Blue checks don’t shield sex workers – Mistress Rouge, a professional dominatrix, anticipated that paid subscription verification would help her market to new clients when X (previously Twitter) announced it. X’s restriction on explicit content, which is a particularly harsh blow for the platform’s sex workers who have few options to promote themselves elsewhere, didn’t stop her from paying for the service, though.
“It has done basically nothing for my Twitter engagement,” Mistress Rogue said. “I feel like a fool for paying it. I feel fooled by Elon Musk.”
The Twitter Blue subscription, now known as X Premium, promised consumers more than simply a blue checkmark. The program guarantees prioritized rankings for a $7.99 monthly subscription, giving authenticated users’ comments a higher rating than non-certified users’ replies. According to X’s Help Center, it is also intended to increase the engagement of posts on which verified people comment.\
Blue checks don’t shield sex workers
X has been increasingly antagonistic toward racy and provocative content under Musk’s direction. This week, X began classifying NSFW content as “sensitive material,” according to Rolling Stone and restricted flagged users to cut down on their reach. Sex workers claimed that even though they weren’t informed that they had been marked, their engagement plummeted and their accounts no longer appear in X’s search. X informed flagged accounts that their posts would be hidden with a warning to prevent users from seeing sensitive content and that they might also be excluded from the For You and Following timelines, recommended alerts, and trends in screenshots provided to Rolling Stone and published online.
One of the sex workers who want to cancel their subscriptions as a result of the harsh actions X is taking against adult content is Mistress Rogue.
“I thought it would help my engagement but now I feel like it’s a waste of money,” Mistress Rogue continued.
Sex workers embraced Twitter Blue quickly in the hopes that the increase in engagement would protect them from the shadowbanning and excessive censorship they frequently experience on social media, but Blue checks don’t shield sex workers. Many sex workers had to pay a membership even if they opposed Musk’s reforms to the platform in order to stay on the platform.
Up until Musk’s takeover, Twitter was one of the only social media platforms tolerating explicit content and a vibrant location for sex workers to exchange information, connect with others in the industry, and advertise their services. The strippers, pornographic content producers, and full-service escorts who drove traffic and memes had a significant impact on the site’s culture. However, the platform is growing less tolerant of nudity, pornography, and anything even vaguely sexual now that it is known as X, making it very obvious that Blue checks don’t shield sex workers.
Regardless of whether an account had an X premium subscription, the crackdown affected it. On X, an NSFW creator going by the handle Mara Villana alerted other makers that her verified account had been detected and blocked. She made the speculative claim in comments left on her post that “they are trying to rid the app of SW [sex work] altogether.” TechCrunch contacted Mara Villana for comment, but she didn’t react right away.
However, X’s sensitive media policy excludes adult nudity and sexual conduct, which it describes as media “that is pornographic or intended to cause sexual arousal.” Twitter permitted consensual pornographic content. The policy covers both whole and partial nudity, simulated sex, and sexual actions shown in “cartoons, hentai, or anime involving humans or depictions of animals with human-like features.” Even suggestive imagery is marked as sensitive material in accordance with X’s policy.
Alleria, a dominatrix who pays for X Premium, claimed that despite the absence of explicit nudity, one of her posts had been flagged. The photograph of Alleria’s crotch, which TechCrunch examined, was severely distorted and further hidden by a black bar. Over the bar, a white written message read, “NO PUSSY FOR BETA LOSERS.”
“It was the word that triggered it I think, because the nudity is blurred out,” Alleria said. “It’s already censored.”
She claimed that she is “not happy” about having to pay for X Premium because it only increases the number of views for her comments on other people’s posts, not for her own. She had to “go PG-rated” with her X content, and when she started interacting with folks outside of the NSFW group, her post views only slightly increased.
“I honestly don’t understand why X is targeting porn content on this site when there is dangerous misinformation, racism and bigotry freely flowing from this site,” she remarked, “You would think targeting consenting adult nude content would be the last thing X should be doing.”
X is forgetting to control the false information and violent language that are flourishing on the platform in its haste to ban pornographic content.
On X, there has been a great deal of misinformation, especially in the aftermath of the intensifying crisis in Gaza. Following the tragic Hamas attacks on Israel, the European Union has already issued X a public warning for failing to halt the spread of unlawful content and misinformation. Large online platforms like X are required by the EU’s Digital Service Act to reduce “risks to public security” brought on by misinformation. Despite the fact that specialists have disproved the posts as doctored, fake, or taken from earlier instances in other places, graphic information purporting to be footage of the bloody conflict continues to go viral.
Other blue check accounts, verified through X Premium, have been spreading false information about the conflict while X spent this week filtering sex workers with little to no repercussions.
Shayan Sardarizadeh of the BBC frequently refutes statements made by verified users, including one that erroneously claimed Hamas had launched an airstrike on Israel, in his daily threads calling out incorrect information on X. The verified account released a video that was a screenshot from the video game “Arma 3.”
Alleria cautioned that outlawing porn, which is already under investigation by authorities and outlawed in several jurisdictions, is a “slippery slope” toward discrimination against LGBTQ people. If governments are given the authority to determine what material consenting adults are allowed to exchange, she said, porn prohibitions will inevitably have an impact on everyone.
An adult video creator named Mistress Alexxxia called the growing censorship of sex workers “digital discrimination.” She blasted Musk as the “absolute antithesis of free speech” in a thread regarding X’s opposition to NSFW content.
Because the general public either doesn’t care about us or outright despises us, she added, “SWers are the guinea pigs used in [the] changing of policy and access to information.” “Your rights disappear next”
Alleria claimed that as long as she can still post links to adult websites, she will continue to pay for X Premium, albeit reluctantly. She has thought about switching to Reddit or Bluesky to market her services, but she is “not giving up on this site yet.”
“I mean Elon is unpredictable. Anything is possible with him,” Alleria said. “But unless he targets posting links to adult content, I’m not worried. Adult content creators adapt.”
Although Blue Checks don’t shield sex workers, it still holds a lot of benefits for other creators who are even earning monthly ad revenues for creating content and interacting with the platform actively.
