s paid or volunteer.

When activism is a big part of your work (and possibly even your identity), it can be hard to separate yourself.

I need to prioritize self-care. I need to know when to step back (which can be tough, especially if you are being harassed or threatened) and when to ask for help.

I recommend resources like The Self Care Project, Rest for Resistance, Everyday Feminism, Wear Your Voice Magazine, The Establishment, and these self-care options for days when the world feels terrible.

These are lessons we all need to take seriously, especially as the Internet and social media become more advanced.

We may have constant access to a vast amount of information, but we can’t do anything about it if we aren’t strategic — especially in how we build self-care into our priority lists for daily life.

Alaina Leary is an Everyday Feminism Reporting Fellow. She is a Bostonian currently studying for her MA in publishing at Emerson College. She’s a disabled, queer activist and is on the social media team at We Need Diverse Books. She can often be found re-reading her favorite books and covering everything in glitter. You can find her at her website or on Instagram and Twitter @alainaskeys. Read her articles here.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/should-women-trust-facebook-with-their-nude-selfies-d49f89efb39f/ Sat, 11 Nov 2017 17:26:55 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=3062 Read more]]>

A new scheme to fight revenge porn online is raising eyebrows.

flickr/D Sinclair Terrasidius

By Liz Pozner

The tech sector is heavily run by men — sometimes, men who seem blind to the potential dangers of their innovations. Now, in a move that seems to confirm this stereotype, Facebook has come up with a solution to one of its many PR crises — the rise of revenge porn on the platform. To combat this problem, Facebook is proposing that women upload nude selfies preemptively to their websites so that bots can block their exes from posting similar images.

Perhaps sensing the eyebrows raising from this announcement, Facebook sent out a flock of female media relations staffers to defend its anti-revenge porn system.

“It would be like sending yourself your image in email, but obviously this is a much safer, secure end-to-end way of sending the image without sending it through the ether,” online safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant told ABC. An even higher-up employee, Antigone Davis, Facebook’s head of global safety, further assured users that “the safety and well-being of the Facebook community is our top priority.” Uh huh. Sure.

Feminist Hacking Group Helps Women Send Safer Nudes

The idea is that women would snap nude selfies and upload them to Facebook Messager, which would then use AI technology to create a digital copyright of their naked bodies. That would automatically block a different user from posting a photo of the same body. It’s the same concept as fingerprinting at birth…except way more invasive. It sounds like a poor plan, especially at a time when users have less trust than ever in technology’s ability to protect their privacy. Leaked nude photos afflict celebrities and normal folks alike, and hackers who access supposedly secure information are a regular feature in our news cycle, so why on earth should Facebook users be expected to happily hand over even more of their private lives?

Facebook is piloting the technology in Australia, where Inman assured the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that users shouldn’t worry about their nude selfies winding up in Facebook’s cloud. “They’re not storing the image. They’re storing the link and using artificial intelligence and other photo-matching technologies. So if somebody tried to upload that same image, which would have the same digital footprint or hash value, it will be prevented from being uploaded.”

Why Should You Become An Establishment Member For $5 A Month?

Facebook has come under particular pressure in recent months to tackle the problem of users posting explicit images of women online without their consent. The most publicized case was the all-male Facebook group United Marines, which was found in March 2017 to have harvested hundreds of photos of female Marines and veterans. The men would regularly leave lewd messages in the comments, like the Marine who commented on one woman’s photo that he’d like to “take her out back and pound her out.”

It’s a major problem for civilians, too — 10% of American internet users under age 30 have been victims of revenge porn or online harassment. In recent years, multiple women have sued Facebook for failing to promptly take down nude images that were posted without their consent.

10% of American internet users under age 30 have been victims of revenge porn or online harassment.

As Slate’s April Glaser writes, it’s pretty tone-deaf of Facebook to ask victims of revenge porn to upload more nude photos of themselves. “When a naked photo of a person is circulated without her consent, it can be ruinous emotionally and professionally. Requesting that women relive that trauma and trust Facebook, of all companies, to hold that photo in safekeeping is a big ask.”

Surely there must be other ways to prevent revenge porn on social media — heavier community monitoring by humans, perhaps, or a system to automatically flag users whenever they upload photos that contain nudity? Just some thoughts.

Whether Facebook’s anti-revenge porn initiative will succeed depends on an ethical question for the 21st century: do women today trust anonymous AI technology more than they trust the shady men to whom they send nude photos in the first place?

