Hello cyber professionals. The online safety bill is upon us. It is the most sweeping internet regulation the UK has ever birthed out of its right-wing canal, and it is probably not going to be good for a lot of us in a number of ways. I feel like this is a pretty big deal, and hardly anyone is talking about it. The government believe the bill will make the UK “the safest place in the world to be online” which is a sentence that indicates a low understanding of network effects, and also a separatist desire to make ‘our internet the BEST internet’.

The online safety bill mostly centres around protecting children from illegal content — or content that is deemed ‘harmful’ by some vague, unknown parameters. The most important bits to know are:

• Age verification on porn websites: no idea how this is going to be implemented; you’ll probably have to enter your driving licence details every time you want to have a wank

• Ensuring that social media sites actually enforce their ‘no one under 13’ rules, and other content rules: again, no idea how. The idea at the moment is to simply “use technology”.

• There was going to be a clause that would force private messaging apps to break encryption (in which case, WhatsApp and Signal would cease to operate in the UK), but that’s now been removed, because they finally realised there’s no way to scan for CSAM without completely invading everyone’s privacy.

I wanted to know more about how this bill might affect someone who creates ‘harmful’ content, so I reached out to April Fiasco, a performer and adult content creator. We had a highly energetic and revealing conversation — if you work in technology, I urge you to read this so you can actually get a first hand account of how policy changes like this effect online communities. Also read to the end to learn about the difference between squirting and female ejaculation.

✨ Before we dive into the conversation, I also just want to plug Ben Whitelaw’s newsletter Everything In Moderation. If you want an unfussy straightforward overview of the content moderation landscape, you better sign up. Ben tends to cover things that no one else does, and he aggregates links together so you can do further reading. EiM was literally the first place I went when I started researching this piece so that’s saying something. ✨

And now here’s the conversation with April. Please note that edits were made for clarity.

GI: Hey April. Tell us about yourself.

AF: I’m April Fiasco, I’m a burlesque and cabaret performer and stripper, and I also make online content. I’m the resident host for Sexquisite, which is an arts company that provides platforms for sex worker artists through live performance. I’m also a co-organiser for Cybertease which is a socialist strip club we set up in 2020. It was all online at first, and now we do live in-person events. With Cybertease, we’re challenging the mainstream strip club model: we share all profits equally, whereas in a mainstream strip club you would pay a house fee to work there; we have no rules on gender or sexuality for our audience members or performers, whereas mainstream strip clubs only hire cis women who look a certain way, and a lot of strip clubs won’t allow women as audience members.

GI: And what online platforms do you use to promote and monetise your work?

AF: I use OnlyFans at the moment. And I use Instagram, but with Instagram you can’t hashtag OnlyFans because it will get you shadow banned or deleted. So you just say ‘link in bio’ and use Linktree. People were a bit worried about Linktree at one point, but actually they recently updated their terms and conditions to say that it is not a violation to share links that promote online adult content and services. And actually what they do is provide a pop-up that says something like ‘this may lead to sensitive content; you should be over 18 to look at this’, so it kind of helps you out in a way, because they’re not banning sex workers from using it. They seem a little bit more open then every other platform.

GI: Linktree is great; you don’t have to make a whole website just to share all the things you wanna promote.

AF: Exactly. And Instagram only lets you put one link in your bio.

GI: Oh I didn’t even know that; goes to show how much I use Instagram. It’s interesting to hear that putting the word ‘OnlyFans’ in your bio will now get you shadow banned on Instagram. I feel like this is indicative of the way in which online social spaces are changing.

AF: Yeah, I would say like a few years ago you would be able to post a bare butt and you wouldn’t get flagged, but now if you post say a butt in a thong, the post will either get deleted or you’ll get a warning that says ‘if you don’t delete this your content can’t be recommend to non-followers’. Which is crazy. I get the same warnings if I post photos of myself on stage wearing nipple tassles, where my nipples are fully covered. It’s so frustrating because not only are you not even showing anything, but the standards aren’t the same for male bodies. The other day I saw a photo of a man showing the whole of his torso, cutting off pretty much right where the pubic hair starts. If I posted something like that, I would get deleted straight away.

