Dr Carolina Are is challenging the digital censorship of sex positive communities

The academic is fighting online erasure and pushing for freedom of sexual expression.

Welcome to SHAGGERS, a ~semi-regular~ interview series speaking to creative practitioners expanding sexual culture.

Digital censorship has become one of the most pressing issues of our times, as we enter the cyber age of the porn wars: sex workers are being deplatformed and having their accounts deleted en masse, while debates around digital porn rage on. AI erotic content — from sensual chatbots, to AI porn — don’t seem to be censored at the same rate. Why are humans being punished, while computers are doing the same things with impunity?

Amid all the scare-mongering and double standards, it’s important to have voices that cut through. If you’re interested in a feminist perspective on digital culture, you need to follow Dr Carolina Are: a pole dancing academic, activist, blogger and content creator who is speaking up for sex worker and sex positive communities, and whose research probes the intricacies of our current internet-first moment.

Below, Carolina explores why social media bans for under-16s aren’t the answer, details her first-hand experience of digital censorship, and how the legacy of FOSTA-SESTA has reshaped discussions of sex online.

Hey! To start, could you introduce yourself to Pulp’s readers?

I’m Dr Carolina Are, a pole dancing academic, activist, blogger and content creator. My expertise is in digital criminology, and my research sits at the intersection of online harms and freedom of speech. I’m currently working at the London School of Economics and Political Science as a Fellow, teaching and researching on issues surrounding AI, online harms and digital rights. My work, which has been published in high-impact journals and funded by high-profile research funders and NGOs, has resulted in several citations, in engagement with platforms, tech regulators, charities and governments.

As a researcher-activist and content creator, I am committed to raising awareness of the issues social media users face, from safety to censorship of marginalised communities, through my research, teaching and public scholarship. My work has been featured in The Guardian, The New York Times, the BBC and Wired.

I’ve also been pole dancing for almost 10 years, something I discuss extensively on my blog bloggeronpole.com and on my social media platforms, where I share performances, training videos and thoughts about our industry. I’m a semi-retired instructor too, because now I’m mainly focusing on performing and training for myself as I build my career in academia.

I know you’ve had a varied professional journey, so I’d love to hear a little bit about how you came to your field of research, and why you ended up pivoting from your first career in PR and comms towards research?

My first degree was in Journalism, at City University. I moved to London at 18 from my small town in Sardinia, Italy, and even though I wanted to study criminology, I was afraid it was going to be too challenging to do a degree like that in my second language. I liked writing, and journalism had an element of investigation, so I went for it. Eventually, I realised I’d idealised the UK journalism industry (I grew up during the Berlusconi era of biased and monopolistic Italian media, so the UK was of course better but... still not ideal), and got very seduced by the London restaurant and nightlife scene, which I was covering through my blog in Italian.

I got headhunted for a social media job in my third year of uni, so continuing in PR and social media strategy seemed the intuitive next steps. At the time though, I ended up in an abusive relationship which had pretty devastating impacts on my mental health, so the very bubbly, social PR life didn’t suit me as I tried to recover from PTSD and depression and various episodes of violence.

When I was still working in PR, I ended up winning an award from my undergraduate dissertation and when I collected my prize, at the Undergraduate Awards in Dublin, I realised I missed studying and that I wanted to go back to my original passion: criminology. I applied for one degree - the MA Criminology at the University of Sydney, Australia, because my ex had a criminal record and couldn’t enter the country - and told myself that if I got it I’d have to move and retrained.

I got in, so I moved and retrained, and joined my previous experience in social media management and strategy with my interest in criminology by observing online abuse through my research. I missed London though, so I moved back for my PhD and realised that my need to leave was because of the life I led, and not because of London itself.

My experience in PR and social media has been crucial towards my content creation though, it really helps when it comes to sharing my research in a way that is accessible to people outside the academy.

@annabelleyb

Your interest in pole dancing and online exploration of this hobby led to you experiencing censorship first-hand. How has this first-hand experience of censorship fed into your advocacy for the sex positive and sex worker communities?

I took up pole dancing around the same time as when I was retraining as an academic, in Sydney, Australia. Here, pole was fun and liberating, featuring performances in lingerie and the celebration of all sorts of bodies, backgrounds and sexual expression. I’m told this was very different from the UK scene at the time, which tried to sanitise pole into “fitness”. So when I moved back to the UK and rebranded my blog as bloggeronpole.com at the start of my PhD to initially maintain some distance between me and my students, I found myself in a unique position: I was doing a PhD on the governance of online abuse and conspiracy theories (something harmful that wasn’t heavily moderated), and yet the pole dancing and sex working communities in my network and their activist or performance work was being heavily censored.

I thought it was absurd, and I wanted to harness all my different backgrounds to talk about it and explain my situation to my community to try and change something. At the time, mindful of my journalism and PR background, I was afraid of slagging off Instagram without giving them the right to reply. I wrote an email to their press team with questions about shadowbanning, thinking: “LOL, they’ll never reply!” and... they did reply. Two hours later. Denying shadowbanning was a thing of course, and denying they did it to pole dancers and SWs, but a communications channel had been opened with the press team, something that developed into the internal policy team as my academic career advanced.

This became crucial when the shadowban of pole dancing increased the following summer, and it resulted in the apology to pole dancers that kicked off broader awareness of censorship (see here) and in my paper, which was the first study to ever describe how shadowbanning manifested on a user’s profile.

Since then, I’ve always been involved in efforts to improve content moderation for the communities I am part of, because if it wasn’t for sex-positive communities, pole dancers, and education about consent and relationships online, I probably wouldn’t be here. These were crucial in uplifting me and helping me realise I wasn’t to blame for my experiences of sexual assault and intimate partner violence. I hate that so many people won’t have the same support networks I had because of censorship. And of course, if it wasn’t for SWs, we wouldn’t have pole dancing - and teaching online through tutorials was one of the ways in which pole went mainstream, so preserving this history, learning and connection as well as people’s right to work independently is what got me into this in the first place.

Because of the pivot my research took (the abusive communities I was observing for my PhD would have trolled me for life if I chose to publish about them), my work and my life as a pole dancer began colliding a lot more, so that’s why I joined the two identities online. I talked about it in the first chapter of the Sex on Stage book here, published by Bloomsbury.

Within sex positive feminist communities, you perhaps first became known for working with numerous pole dancers to prompt Instagram to apologise and rescind the shadow-banning of certain tags used by the community. I’d love to hear a bit about what this experience taught you, and about how the censorship of the pole community online has evolved since then?

I started pole dancing relatively uncritically, because I didn’t know anyone in Sydney and felt very lonely, and needed a hobby to keep myself sane. I did artistic gymnastics as a child and I missed the danger of being upside down, so when a contact told me to go watch a pole showcase and join her at a trial class, I didn’t think twice. So I initially wasn’t privy to the whole debate about where pole comes from, or about the fact some people refuse to recognise its stripping origins.

As soon as I started joining sex positive communities through mutual follows and event attendance, I became more exposed to sex workers and their content focusing on rights, labour and censorship. So my anti-censorship activism owes everything to SWs, because without them I wouldn’t have been aware of what was going on. And when the apology to pole dancers happened - because I joined forces with the authors of a petition to demand fair moderation, who were pole dancers and strippers - I realised how many people outside of our communities were affected, meaning that SWs are (as always) the canary in the coal mine for governance that then trickles down to so many other people.

So from the apology I learnt to make campaigns relatable to everyone, because as soon as other demographics became aware that we were affected by censorship, we found out that it was bigger than us. That’s why we continued that work with the #EveryBODYVisible campaign, which was supported by the likes of Dita Von Teese, and why I’ve continued with an approach focused on information sharing and building bridges.

Censorship has only been getting worse, and even if Instagram now ‘notify’ users of it more, they’ve created an entirely unaccountable and automated governance process that stifles creativity, censors art and expression, and breaks communities apart. You can find out more in the follow-up to my paper here.

It feels like FOSTA/SESTA essentially wiped out most of the sex positive conversations online — do you agree? And should digital platforms even has this power to determine what speech is acceptable?

I completely agree, FOSTA/SESTA started with SWs, and trickled down to everybody else. And worst of all, it’s provided a blueprint for other legislation, and since it’s a law originating from the country where most platforms have their HQ, it’s really applied worldwide.