This story first appeared at AlterNet and is reprinted here with permission.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-parallels-between-social-media-and-ptsd-in-the-age-of-trump-f5ade1b5198d/ Thu, 31 Aug 2017 21:45:54 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=3537 Read more]]> In response to the abuse of the Trump administration, many have become social media hyper-vigilantes. Is this a good thing?

Adapted from Wikimedia Commons + flickr/BrickinNick

Survivors of family and intimate partner violence adopt many strategies for self-preservation, both with and without conscious intent. Two strategies I adopted in the past were numbing myself with alcohol and drugs, which was not very effective, and volunteering with battered women’s service organizations, which both educated and healed me.

In the 1970s, following my escape from violence at the hands of my adoptive parents and, later, my high school boyfriend, I also worked to prevent future abuse by closely monitoring cues, like the heaviness of a footfall or the tone of a voice.

Back then, I didn’t know I was suffering from PTSD, a diagnosis that didn’t enter the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980, and wasn’t applied to survivors of child abuse and intimate partner violence (IPV) until the 1990s. Today, I recognize my response as “hypervigilance,” a common symptom of PTSD that’s described as the “experience of being constantly tense and ‘on guard,’” acting “on high alert in order to be certain danger is not near.”

The Many Faces Of Trauma

Hypervigilance wasn’t the only trauma symptom I experienced — I also endured recurring nightmares, intense anger, and startle responses to movements near my head — but it’s one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, in the context of our current political climate.

It’s not a stretch to say Trump behaves similarly to abusers. Many characteristics of batterers — grandiosity, alignment with traditional gender roles, using sex as an act of aggression, blaming others for their actions, denying or minimizing their own bad behavior, losing their tempers explosively, insisting on control — aptly apply to the leader of the free world.

In turn, I’ve seen many respond to Trump — and, for that matter, to other politicians acting in abusive ways — with the same kind of alertness I adopted while experiencing PTSD as a survivor of abuse. Only now, instead of taking place IRL, this hypervigilance plays out on social media.

Soon after the 2016 Republican victory, psychologists began talking about “Post-Election Stress Disorder”(PESD) — a way to describe the anxiety and depression that affected many after Trump ascended to the White House, accompanied by symptoms like headaches, lost sleep, and stomache pain.

My own anxiety began during the brutal election process, and has not abated since. And in my state of despair, I’ve often turned to social media.

As the election drew near, I checked multiple feeds for news each morning, and then each night. Every new misogynist revelation, every new racist pronouncement, left me enraged or numb. I felt fearful. I joined secret Facebook groups for survivors of domestic violence, where I read other women’s posts about being triggered by political rhetoric and disclosures of abusive behavior. My morning writing practice fizzled out in favor of huddling under the quilts with my phone, tapping at apps that kept me informed. My obsessive social-media-and-news-outlet-checking persisted post-election. After the inauguration, I kept checking with renewed diligence, even flushing spare minutes at my day job down the Twitter wormhole.

How Do You Keep Social Media From Destroying Your Mental Health?

By March of 2017, knowing my behavior was unhealthy, I resolved to keep at least my time outdoors screen-free. Walking my dogs in the woods, I’d tripped over a tree root while checking the New York Times on my phone.

My compulsive checking had reached a level that felt familiar; I was behaving the same way I did as a child in an abusive home, and as a teenager in an abusive intimate relationship. Walking on eggshells. Staying alert to mood changes in the abusers. Exercising hypervigilance. Back then, I hung on to the fantasy that if I could predict violence, I could prevent the next black eye, broken nose, split lip. Now, I was on alert for all the ways the government planned to abuse me and other women and marginalized people.

I published a short blog post, and later a poem, about the parallels between intimate, personal violence and the politically-induced terror in my [non] writing life. More women than I would have thought responded to the two pieces, saying something along the lines of “Yes, me too.”

One woman, a survivor of extreme violence, “understood instantly that having an openly avowed abuser elected to the presidency would give license to the closeted abusers everywhere.” Afraid to leave her house after the election, she relied on social media for support from women who were expressing similar fears, and as a safe place where she could monitor political developments. Today, she uses social media to stay connected with allies, and to keep tabs on political bullies and their agendas. “I would not say that the terror has abated,” she wrote to me in May 2017, “but that I have come to live with it, as I did in childhood.” Her hypervigilance continues.

Abusers and batterers can snap at any moment, which is perhaps the cause of hypervigilance among survivors. Karen Sheets, a social worker who teaches life skills in a Displaced Homemaker Program in Florida, calls it “crisis mode.” Her program frequently serves women escaping violence, and collaborates closely with the local domestic violence agency. Sheets, herself an IPV survivor, says that women can become addicted to crisis and continue to act in crisis mode long after the abusive situation is behind them.

