The Internet and social media world has made a change of paradigm regarding how we understand communication. Therefore, brands and enterprises have adapted themselves to these new conventions to reach their clients simply and effectively. It may seem that this change has democratised information and has been an advance in the fact of sharing and talking about all the topics. However, behind the machines there are still people with morality, and so with prejudices, specially in topics such as sexuality.
“Behind the machines there are still people with morality, and so with prejudices, specially in topics such as sexuality.”
One of our most popular clients is the erotic supermarkets chain Sex Toys Center. In Crece Agency we do an integral management of their communication, from offline and promotion campaings, until the control of their online reputation, website and social media with branded content. For us, these tasks are a way of learning and, aligned to the philosophy of the client, breaking taboos with regard to sexuality. However, the tools we work with don’t make it easy for us.
We have already seen a few times that digital platforms like Facebook and Instagram are very restrictive abot the content shared in them, getting to the point of deleting posts and even closing accounts that posted content that, for the moderators and some users, was a violation of the community guidelines. From the agency we have experienced it directly, from an inexplicable closing of the Instagram account of the client until the rejection of some posts in Google My Business.
The reason? Sexual content of the communications. The simple fact of a semi-nude person appearing on a picture, a too-much realistic erotic product or simply a word which is related to sex in the “copy” can suppose a barrier to share the content with users. This, first of all, is already an added difficulty for the work of communication agencies whose clients work with this kind of materials. Lots of the tools we use on a daily basis must approve what the client’s communication channels can say or show.
“This incongruence just makes the control mechanisms be useless, and also they have an impact in the freedom of who can speak, what they can say and how…”
For example, we see that to realize a paid advertising campaign on Facebook, Instagram or Google Ads there’s already a very strong restriction in the contents that can or can’t be promoted. Even when filtering by age, you can never make ads that are really adults-only, and enterprises like Sex Toys Center can’t enjoy this online marketing tools because the risk that a kid can see it goes before the contents that want to be transmitted. This incongruence just makes the control mechanisms be useless, and also they have an impact in the freedom of who can speak, what they can say and how.
Besides, this is also translated to a way more important social issue: a coartation of freedoms. If the digital world has experimented this increasing is for, as we said, democratise information and create spaces where to share, talk and discuss with no limits about natural topics which are present in our daily life, like sexuality. Big corporations like Google or Facebook forbidding this kind of enterprises to promote their products and messages is just a way of legitimating this taboos, still present in our society, and stigmatising the people who sell and use them. Sexuality is a topic as important as any other, and therefore it should be treated with the same respect in the digital world.
From Crece Agency we advocate for a change in the conception of the digital spaces like social media, to achieve that the communication world is as free and transparent as it should, and exercise a very different control about which contents are valid and acceptable and which aren’t. So, we’d like that all of us had the same right to share the content we want to, always from the respect and the goodwill.
