Facebook Moderation Advisor: There's 'Nothing Wrong' With Consensual Pornography (XBIZ)

Read the full article by Gustavo Turner at XBIZ.com

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Legal scholar Danielle Citron, a member of Facebook’s Nonconsensual Intimate Imagery Task Force, one of the company’s internal — and secretive — moderation advisory groups said that “there’s nothing wrong with pornography as long as you chose it yourself.”

Citron, a Boston University professor, recently received the prestigious MacArthur grant (aka the “genius grant”) for her work on online harassment, bullying, defamation and more recently “deepfakes.”

The legal expert gave an extensive interview to New York magazine’s Intelligencer vertical about changes in legal perspectives regarding online harassment.

While the interview mostly focused in what she calls Non-Consensual Pornography (NCP), the more general rubric under which instances of “revenge porn” fall, Citron did differentiate the violation of sexual privacy involved in sharing private sex videos or nude photos and consensual porn among adults. The latter category includes all the legally produced pornography made by the adult industry.

Regarding NCP, Citron explained that Facebook (and subsidiary Instagram, which uses the same Community Standards as part of their Terms of Service), has “a no-nudity policy, anyway.”

“So my deep worry is about people’s nude photos being used without their consent and shared on the platform,” Citron said. “They’ve been really aggressive and wonderful about how to proactively deal with some of these problems. That is a one-size-fits-all approach tied to child pornography and exploitation. And that sort of makes sense, because the approach is largely similar across boundaries. In Wales and the U.K., in India, we say, ‘Okay, you don’t want your nude photo posted without consent.’ This luckily falls within their anti-pornography rules.”