Sex, Violence And Naughty Words Won't Get Boosted At Medium Anymore.
The criteria for getting posts boosted changed this week. Let's talk.
Did you hear the story of Joe Biden and porn on Medium?
In 2021, Joe Biden wanted to start writing on Medium. He was no stranger to Medium, he’d used it on the campaign trail in 2020. And if you didn’t know, Barack Obama has 255K followers on Medium. Why wouldn’t Biden want a piece of that?
So a White House staffer logged into the @potus account to get it ready. Make some notes, give him some instructions. That kind of thing.
Here’s where it gets funny.
When the White House staffer logged in, the top “recommended” story on the home page was A is for After, a cuckold love story. It’s about a woman who seeks multiple sex partners in one evening, with her husband's permission. Apparently it was pretty graphic and included a lot of profanity. I didn’t read it, so I can’t comment.
So, anyway... the phone rang at Medium. lol.
White House staff called Medium to ask how to get rid of the porn. So, yeah, just a teeny bit of scramble over at Medium that day.
Medium tried to fix it. They cleared history, followed political tags and read posts by Barack Obama and Kamala Harris. Then they told The White House to log in again. Sure enough, the homepage had changed.
The “new” top recommended story was Getting a Piece (and Some Pizza Too) with subheading Step sister taboo erotica.
So funny.
Not even done yet.
Apparently the @potus account had been added as a writer to at least 10 “garbage” publications. Because, any publication owner can add any member as a writer. That’s no joke, I’ve been added to publications I’ve never heard of. The list of pubs I write for keeps growing with no effort on my part. It’s like playing whack-a-mole.
The whole mess hit the media. Because of course it would.
Medium.com Shows Porn To The President!
They all used some version of that title. The story made The Verge, Business Insider, The Daily Beast, Vanity Fair and a bunch more outlets. It got a lot of air time.
While news outlets were getting views from Medium’s little porn disaster, there wasn’t a damn thing Medium could do to fix it. There were no content filters and no human curation. Algorithms ran the show.
Fast forward to today.
New rules for boosted posts, Jan 2024
The boost program beta has been live almost a year. They now have human curators who can boost a post for more visibility. They can also flag a post for “network only” access, which means only people who follow the writer or topic see it.
But there are still no content filters. There is no way for a reader to say what content they don’t want to see.
This week, Medium announced that sexually explicit text or images, profanity, NSWF content, and stories depicting violence in a gratuitous way will not be boosted. You can read the entire announcement here.
There’s a lot of backlash, and I’ll get to that. But first, let’s tackle the big question.
Why don’t they just use a NSFW filter?
That’s a common question. Why don’t y’all just use a damn content filter. Medium’s reply is that they’re working on it.
I’d like to pose a different question.
Who do you think is going to implement it?
Remember Covid? When Covid hit, Medium installed a filter to flag all posts using the word Covid. They wanted to be sure people weren’t spreading false information so they wanted an easy way to find and review that content. Yeah. Good luck.
You have any idea how many ways you can spell Covid?
You can replace the ‘o’ with a zero, or asterisk, or hyphen, or underscore. Replace the ‘i’ with a one, a horizontal bar. You can use characters from another language set. You can put underscores between letters. Tons of ways to get around filters.
We’ve literally seen writers actively work to get around a filter that targeted one damn word. Do you really think “every” writer on Medium would responsibly use a filter to flag their content for sex, violence or profanity? I promise you they will not.
Ever written on Vocal? Writers wait days for a post to go up because every single story has to be read by a human before it goes live to ensure it meets their PG13 rule. Do we want that at Medium? I don’t think we do.
As always, the problem is probably not you or me. It’s solving for the people who will try to get around whatever filters they do eventually put in place.
I would not want that job. I would not want to be the person responsible for figuring out all the ways people will get around a filter. Because that’s going to happen.
Some of the backlash is valid…
Some people are mad because they think it’s edgy to say f*ck. But that aside, there are valid concerns with this new rule. One writer brought up gun violence. Shouldn’t we be writing about that? Shouldn’t it get boosted? That’s a valid concern and Medium’s reply addresses concerns most of us wouldn’t think about.
What's problematic is when the effect of disturbing images or descriptions of violence become a way a writer "sells" the story—it becomes clickbait, or outrage porn, or fuel for article engagement. That's really what these policies are for. (source)
We’re not new to the world. We know people use shock and outrage to get views.
Let’s expand on that. Doesn’t matter if it’s sex, profanity or violence. Your story might be tasteful and respectful of the president or a 13 year old on the site. That doesn’t mean someone else’s is. So where do you draw a line? Do you start counting the number of f*cks permitted in a post?
That’s what Medium is dealing with. For the record, they do make exceptions. In the gun violence conversation, Medium also said this:
We have boosted stories that depict disturbing violence (and we'll continue to do so), but they really have to be handled in a way that's respectful of the reader. (source)
Respectful to the reader is the key. