05 Aug Keeping your accounts safe from AI content moderation
Posted
in RedGIFs Tips 'n' Tricks
Most platforms we sell on don’t have a robust internal promotion feature, so we have to do the bulk of our own marketing and advertising on social media. Twitter and Reddit offer fairly accepting spaces with loose restrictions for us to post our work and links, but not everyone is on NSFW social media. Instagram and Tiktok are both a vital well of potential customers that we would all love to tap into, but they’re far stricter with acceptable content than the former two. With the snowballing use and power of Artificial Intelligence, content moderation on those platforms is no longer handled by human beings who can make judgement calls on what constitutes a violation of terms of service and is now almost entirely judged by algorithm driven AI. That means that your accounts can be banned for the same thing another account gets boosted for based solely on engagement. So, what can we do to help protect ourselves?
A lot of us have definitely felt the burning sensation you get when you see a famous performer showing full nipples in a wet t-shirt or half a butthole behind a thong when you’ve been shadowbanned for a bikini picture. But that’s just the reality you deal with now that AI is running the show with content moderation. Nobody knows EXACTLY how it measures what to take down and who to ban, but it’s pretty safe to assume that the more interaction a post gets, the more it can get away with. So, unless you’re working with a bunch of throw-away accounts you can skirt the rules with until they get banned and move on to the next, we have to play it safer than a Kevlar condom. But even then, some of your posts can be removed, even when they clearly aren’t in violation of any of the ToS. And now, for Instagram at least, there’s no way to get a hold of a real person for an appeal.
What you can do is to make sure you have a few backup accounts on all of your favorite platforms. Just grow them over time by making the same posts on them as you do with your main page and hope that you’ll never need them. Getting your account up to 50k followers just to get hit with the ban hammer is going to suck no matter what, but if you have an account with a few thousand followers built up and ready to go, it’ll take some of the sting out and keep the traffic to your sites moving in the meantime. Another benefit of backup accounts that is unconfirmed, but seems to be working for people, is to have your backup accounts make the riskier posts and to invite your main account as a collaborator. It looks like even if the original post is flagged, the collaborator account won’t be penalized for it. Not to say that you should try getting away with anything full-frontal, but it might be worth it to take the extra step for your own peace of mind if nothing else.
I wish there were more answers for us when it comes to keeping our ability to market effectively safe from terms of service that are pretty openly anti-sex worker. All it takes is an angry fan to start a war reporting your posts to start a cascade of violations that can lock up your favorite accounts. The best we can do is to have backup accounts for our backup accounts, keep our SFW content as tame as possible while still attracting customers, and have a few accounts on less popular sites like Tumblr to fall back on if the worst should happen.
Riley Cyriis is a New England-based indie content creator and mortician. She owns Cyriis Studios with her partner, Ryan Cyriis. She’s a cult survivor, a heavily-armed liberal, and the enemy of corruption and greed.
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Most platforms we sell on don’t have a robust internal promotion feature, so we have to do the bulk of our own marketing and advertising on social media. Twitter and Reddit offer fairly accepting spaces with loose restrictions for us to post our work and links, but not everyone is on NSFW social media. Instagram and Tiktok are both a vital well of potential customers that we would all love to tap into, but they’re far stricter with acceptable content than the former two. With the snowballing use and power of Artificial Intelligence, content moderation on those platforms is no longer handled by human beings who can make judgement calls on what constitutes a violation of terms of service and is now almost entirely judged by algorithm driven AI. That means that your accounts can be banned for the same thing another account gets boosted for based solely on engagement. So, what can we do to help protect ourselves?
A lot of us have definitely felt the burning sensation you get when you see a famous performer showing full nipples in a wet t-shirt or half a butthole behind a thong when you’ve been shadowbanned for a bikini picture. But that’s just the reality you deal with now that AI is running the show with content moderation. Nobody knows EXACTLY how it measures what to take down and who to ban, but it’s pretty safe to assume that the more interaction a post gets, the more it can get away with. So, unless you’re working with a bunch of throw-away accounts you can skirt the rules with until they get banned and move on to the next, we have to play it safer than a Kevlar condom. But even then, some of your posts can be removed, even when they clearly aren’t in violation of any of the ToS. And now, for Instagram at least, there’s no way to get a hold of a real person for an appeal.
What you can do is to make sure you have a few backup accounts on all of your favorite platforms. Just grow them over time by making the same posts on them as you do with your main page and hope that you’ll never need them. Getting your account up to 50k followers just to get hit with the ban hammer is going to suck no matter what, but if you have an account with a few thousand followers built up and ready to go, it’ll take some of the sting out and keep the traffic to your sites moving in the meantime. Another benefit of backup accounts that is unconfirmed, but seems to be working for people, is to have your backup accounts make the riskier posts and to invite your main account as a collaborator. It looks like even if the original post is flagged, the collaborator account won’t be penalized for it. Not to say that you should try getting away with anything full-frontal, but it might be worth it to take the extra step for your own peace of mind if nothing else.
I wish there were more answers for us when it comes to keeping our ability to market effectively safe from terms of service that are pretty openly anti-sex worker. All it takes is an angry fan to start a war reporting your posts to start a cascade of violations that can lock up your favorite accounts. The best we can do is to have backup accounts for our backup accounts, keep our SFW content as tame as possible while still attracting customers, and have a few accounts on less popular sites like Tumblr to fall back on if the worst should happen.
Riley Cyriis is a New England-based indie content creator and mortician. She owns Cyriis Studios with her partner, Ryan Cyriis. She’s a cult survivor, a heavily-armed liberal, and the enemy of corruption and greed.