Can post-election anxiety end for anyone when the president keeps the hits coming as fast as he has?

Being on such high alert as a PTSD sufferer can be exhausting, and in many ways detrimental to mental and emotional health — but it can also function as an adaptive strategy, helping one to make snap decisions under stress and avoid future harm. Studies of vigilant and hypervigilant decision-making often privilege the vigilant method, which relies on fact-gathering and consideration of multiple options. But many researchers have concluded that being hypervigilant is more effective in high-stress situations when the stakes are high. One study even found that abuse survivors in a state of hypervigilance walked in a way that reduced their perceived vulnerability, and concluded that this, in theory, would reduce the potential for harm.

There are, it seems, particular benefits to hypervigilance in the context of our current political climate. While IPV is often unpredictably explosive, institutionalized violence against American women, like institutionalized violence against African-Americans, is the result of policies and ideas that evolve over years. We need to monitor any development, alteration, or affirmation of those policies and ideas by the government so we can make decisions under stress and avoid abuse. With social media — the 24/7 panopticon — we can monitor threats, but at a safe distance, and we can do it obsessively.

How My Abusive Father Helped Me Understand Trump Supporters

At its best, this heightened social media altertness can also manifest as tangible action. This summer, for instance, the hypervigilance of millions of Americans on Twitter and Facebook played a key role in thwarting GOP efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It’s too soon to quantify social media’s role in keeping citizens informed and in giving citizens platforms to exert pressure on officials — but the proliferation and popularity of voter-action sites like 5 Calls and Indivisible since the 2016 election demonstrate the existence of a demand for ways to use social media to both monitor danger and take action in response.

The Pew Research Center, in a study released in October 2016, found that nearly one-third of politically engaged users believe social media platforms allow them to get involved with issues that matter to them. Meanwhile, the anecdotal evidence is on your feeds and mine. Social media allowed me to track the status of proposed anti-ACA legislation, it gave me access to inspiration through posts from ADAPT members, and it offered me more ways to contact elected officials and make my voice heard. It gave that to me, and millions of others.

We’re not social media obsessives — we’re hyper-vigilantes who aim to enforce the principles of democracy.

In my nightmares, and in my obsessive following of both progressive and conservative social media feeds, I’m re-living the terror and anxiety of my teenage years on a macro level. America has long been awash in racist and misogynist violence. The recent election has validated and further normalized that violence. Our government seeks to put the health and safety of the majority of Americans at risk: women, immigrants, gay, lesbian, and trans people, people with disabilities, people living in poverty, and anyone who doesn’t look white. It’s much too much like the not-so-old days, when men were legally entitled to rape and beat their wives, when parents could abuse their children with impunity, when communities and governments sanctioned such behavior and excused it as “private family business.”

Abuse Survivors Speak Out About Being Triggered By Trump

In the face of all this, I have mixed feelings about whether to stop my relentless checking of Facebook, The Washington Post, The New York Times, or Charles M. Blow’s Twitter feed. Walking on eggshells doesn’t guarantee that the sleeping monster won’t wake up. Checking the news 20 times a day won’t, by itself, prevent the next police shooting of an unarmed Black teenager, or violence against immigrants, or the abrogation of women’s control over their own bodies. But don’t all those stories need to be told and re-told, and read and heard and analyzed? After all, if I hadn’t been checking, I might have missed Paul Ryan’s response to Kevin McCarthy’s assertion that Putin pays Trump. “No leaks, all right? This is how we know we’re a real family here,” he said. “What’s said in the family stays in the family.”

That sounds a lot like the 20th century rhetoric of abuse that enabled and excused paternalistic violence against women and children. The victim in me wants to say those days are over. But the watcher in me says pay attention. To everything. Every single word.

If you could pick a moment when the sad girl tweeted and streamed and sighed her way into the mainstream, you’d probably place the year as 2011.

That summer, Lana Del Rey emerged, fully formed, onto the internet in a whirl of beauty and tears and cigarette smoke. With her pleading looks and plaintive glances, Del Rey was a Valley of the Dolls-era Sharon Tate for the 21st century, a Bardot beauty fallen on hard times, a good girl gone despondent. The image she cultivated was one of hard, masculine men and the women who yearned for them, who grieved for them — “it’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you, everything I do” — who were nothing without them. Above all, she was capital-“S” Sad. She was something tragic, something doomed.