It also doesn’t make any sense because it’s technically not illegal to be naked in public unless you’re trying to cause offence — which obviously can be misinterpreted — but it’s wild that there used to be topless women on page 3 of the Sun and that was fine. The problem I had with page 3 was that you would never see any other gender besides women. And I guess page 3 was banned because the images were sexualised. But the thing is, tits are not inherently sexual. Tits are for breastfeeding. But now they’ve been sexualised. So we can’t show them. What you define as pornography is very open to interpretation: what one person might find arousing, is not the same as someone else. So if you’re saying that nudity is inherently sexual, that’s not true for everyone.

Another thing that has changed with Instagram is their content moderation: one day in June, our Cybertease account and loads of other sex-positive accounts got deleted. We also have a Cybertease Facebook group which is linked to my personal Facebook account, and that also got deleted. Obviously everyone was outraged when this happened, and there was a campaign to reinstate accounts. After a few days, accounts started to come back (not all of them unfortunately), and it was clearly in response to all the backlash.

GI: Why did Instagram suddenly delete these accounts do you think?

AF: That’s the thing, we just don’t know — they changed the algorithm or improved their content moderation tech or something. But the thing is we don’t know. There’s a really prominent writer [named Dr. Carolina Are] who runs Blogger On Pole, and writes research papers about online censorship and interviews sex workers about this very thing. So she’s very respected in the community, because she’s not a sex worker but she’s a great ally. She’s a pole dancer and she’s an academic, so when people like her complain about these things, something is usually done about it. She’s using her platform to actually help sex workers — because sometimes we won’t get listened to but someone else will.

It’s refreshing having people like her in the community because pole dancers often don’t support sex workers, forgetting that strippers made pole dancing sexy and popular in the first place. There are pole competitions that will ban strippers from entering, or penalise you if you’re dancing too sexy. It’s kind of mad.

GI: It’s kind of funny how page 3 nudity got banned because it was ‘too sexy’ because ultimately it was sexual content that was designed only for men, and it kind of compounded itself into something that was considered disgusting… because men made it disgusting.

AF: Yeah, there’s an objectification culture but there’s also a purity culture going on at the same time.

GI: So let’s move onto the Online Safety Bill. It first emerged in 2019 as the online harms white paper, and it’s now morphed into a monstrous piece of legislation that almost no one likes. When did you first hear about it?

AF: Probably during lockdown in 2020; we all talk to each other about this kind of stuff. I’m trying to remember what I even thought of it back then — this is the thing, there’s always something to think about as a sex worker; a new online safety bill or new rules on Instagram. There’s always something going on that we have to keep an eye on.

GI: In its current state, how do you think it might affect your work in the next year or so?

AF: So I read through the government website on it the other day and it’s so vague. It’s not clear what it’s gonna do, and this is exactly the problem — we just don’t know.

GI: As I’m sure you’re already aware of, a big part of it is age verification: websites that mostly contain adult content will be forced to verify the age of their users. What are your thoughts on this?

AF: There was already something that was in the works before the online safety bill that was going to get porn sites to verify people’s age. There was a really good article in Wired about this which points out that there are already age protections that have surfaced in other ways, and in most cases, you can get around age verification and access porn anyway. If a child really wanted to watch porn they could probably get to it via their parents’ devices. It’s more that parents should be a bit more on it in terms of what their children are consuming, rather than the websites themselves.

The other thing is, people don’t wanna have to click on a thing and verify their identity every time they want to have a wank; it’s a bit unrealistic. This online safety bill — and this is the case with a lot of laws like this — in theory, it sounds like a good thing. I can definitely see how things could be improved online. For example, Pornhub doesn’t remove bad content as quickly as it should. There’ve been many cases where they’ve taken ages to remove content that is age inappropriate, and so if this law forces websites like this to be more stringent with enforcing their own rules, then I would love that. But it’s probably not going to do that — it will probably just censor sex workers even more. I guess we’ll have to see what happens.

There is an anti-revenge porn policy in the bill, but the government did already pass an anti-revenge porn law in 2015, so it's now illegal to leak nudes without someone's consent and people have been prosecuted for this. So that's a huge step forward in terms of bodily autonomy. Even five or ten years ago, people thought it was quite funny when celebrity nudes got leaked. But now the tide is turning; it’s less socially acceptable to go ahead and google a celebrities’ name with the word ‘nude’ next to it. Even before I did sex work, I wouldn’t want anyone to do that to me.

