Sex Positive Social Media

Cultivate consent!

  • Social media platforms should be aware about how power operates on their platform, understand the systems of oppression under which their users live, and build cultures of consent into their design.
  • The uploading, sharing, reproduction and use of sexual content – by users, platforms, and both private and public actors – should be based on express, informed, specific and dynamic consent.
  • The fact that a user has consented to posting sexual content on one platform, for one purpose, does not equate to consent for that content to be reposted on another platform, for another purpose. Sexual content creators ought to be able to place limits and boundaries on how their content is used and shared and by whom.
  • Start-ups, ventures, private companies, commercial enterprises or public agencies who wish to use databases of sexual content to develop classifiers, scrapers, or any other software must either have express and informed user consent or rely on data donations. Platforms have a responsibility to put measures in place to prevent and respond to the extraction, theft, and non-consensual sharing of sexual content.
  • Platforms ought to have policies and practices to prevent and address harmful behaviour, such as stalking, intimidation, harassment, bullying, abuse, catfishing, and non-consensual sharing of sexual content. Users should have a variety of options for reporting and transparency about how reports are handled.
  • Users should have opportunities to withdraw and take-down non-consensual intimate content of themselves that do not involve providing government-issued identification or using criminal law mechanisms. Users should be given a range of options to pursue takedown requests, including directly through platforms, third party assistance, government agencies and by receiving notifications that their images have been shared.
  • Platforms should resist over-surveillance and carceral politics by allowing people to access these spaces without requiring legal names, identification documents, biometric or behavioural verification or unwanted surveillance. Allowing users to have multiple accounts and engage using pseudonyms recognises that people’s identities are multifaceted and affords users power to compartmentalise their lives.
  • Connecting legal identities with people’s sexual browsing histories, sexual preferences, sexual health status or other sensitive data puts users at risk of having their sexual data leaked, hacked, sold, shared or misused.
  • Platforms should be transparent about their relationships with law enforcement, and ought to have a policy to only share content with police in the case of a warrant, court order or a subpoena.