Build safer spaces!

• Sex positive social media requires shifts in the structures, businesses and revenue models of platforms to prioritise sex-positive and sexually marginalised communities as knowledgeable stakeholders, decision-makers and leaders.

• Regulatory environments should support co-operative, collective, collaborative governance models for platforms that more equitably distribute financial benefits and decision-making power to sexual content creators.

• Platforms should explicitly set out the values and ethics that guide their community standards, rather than feigning neutrality. Outdated standards of decency, propriety and offensiveness are not appropriate measures through which to assess sexual content.

• References to legality and illegality in domestic jurisdictions are not necessarily appropriate standards by which to govern consensual or ethical sexual content. Many forms of consensual sexual activity (such as sex work and same-sex activity) are unlawful in various parts of the world, while some activities that remain lawful (such as rape in marriage) are fundamentally unethical. Social media companies should not use restrictive, repressive regulatory regimes as their baseline standard for governing sexual content.

• Platforms should look to international human rights principles to guide their community standards. Platforms are subject to numerous human rights standards relevant to social media, including freedom of expression, freedom from discrimination, and the right to enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health, including sexual health.

• Platforms must proactively build safer sexual spaces that support users to unlearn structural oppression and uplift the voices of sexually marginalised communities. This requires steps to address content, behaviour, and practices that reproduce structural oppressions.

• It further involves promoting cultures of body positivity, bodily autonomy, data sovereignty, consent, disability justice and anti-oppression. Platforms should build accessible spaces that include tools that help disabled people access appropriate and relevant sexual content.