GI: From what you’re saying, this doesn’t sound like a problem that can be solved with punitive measures — it’s more of a social problem

AF: Exactly. And if you think about it, kids shouldn’t even really want to watch pornography until they’ve reached a certain age. It’s not for them. Teenagers need to go back to masturbating over their favourite boy band or girl band or whatever. They should not be watching really explicit things that they have no understanding of. Parents and schools don’t ever want to talk about porn, and so they will never warn children about any dangers there. It’s not really like real-life sex. I think it’s on the Guys We Fucked podcast where they say that trying to learn about sex from porn is like trying to learn about love from Hollywood movies. Like, it’s just not reality. So people need to talk to kids about what porn actually is and how to approach it.

There’s also a problem of like, turning porn into this big forbidden thing just makes the problem worse. Even before the internet, if a child was to accidentally find their dad’s porn magazine or whatever it would probably be made into a big deal. But if you just said: ‘yeah, some people masturbate and they look at pornographic material. Find what you like and consume it ethically,’ it wouldn’t be this big secret thing. What we have now is a situation where people are ashamed of watching porn, and they project that shame onto other people — and then the sex workers end up facing the consequences of this shame, and the toxic ideas that go against being more open about pornography.

A few years ago the UK passed a law around what wasn’t allowed to be included in paid porn content. One of the things was female ejaculation, and this literally doesn’t make any sense. They probably put that in there because they’re worried about squirting, and when you squirt there’s probably pee in it. But female ejaculation and squirting are two completely different things. Female ejaculation is when you have an orgasm and a small amount of sticky liquid comes out in your vagina. But squirting is when a load of liquid — possibly from your skene’s gland or your bladder or wherever — literally squirts out, and it probably has got pee in it. But because they don’t actually understand the difference, they’ve accidentally banned a standard vaginal orgasm or clitoral orgasm in porn. But also… some people like peeing on each other and that should be okay.

They also banned a lot of other things; anything they think is too ‘hardcore’. So this includes stuff like blood play — if you even have the word blood on your OnlyFans you will get censored. This literally comes from not understanding that there are people out there who are trained very well in things like blood play and know exactly what they’re doing. They should be allowed to make their videos and show that. This is why banning things outright never works. When something is banned, people don’t think ‘oh well I can’t do that anymore’, they just search for it in other places, and go further underground, to places where the content is nowhere near as safe. When you ban a certain kind of content, you’re also making the knowledge around it much more limited. The censoring of blood in porn also means that you can't show content with menstruation in it, which is a natural human thing. No wonder so many people (mostly cis men) are disgusted by it when they see it in real life if it is so hidden away in pornography.

GI: I think a lot of the time legislators will hide behind ‘child safety’ so that they can make up a lot of rules that censor people

AF: There are even little things like using the phrase ‘child pornography’ because that just doesn’t exist; it’s child sexual abuse images. There will also be headlines that say ‘this guy had sex with this person without their consent’ and it’s like no, that person raped them. We need to start using the right language, but people are scared to do that because it sounds too violent — but it is violent. We need to be talking about these things, because it’s important. Censorship and banning is not the answer.

GI: The online harms bill at one point had a very unpopular rule in it for social platforms about content that is ‘legal but not harmful’ — and porn obviously fell into this category. How do you feel about it being deemed as harmful?

AF: Well it can be harmful — but it also could not be. It could just be something really fun and great. Porn is not good or bad. I think we need more porn that shows consensual conversations about what people want to do. I think we do need to warn young people about the dangers of porn and how performers aren’t always treated well, and what it means to watch too much of it, and you can’t necessarily do something you’ve just seen to a girl you just met. I think we need to say that porn can be something that’s very exciting and pleasurable, and maybe you’ll find something that you’re really into and you see that other people are into it, and it makes you feel validated. Porn is not meant to be about shame, unhappiness, and disdain for other people. It’s supposed to make your sex life more enjoyable, and we don’t speak about it in those terms enough.

GI: April, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. It was very useful and interesting

AF: Thank you for asking me to do this!

If you want to follow April Fiasco’s work, here are a bunch of links and handles for you to click on:

• Instagram

• Twitter

• Only Fans

Upcoming live performances (all in London):

• Riot Party — happening TONIGHT quiiiiick

• Cybertease — 5th October

• Sexquisite Sirens & Spells Halloween Show — 26th October