Anti-Porn Lobbyists Pressure Reddit to Shut Down Its NSFW Communities

An anti-pornography group that claims all adult content is unhealthy is taking aim at Reddit, one of the biggest online platforms for sharing porn and sex worker resources.

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), formerly Morality in Media, celebrated changes to policy that resulted in adult performers losing their incomes, taken credit for pressuring Instagram to ban Pornhub from the platform, and encouraged its followers to help them shut down sites that host legal adult content, causing real-world harm to sex workers and pushing them toward the exploitation they claim to aim to prevent.  

The letter, signed by 320 “anti-sexual exploitation and violence experts,” according to NCOSE, accuses Reddit of not doing enough to prevent image-based sexual abuse. The letter’s co-signatories don’t just push for better protection against non-consensual imagery, but demand that all adult content be banned from the site. This would result in a massive purge of hundreds of subreddits, many of them run by sex workers for posting consensual, legal content.

“Adopt strong policies against hardcore pornography and sexually explicit content, due to the inability for Reddit to ever sufficiently verify the age or consent of people depicted in such content,” the letter urges Reddit. It also demands that the platform “ban users who upload sexually explicit material, especially if the material depicts child sexual abuse material or non-consensually shared intimate images, and prevent them from creating another account.” 

“While these are steps forward, Reddit’s failure to enact meaningful age and consent verirication[sic] practices and ineffective moderation strategy continues to allow such content to flourish on its platform,” the letter states. There’s a nation-wide legislative push for strict age verification practices on porn sites that’s already happening in multiple states, including Louisiana and Arkansas; Last month, a judge ruled that popular porn site xHamster must audit all of its amateur content for documentation of consent or delete it, despite already having strong identity and age verification methods for uploaders. Critics say that age verification doesn’t work to prevent abuse, but has a chilling effect on the livelihoods and rights of adult content creators and consumers. 

Moderators of adult subreddits say that this demand is unsurprising, but bleak. 

“If they cause enough fuss in the media, over and over, eventually Reddit will decide it's not financially worthwhile to stand up for sanity, and they'll just nuke porn out of convenience,” a moderator for r/cumsluts, a 3-million subscriber community for adult content, told Motherboard. Like many adult subreddits, posts focused on a specific fetish come from both adult performers promoting their work, and other users who are reposting adult content they lifted from other sites without permission. “Eventually groups like NCOSE will get porn outlawed from the web in general. It's just a matter of time, and reintroducing the laws several times under different acronyms until people get tired of fighting. I'm very pessimistic about this. Unfortunately, mindlessly shrieking ‘Won't somebody please think of the children?’ over and over is a dangerously over-effective tactic.” 

The moderator pointed out that bills like FOSTA/SESTA—which NCOSE supported and which is largely considered a failure—drive sex workers further underground to one effect: causing more precarity to workers. 

“If they win, everyone loses, including themselves,” the mod said. “Likewise, in getting all the big, well-moderated porn sites taken down, these demented religious perverts will inevitably drive all porn underground into closed communities where there is no moderation or control whatsoever. It's completely backwards. Big sites like Reddit are significantly safer and better moderated than the internet in general. Driving all porn underground is profoundly dangerous and stupid. These anti-sex religious groups are all alike: they're all depraved, repressed perverts. Absolutely demented, brain-damaged imbeciles, absolutely self-defeating, too stupid to think two seconds in front of their faces.”

A moderator for r/18_19 told Motherboard that they don’t expect Reddit to ban adult content anytime soon, but if it did, that it could push people to decentralized platforms, or platforms that are more difficult to moderate or search. “I don't think Reddit should ban porn or adult communities. In the short term, banning adult content would suck,” they said. “A huge number of people come here for that. But it wouldn't be a big deal in the long run. Porn will be available, it would just take a while for it to consolidate around new locations.”

In 2018, Tumblr banned all porn from its site, a move that’s become a touchstone example for platforms eradicating sexual content and nuking an entire user base with it. “If a vacuum like that is created again, it will be filled,” a moderator for r/workgonewild told Motherboard. “Do I particularly care about the fate of my subreddit should such a ban be applied? No. I don't make money here, and moderation takes a time out of my day. I'll start collecting post stamps, like my father before me.” 

Reddit has faced problems with non-consensual imagery and image-based abuse over the years. In 2019, after the criminal operation Girls Do Porn was charged with federal counts of trafficking, Reddit banned one of the biggest forums for sharing videos of its victims, but within months more popped up in its place. Adult performers have long reported that Reddit’s users repost their content from closed subscription sites like Onlyfans without their permission. 

Last year, Reddit strengthened its policies against nonconsensual image sharing, including offering improved support for victims of image-based abuse.

Data shows that blanket bans of adult content don’t work; in 2021, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s received more than three million reports from Instagram. There were 22 million reports from Facebook, which NCOSE uses daily to share updates with its 38,000 followers. Both those platforms have some of the strictest policies against pornography of any social media network. Reddit, by comparison, sent 10,059 reports that year.  

NCOSE has been criticized by experts in anti-trafficking as using “misleading ‘research reports’ to fabricate a false medical consensus about the harms of pornography.” The organization publishes an annual “dirty dozen” report of companies it deems supportive of “pornography,” including fast food burger joint Carl’s Jr., coupon site Groupon, and Walmart. 

Caught in these cries for overarching bans on adult content are sex workers promoting their legal work, harm reduction communities, and groups that support constitutionally-protected speech about their personal kink and fetish lifestyles. A total ban on pornography on Reddit would be yet another blow to sex workers’ ability to survive online, and to avoid the actual exploitation that NCOSE claims to want to prevent. For example, even though a lot of people steal and repost Onlyfans content to Reddit, a lot of online sex workers use Reddit to advertise their paid sites.

Reddit is NCOSE’s latest target: In 2021, the organization said that Twitter should “eliminate all sexually exploitive images that victimize people.” In the view of anti-pornography activists, who consider all pornography to be exploitation, this would mean all adult content.

This piece was updated to include comment from subreddit moderators.