Bonnie Rotten Talks To The BBC About Internet Censorship

LONDON, UK—As social media platforms implement stricter policies and the UK rules regarding age verification on the internet gets closer, the BBC podcast Beyond Today spoke with Bonnie Rotten about how censorship affects her work and the industry. "Since my new [Instagram] account has been active and growing, I was at over a million, and this is the first time I was shut down," Rotten told BBC host Zara DuRose. "And I would get little warnings about, ‘Oh, this content is sexually suggestive,’ but my point in getting these alerts is, you agree to community guidelines; it’s subjective. You may be offended by me wearing a skirt above my knees; you may be offended by me being in a bikini; you may be offended by me being slightly nude. How do we police this based on some electronic bot going by someone reporting things X amount of times?... Any photo that I posted could be reported and deleted. It didn’t matter what it was. Next week, the BBC noted, Tumblr will start blocking pornographic posts. Next year a new law will force porn sites to verify that people watching in the UK are over 18. It’s the first attempt to restrict access to porn online. It’s not yet clear how age verification will work and the social media platforms’ own rules about what is and is not allowed seem to change all the time—and Rotten was certainly not happy with that, considering the time and effort she's put in to promote her brand and sexual sanity in general. “We’re also building up and creating and making the platform and giving them traffic and giving them followers and giving them a name, so for all of us  to put so much work and so many years into something, and for it to just be deleted based on something electronic just shows you there’s a lack of advancement in technology at this point," Rotten declared. In addition to Rotten, DuRose discussed the issues adult personalities face publicising their work, after which the BBC’s Thomas Fabbri and Kim Gittleson explained what lies behind the bans. At 22 minutes and change, it's quite the informative listen.