“Vamp of constant sorrow,” Rolling Stone proclaimed, over an image of her wearing furs and smoking sadly (of course). It’s an image that Del Rey would shrewdly utilize in the years following — whether in song names (“Summertime Sadness,” the unsubtle “Sad Girl”) or public image (flower crowns, sepia filters, a fixation with suicide and death). Something about this overt yet glamorous sadness, this image of mascara smudged perfectly by tears, of a cigarette in a holder held by a delicate yet trembling hand, stuck in the cultural consciousness of the decade. And thus the Internet Sad Girl was born.

2011 was also the year when Instagram began to take hold, and YouTube continued to cement its place in media. With new technology came the opportunity to share your most intimate moments in a way that wasn’t possible before — the ability to be truly steam-of-consciousness in your discussions of your feelings, your secrets, your particular problems at that point in time. It’s easy to see why this way of baring all was particularly appealing to young women, who were used to being silenced when they tried to talk of their sadness and depression, who had it ingrained within them that they should aspire to be cool, calm, fine with everything that happened to them.

Young women in this new era were also the victims of wage stagnation and an escalating housing crisis, poor access to mental-health services, increasingly limited access to reproductive rights; in other words, they had many reasons to be miserable, depressed, and cynical, and suddenly there was a platform on which to voice these concerns. A platform where people listened, or at least related. Every retweet, every like, every “same,” serves as an affirmation that your feelings are valid, that you are not alone in your struggle.

It’s easy to see why this way of baring all was particularly appealing to young women, who were used to being silenced.
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The movement was codified, and then calcified, by artist Audrey Wollen, whose “Sad Girl Theory” argues that:

“the sadness of girls should be recognised as an act of resistance. [A] limited spectrum of activism excludes a whole history of girls who have used their sorrow and their self-destruction to disrupt systems of domination. Girls’ sadness […] is a way of reclaiming agency over our bodies, identities, and lives.”

Viewed through this lens, the Sad Girl is inherently radical — it is an expression of personhood, of the difficulty inherent in being a girl. The selfie taken while crying in a bathroom, the tweet about missing your ex — these are the methods of girls resisting what is expected of them.

But this new-era manifestation of the personal as political is undone by the very platforms it thrives on. Across Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter, we saw artists like Molly Soda, who showcased works which consisted of her crying on webcam, and Arvida Byström and Amber Navarro, whose exhibition of digital and Instagram art was titled QWERTY, Flirty and Crying. Another flag-bearer for the movement was Sad Girls Guide, which in a memorable piece for The Toast, intoned that “sad girls aren’t the girls you see walking around with the teary-eyed gaze of someone who looks like they could break down at any instant if nudged the wrong way.” Hugely popular Tumblr users such as Plastic Pony and online zines like Sad Girl Magazine contributed to the sense that this was a major internet movement, rather than just the preserve of artists.

Adding to this, and one of the most high-profile examples of the Sad Girl phenomenon, is “So Sad Today,” Melissa Broder’s hugely popular Twitter account. Dedicated solely to publishing tweets about, simply, being sad, Broder’s account is so popular that it spawned its own book. Sample tweets include:

“i don’t like you, respect you, enjoy your company or find you cute but i still need you to like me”

“i miss ex-boyfriends who were never my boyfriend”

“determined to not get my life together”

At the time of writing, the account had 506,000 followers. There are normally four or five tweets posted a day, most of them with thousands of retweets, a constantly updated stream of wry, knowing despair. Laid out like this, an infinite scroll into the depths of sadness, stripped of complexity and context, the idea that the online Sad Girl is an act of rebellion seems hollow. Repeated over and over again, it becomes empty, no longer an outlet but a parody of sincere emotion, a stereotype and fetishization of female sadness.

If the Sad Girl is desirable, funny, sexy, then surely to make serious and concerted attempts to alleviate mental illness or depression is the opposite of those things. When there’s an onus on performative, calculated vulnerability, there’s no reward for sincerity.

After 27,000+ tweets about how sad it is to be a girl, to be alive, it begins to feel as though the Sad Girl phenomenon hinges on the idea that women should be inherently sad, never moving forward or growing, but instead that that is our default condition. Being a Sad Girl is not only a popular and profitable aesthetic, but its very name emphasizes that its defining trait is arrested development. It’s not a particularly novel concept; the thread of the Sad Girls connects to the weeping, beautiful girl of Victorian art (Tennyson’s Mariana, Waterhouse’s Lady of Shallot), who either wishes to die or, even better, ends up dead.

