Cybersexual Moral Panics
Vickery asserts that “Moral panic discourses divert attention from deviant adult behaviors–behaviors which are difficult to control–and instead exert control over the bodies and lives of young people” (Vickery 2017). Young people are often a target of social control because of assumptions that they require discipline to grow into a ‘successful’ adult (by capitalistic measures), and because there is both a perceived and actual simplicity to controlling youth compared to adults. The marginalization and disempowerment of people under the age of 18 allow for the continued social control and mistreatment of youths via legislation, education, and exploitation. This is not to say that all forms of discipline and expectations for young people are inherently violent or ill-intended. There are many caring people who genuinely want children and teens to succeed and have an easy transition into adulthood. However, the historical perception of youth as a vulnerable and innocent population does a disservice to young people who hold multiple marginalized identities. Some “protections” that may be supportive for white children of middle to upper-class socioeconomic background may be harmful or create a wider gap in privilege and success among young people of color and/or students from poor communities. Casting young people as inherently vulnerable and innocent also downplays the value of lived experiences impacting one’s knowledge and positionality from a young age. In addition to the historical construction of youth being in need of protection (similar to white women and sex workers), there is also a permeating idea that the internet is an inherently dangerous place. With the construction of youth as vulnerable (and clueless about risk) and the internet as dangerous hand in hand, the perceived threat of young people engaging in digital worlds is disproportionate to reality. The repetition of these ideas has allowed these fallacious arguments to function as hegemonic truths about the world (Vickery, 2017). Ironically, guardrails like the TikTok guidelines reinforce the notion that the internet is a dangerous place and use that as a way to limit what users can consent to, while as I have been demonstrating the actual digital violence is how biases against marginalized communities are a part of tech design. Unequal power dynamics IRL are reproduced online by being encoded in algorithms and written into terms of service, allowing those in power to wield virtual technology to their advantage, just as powerful people and institutions wield technologies of the state. Digital violence takes place in forms of exclusion and suppression of othered groups of people and othered ideas, including many forms of liberatory political education.
This constructed idea that the internet is an intrinsically dangerous place for vulnerable, wholesome, and pure children and teens sets up the intertwined nature of moral panics related to pornography and technology, the porn panic, and technopanic respectively. Sexuality and technology are temporally interwoven. Sex has pushed technology forward and technology has returned the favor by continuing to expand the realm of sexual possibility. The distribution of sexual material was a key component of the development of communications technology. Sex workers fiscally supported the growth of the tech industry by being early adopters of new technologies such as photography and home video. In 2021, Decoding Stigma, a coalition rooted in compelling conversations about sex work in tech, published their article “What can tech learn from sex workers?” In it, they give a brief, comprehensive history of the relationship between the sex and tech industries. “As the sexual revolution of the 1970s collided with more affordable means of film production and the birth of public-access television Money made in the erotic market of 1980s proto-internet bulletin board systems (BBSs) literally paid for the material infrastructure that paved the path toward the world wide web before mainstream consumer adoption could even be taken into consideration” (Stardust et al., 2021). The claim that sex workers built the internet is no understatement. Decoding Stigma goes on to say, “As necessary innovators, sex workers are consistently early adopters of new technologies, designing, coding, building, and using websites and cryptocurrencies to advertise. In our time of internet ubiquity, sex workers often build up the commercial bases of platforms, populating content and increasing their size and commercial viability, only to later be excised and treated as collateral damage when those same platforms introduce policies to remove sex entirely” (Stardust et al., 2021). Frequently, sex workers are relied on to create profitable platforms only to be met with whorephobic policies and community guidelines that are designed to deny access to the very people to whom those platforms owe their success (Love et al., 2021; Horn et al., 2022).
Sex, sexuality, and technology are mirrors of one another in the reception of how both continue to evolve with potential for global impact. As fears around the power and danger of sex motivated the moral panics of the feminist sex wars, technology has experienced its own cultural morality debate referred to by scholars as the technopanic or the cyberpredator panic of the 2000s (Alice Marwick 2008 and Vickery 2017). These panics can be viewed on a timeline illustrated by policies targeting children, cyberpredators, and sex workers starting in 1996 with the Communications Decency Act (CDA) which was an attempt to regulate sexually explicit material and indecency on the internet. Two years later in 1998 the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) was introduced to protect minors from online pornography. Rather than policing the already vague categories of explicit and indecent material, COPPA sought to define “harmful to minors” in a broader sense than just “obscenity.” It “also included material that ‘appealed to prurient interests’ as deemed by ‘contemporary community standards’” in its definition of harmful (Vickery, 2017; Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, 1998, section 231). This included all sexual acts and human nudity, which further blocked young people’s access to educational information relating to sexuality and broader health concerns. This disruption of access discourages minors from developing their own sexual identities. Which they otherwise could through navigating questions about their bodies and desires in a personal and private way online. Autonomy that can be granted through internet exploration being denied is harmful because it prevents young people whose identities and desires fall outside of hegemonic constructions from having the opportunity to find and build community with people with common experiences. Rather than addressing that the internet does have risks, but those risks can have tangible rewards (including finding community, finding language that can vocalize lived experiences, and filling educational gaps produced by racial and class boundaries), COPPA constructed the internet as a place with the capacity to harm children without considering the ways it can also help them. This perpetuates the way that potential violence on the internet has operated to set sex educators and sex workers up for digital violence.
In the year 2000, the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) was enacted by Congress to continue the crusade against “children's access to obscene or harmful content over the Internet” (Federal Communications Commission, 2020). Not long after, the rise of social media sparked panics about sexual predation online that became sensationalized by misinformation about digital risk. In the watershed years of 2003 and 2004, when Myspace and Facebook were created, the sharp rise of social media out of the legacy of 1990s discussion boards and chat rooms was a catalyst for unprecedented cultural and global change. This momentous shift could have set a precedent for accessible, widespread knowledge, making young people safer, but instead induced fear about children stumbling into knowledge not meant for them.