Platforms act as the arbiters of taste, but they do that on the basis of guidelines that look after their businesses way more than their user communities. So while I do think that platforms have to enact some form of moderation the fact that we have no one to complain to if something goes wrong is appalling. We’d all be way less upset about censorship if platforms had an appeals and governance infrastructure that worked and put the user at their centre, but sadly they only centre their needs and those of their advertisers.

This shows the ultimate betrayal of their pitch to the masses: they sold themselves to us as community and connection tools, but they’re really only money-making machines. If they cared about community, they would govern differently.

Your research as an academic explores topics of freedom of speech, censorship and digital harms, topics which are in the spotlight right now due to global debates on how the internet and social media should be monitored. You’ve spoken about how you oppose a ban on social media for teens, particularly when it comes to their exposure to porn. Why?

Research by several colleagues shows that banning teens from social media is not the answer. It lets platforms off the hook from governing different users in ways that are appropriate for their ages, while also risking to push under-16s to more underground, riskier and less regulated spaces. The way age ID is being deployed is another worrying development, where we’re bringing in another unaccountable and unregulated intermediary - the age ID companies - who have the potential to store lots of data about young people (and adults’) behaviour.

We need to invest in long-term strategies to improve education and keep platforms’ power in check, but it’s more popular and populist to choose to ban under 16s than to put several checks and balances that would ensure transparency in platforms’ governance, or fund sex education for kids to know what they are seeing when they come across porn.

Often, members of the sex positive community can feel stumped when faced with the ‘think of the children’ argument. How can we fight back against this, and bring reason into the debate?

Research shows that a lot of the “think of the children” arguments are actually pushed by far-right, evangelical organisations masquerading as anti-trafficking groups. Because literally no one will want children to be harmed, it’s very easy to get behind their narratives, but the best way to keep children safe is to educate them about sex and consent, which is something that these groups are fighting against. In the age of the manosphere and the rollbacks on women’s and queer rights, we don’t solve things by banning kids from more places, or by de-platforming sex, but by having conversations that take the fact that teenagers are developing humans with interest in sex into account. If we pathologise it and make it taboo, chances are they’ll go find it in places they are not ready for, or they will fall for harmful narratives peddled by those who wish to make money off of division.

Porn is in the midst of a censorship battle where arguments re freedom of speech are coming up against the argument that categories of porn are innately harmful, regardless of how the performers are treated and who they are. What do you think of this framing?

As above, this isn’t about porn, it’s about control. It’s disappointing to see even feminists fall for this kind of argument, and completely disregard performers’ bodily autonomy and need for workers’ rights.

@whxretographer

You’ve argued that AI-made porn tends to be moderated by platforms less harshly than content by sex workers. This is something I have been seeing within my work, even after the OSA came into effect and Ofcom had a duty to monitor chatbots that had the capability of producing pornographic content — the inefficiencies of the Grok scandal being a case-in-point that moderation of these technologies seems less punitive or, perhaps, that platforms are choosing to be looser with this. My question is, why do you think there is this double standard between AI and IRL sex workers?

I think two things. First of all, content moderation has so far been trained on human content and not synthetic content, so perhaps AI isn’t picked up as much partly because of this. I also wonder if an account owner’s gender matters, because there have been some experiments on LinkedIn and on Instagram where, by changing their gender to ‘man’, women would suddenly become more visible. So I wonder if, given that a lot of these AI porn bots seem created by men and/or by tech companies owned by men, they are flagged less.

I’ve seen a rise in deletions of accounts linked to sex workers since the implementation of the OSA, with many individuals claiming that this has nothing to do with the content they post, but the fact that they are documented as sex workers online, and are being targeted on these grounds. Have we got to the point where sex workers are being targeted simply for existing online, regardless of what they post?

Many of the SWs I have interviewed for my research have told me they were de-platformed when posting videos with their families, or when fully clothed. There was a marked difference between people who labelled themselves as SWs on their profiles and those who didn’t. We go back to FOSTA/SESTA: the law has made SWs worldwide vulnerable to online censorship, and that approach is being exported. I wouldn’t be surprised if, to protect themselves from fines, platforms over-enforced on the basis of identity - see here and here.

Follow Carolina on TikTok, Instagram, and Google Scholar, and read her website here.

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