The tears are still on her cheeks, her pale face unblemished, beautiful and tragic forever. While today’s Sad Girls might be women on the internet, the point is still the same: Women are best when they are sad (and young, and hot) forever.

I Don’t Want To Be The ‘Troubled Girl’ Anymore

Attempts to feel better rarely translate well into 140 characters. Rather than immediately shareable or aesthetically beguiling, narratives of recovery are difficult and complex and ugly. Women trying to help themselves are ugly, as is any effort shown by a woman. To care, to want, regardless of optics or popularity, is something women are constantly denigrated for.

This is particularly worrying in the way the movement fetishizes bad relationships, in there being something glamorous or romantic about being treated shittily by men, and to keep wanting them all the same. Of course, this is reality: People can and will lust after those who have treated them badly. There is a certain luxury in longing for something you cannot fully have. But it’s that this, again, is championed as something that is a core tenet of being a girl, that womanhood is defined by sitting and waiting and yearning. That this is normally expressed as waiting for guys to text you back, or give you the time of day at all, not only seems to reinforce sexist ways of thinking about how men and women should communicate, but also emphasizes the heteronormativity behind the movement.

Just as Lana Del Rey’s songs and videos pine over daddy figures and emotionally-unavailable bad-boys, the Sad Girl movement seems to define the female experience as something that hinges on male interaction, a subtle exclusion of girls who don’t date men.

Narratives of recovery are difficult and complex and ugly.
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It’s no surprise that the rise of the Internet Sad Girl directly coincides with the ascendance of social media platforms that not only place a direct emphasis on sharing personal, private details, but also trade in an aesthetic currency. Look sad, but do it in a way that makes you look hot. Depression and sadness become something that is only valid if you can look good doing it, if you can post a selfie on Instagram with your mascara smudged.

As the Sad Girls Club article on The Toast notes in a painfully irony-free description of their muse: “she listens to better music than you and might spend her alone time watching French films from the ’60s or angsty TV shows from the ‘90s.” The Sad Girl is more than just a woman who’s sad: she’s always cool, always better than you. The Manic-Pixie-Dream-Sad-Girl.

Wrapped up on this is still another form of exclusion. Search for the term on Tumblr, perhaps the site that most fetishizes the idea, and you’ll see image after image of, specifically, thin white girls holding cigarettes, their tights slightly ripped (presumably this is an indicator of despair, rather than them having caught them on the edge of a chair). These images also betray the highly middle-class origins of the movement. It’s telling that the Sad Girl as a term was coined by an artist, that it is prevalent among those with social and cultural capital.

The tears of black women, of poor women, are constantly ignored in society — you can’t use performative sadness for your gain when you are disenfranchised and your sorrow ignored. As always, it’s only those who are privileged in society who can capitalize off it. Nobody wants to like your crying selfie if it’s about how you literally can’t afford to buy food, or if you don’t fit the mold of Western beauty standards. Then you’re just a woman, crying. You’re not part of a movement.

The Dangers Of The ‘Cool Girl’ Ideal

Similarly, actual mental-health problems, outside of references to various medications or therapists, aren’t part of the Sad Girl aesthetic. It’s not hot to be cowering on the floor because you can’t cope with your anxiety anymore. It isn’t sexy to lie in bed for four days straight and only eat beans on toast because it’s all the effort you can manage. When women’s real depression and real upset is taken and scrubbed clean and sanitized so that it becomes an aesthetically pleasing image, or a witty 140 characters, it is a negation of our complex and challenging lives.

With the ascension of Trump, the more ferocious and important battle for women’s rights, and continuing cuts to support services, you might expect the Sad Girl movement to be stronger than ever, for women to have retreated into an aestheticized version of disillusionment. But the opposite seems to have happened: The Sad Girl movement seems to be on the decline.

Actual mental-health problems aren’t part of the Sad Girl aesthetic.
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The patron saint of sad girls, Lana Del Rey, has even named her next album Lust for Life. While the @sosadtoday account is still updated, Melissa Broder now functions as an agony aunt in Vice, perhaps preferring the security of paid, traditional media outlets. The artists who used to be the forefront of the movement, such as Plastic Pony, have removed their Tumblrs from the internet, and Molly Soda’s artwork has turned away from videos of her crying. Web searches for So Sad Today peaked in early 2016, and have been generally declining throughout 2017.

Maybe we have realized that although not being texted back is irritating, it’s pretty small scale in the face of all the awful things we see every day in the news. Maybe it just fell out of fashion, as internet trends always do. Or maybe it’s the fact that we have become not just depressed at what is happening, but furious too, and we are no longer content to be regarded as passive.

The Internet Sad Girl is dead. Now let’s get angry.

For years, LGBTQ+ content has been categorized as NSFW by social-media platforms.

Unsplash/Wesson Wang

Last month, Tumblr joined several other social-media outlets in actively celebrating Pride, sharing a post encouraging LGBTQ+ content. That same month, it also introduced a new measure called Safe Mode, intended to give users “more control over what you see and what you don’t.”

Ironically, it looked to many users like one of the things that set the new feature off was LGBTQ+ content .

In theory, Safe Mode hid “sensitive content” (later clarified to mean “specifically, nudity”) from those who had the filter turned on. It was optional for most users, but mandatory for those under 18. In reality, and to be blunt, the algorithm simply did not work. It failed to block some nudity, sporadically hid everything from educational PowerPoints to gifsets of video games to pictures of cute animals — and, crucially, routinely censored LGBTQ+ content, regardless of how non-sexual it might be.

When the queer community pushed back, Tumblr apologized, and hastily clarified that the problem was the unintentional result of what’s known as “false flags.” In a post, the company wrote:

“The major issue was some Tumblrs had marked themselves as Adult/NSFW (now Explicit) as a courtesy to their fellow users, and their perfectly safe posts were getting marked sensitive unintentionally.”

Essentially, the algorithm had initially assumed that every post shared by someone who self-identified as “Explicit” was sensitive, and this was affecting some LGBTQ+ content. In response to the outcry, Tumblr removed this assumption so that posts are now judged only by their content rather than whoever has created or shared them. The company also gave some details on the algorithm itself, which attempts to use photo recognition to recognize nudity, and described it as “not perfect.”

Ongoing changes do appear to have made the algorithm more successful — or at least less twitchy. Still, people were right to worry.

For years, and across many of the most prominent social-media platforms, LGBTQ+ content has been categorized as NSFW. Back in March, YouTube creators found that LGBTQ+ adjacent videos they had created were being hidden from viewers via the company’s own safety option, called “Restricted Mode.” This included coming-out stories, educational content, and even this video titled “GAY flag and me petting my cat to see if youtube blocks this.”

For years, and across many of the most prominent social-media platforms, LGBTQ+ content has been categorized as NSFW.

YouTube has shared vaguely that it uses “community flagging, age-restrictions, and other signals to identify and filter out potentially inappropriate content.” In response to criticism over the blocking of LGBTQ+ related videos, YouTube sent out a statement that illuminated little about the problem itself, or how exactly it hoped to address it:

A message to our community …

???@YTCreators

The company did seemingly make some changes, as fewer videos are now being blocked. But months later, issues remain. The aforementioned cat video, for one, continues to come up as blocked. As of mid-July, searching “gay” with the filter off returned a wide variety of videos, with top results including documentaries, coming-out videos, and same-gender kisses with hundreds of thousands of views. Turning the filter on, these videos disappeared, with the top results averaging a far smaller viewership.

Long before its latest hiccup, Tumblr had similar issues with filtration. In 2013, searching for tags like “gay” and “lesbian” would return no results on certain mobile versions of the site because they were flagged as inherently NSFW. In response to backlash at the time, the company wrote that “the solution is more intelligent filtering which our team is working diligently on. We’ll get there soon.” According to a reddit thread, this was still a problem in August 2016.

Twitter faced its own criticism this June, for flagging tweets with the word “queer” as potentially “offensive content.” Like YouTube, it replied vaguely, saying simply that it was “working on a fix.” As with Tumblr, the issue was particularly glaring for taking place during Pride Month, when the company was otherwise touting its LGBTQ+ inclusivity.

The Capitalist Appropriation Of Gay Pride

The question of why this keeps happening is a complicated one. Because social-media companies tend to be tight-lipped about how things work on the back-end, we have limited information on the source of these glitches. In some cases, as with Safe Mode, the problems do seem to stem from technical flaws. But it’s hard to imagine human bias not playing a role in at least some of this censorship.

In any case, social-media companies should be taking these filtration issues seriously—their impact on queer people, and especially queer youth, cannot be overstated.

Online, LGBTQ+ communities are far more likely to be welcoming to people of all ages and identities; they are places where minors can explore their sexuality and gender, learn about themselves, and get invaluable support. Tumblr in particular has long been the home of a robust LGBTQ+ community — it’s very difficult to use Tumblr without being exposed to the idea that not only are LGBTQ+ people everywhere, but they’re loud. This can show a questioning person that being LGBTQ+ is nothing to be ashamed of.

YouTube is another crucial resource for young LGBTQ+ people, as are a thousand smaller websites that anyone can access through a simple search — provided their engine doesn’t categorize their query as “unsafe,” like the “kids-oriented” search engine Kiddle once did for “bisexual,” “transgender,” and so forth.

The internet’s imperfect algorithms are not born of a vacuum. They are created by people, who are influenced by their assumptions. And when these programmers make these kinds of choices or mistakes, they don’t only make finding resources more difficult. They undermine the hard work of content creators who often ask for nothing in return except to know that an LGBTQ+ kid feels a little better. Instead of getting a comforting word from an understanding person, the child gets a warning that their identity is considered unsafe by an unfeeling corporation.

The internet’s imperfect algorithms are not born of a vacuum.

There’s also a troubling irony at play in all this — not only are these social media platforms failing their LGBTQ+ users with their “security” settings, they’re doing it to disguise the fact that they aren’t truly making their sites safer. Tumblr is absolutely not a safe website. Bots that spam porn and literal Nazis abound, and Safe Mode does nothing to prevent direct person-to-person harassment, including any aimed at minors. Ditto Twitter, where white supremacist activity has increased 600% since 2012, and Daesh continues to have a presence. Thousands of people, mostly women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color, experience torrents of harassment everyday. Twitter’s solution — hiding “sensitive content,” with filters blocking the word “queer”— has paradoxically hurt the very group it should be working to protect.

Our community is rightfully angry at this continued erasure. We build our support, education, and love on platforms owned by corporations who don’t seem to care about us. Social-media platforms may pay lip service to inclusivity, but in the end, we’re left only with systems that flag our identity as wrong.

We will continue to fight back against this censorship, because we understand a fundamental truth: Our existence is not sensitive content.

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

When I checked Facebook this morning, I was greeted with a bunch of balloons and confetti surrounding a giant banner bearing the thumbs-up symbol. “Sarah, your friends have liked your posts 36,000 times!” the text underneath it read. “We’re glad that you’re sharing your life with the people you care about on Facebook. Here’s a look at some photos that your friends have liked.” Then there was a photo of me standing beneath a large, fairly anatomically correct dinosaur statue at a mini-golf course, proudly thrusting my putter skyward in order to draw attention to the plaster dino genitals hovering above my head.

This completely meaningless and arbitrary milestone in my social media career comes at a weird time for me. Not because I think there’s anything particularly hollow or condemning about my eight-figure “like” tally. Most of those likes came out of pretty genuine and earnest interactions on my part and I don’t think they’re indicative of any great ill in my personality or in society. But I’ve found myself increasingly tired by any human interaction online or in person lately, and when I saw that banner my first reaction was “Well, it’s no wonder I’m so tired.”

As someone who spent her formative years as an undiagnosed autistic misfit in a city of 48,000 people who had little to no interest in me or any of the things I enjoyed, I’ve always considered the internet a godsend. Thanks to chat rooms, message boards, and fan sites, I went from being a loner isolated by her atypical interests to being able to form intense, mutually beneficial relationships. While the online universe is often portrayed as a place of artifice where people can manufacture or at least idealize their personas, I found that it was the first place that I could actually be myself — and get something other than disinterest or disdain in return.

While the online universe is often portrayed as a place of artifice, I found that it was the first place that I could actually be myself.
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I don’t think my experience is unusual, either. For every article and condescending cartoon I’ve seen about the supposed fakeness of online life, I can think of multiple examples of people who have made genuine connections — and genuine change — through the internet. Sure, there are people who only present their best moments, and people who use the relative anonymity as an excuse to be abusive. But it’s not like the offline world doesn’t have its share of posers and jerks. As someone who’s spent a lot of time observing human interaction from the outskirts (like many autistics, I study people and then try to reproduce their behavior in an effort to gain acceptance in social situations), I can’t say that I’ve come across any significant differences in the way that we socialize in the real world versus the virtual one. And I suspect that for anyone who does notice a marked difference, that says more about how sheltered and homogeneous their pre-internet lives were than about the nature of the net.

I like Facebook — and occasionally tolerate Twitter — because I use them as an extension of my “real” life. Social media is enjoyable when I’m feeling well, and useful when I’m not. It’s helped me find people who share my somewhat obscure interests (after two decades of obsessing in solitude over the ’60s spy show The Man From U.N.C.L.E., for example, it only took a couple of tweets to find some fellow weirdos to share it with). The internet has been a way to keep in touch with friends and family and stay up to date on their lives during periods when I’ve had neither the resources nor the energy to properly maintain my relationships with them in the flesh. Some people might think that a “like” is a hollow gesture, or an empty rush that can’t compare with in-person communion, but those simple gestures have been a way for me to let other people know I care or am paying attention when I’m not up to the task of an e-mail or a dreaded phone call. As someone who works from home, it’s sometimes the only source of socialization I get in a day.

Friendship In The Age Of Unfriending

Where social media does differ from the meatspace, though, is in terms of volume and speed, and that’s what’s been throwing me off lately. With everything that’s happening in the world, my almost instant access to it — and to the reactions of so many other people — means that I’m constantly taking in more than my head and my heart can process at any given time, and I’m struggling to express myself in any meaningful way in return. My social media presence is relatively sheltered; I ruthlessly maintain a small number of friends on Facebook and have a small number of Twitter followers, and I’m also a white woman which means that I’m generally subject to less harassment than women of color. But it’s still beyond my current capacity as a person and a writer.

I don’t think social media is the cause of my current troubles. It’s just cranked them to 11. If the virtual world is, as I believe, just the real world coming at you faster and more thoroughly, then my issues with it are simply my day-to-day issues amplified. I like to observe people to get a better idea of how to belong with them, so I obsessively read every tweet and post and comment and link that comes across my feeds in a misguided attempt to understand everyone. I want to be a good person, but I’m so hard on myself that I often end up overwhelming myself with information and external and internal criticism and freezing. I struggle with hyper-empathy, and end up taking in everyone’s emotions in a way that makes me feel like a permeable membrane — or like Star Trek: The Next Generation’s regularly embattled Deanna Troi during a particularly harrowing episode. I’m often too overwhelmed to post anything thoughtful or meaningful in the wake of a tragedy, but I also don’t want to give people the impression that I don’t care about these things. And the “why isn’t everyone posting about ____” posts always seem to hit before I’ve had the chance to process. Social media was, in theory, supposed to be a respite from all of that. But being myself on there also means there’s no escaping myself on there.

I’m pretty sure the solution isn’t just to delete my profiles. The world doesn’t need another writer exploring that old chestnut for material. Besides, I don’t want to cut myself off from all of the brilliant people and valuable opinions that social media has helped expose me to. And it’s not like my problems would vanish if I did that. I’d still be a vicious perfectionist whose all-encompassing desire to do better too often leaves me doing nothing instead; I’d just be a vicious perfectionist who is also bored, lonely, and has no one to share my collection of suggestive Man From U.N.C.L.E. gifs with.

So if my problem is that my online life is just my real life on performance-enhancing drugs, perhaps the steps I need to take to make it more manageable are the same ones I’m already doing (or at least attempting) in the rest of my existence. I don’t stop and talk to every single person I encounter on the street, so why do I force myself to catch up on every single tweet, thread, and comment that I encounter? I’ve reached the point where I feel no shame in telling my friends that I’m not up to going out, so why am I so reluctant to give myself time and space away from the internet? I would never encourage my friends to call me in the middle of the night unless it was an emergency, so why the hell do I think to check my phone when I’m awake at 4 a.m., suddenly concerned that I’ll let someone down if I don’t respond right away?

Social media was supposed to be a respite. But being myself on there also means there’s no escaping myself on there.
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So I’ll be trying to put my social media use on some semblance of a schedule and limiting the ways in which I can access it. I have an iPad filled with books and videos that I keep free of any apps that involve active participation on my part, because I think it’s helpful for my particular brain to have a device that encourages the consumption of ideas without demanding any output on my part. I’ll try to find other outlets for my procrastination. (I won’t say that I’ll try to curtail my procrastination, because I’m thinking of realistic solutions and that’s not going to happen in this lifetime.) I’ll put even more effort into resisting the incredibly perverse urge to read Facebook comments, because that’s just common sense.

None of these are particularly exciting or groundbreaking suggestions. Setting boundaries and giving yourself time to relax and recover are pretty obvious ideas, even if most of us tend to ignore them far more than we should. I’m starting to realize, though, that I’m going to have to be more serious about them if I want a more rewarding — or, at the very least — more survivable life in all of its forms. Having a platform where I can share a photo of myself posing with a fake dinosaur cloaca and having friends all over the world who will appreciate this ridiculous moment in my life is something worth fighting for. It’s just not something worth breaking myself for.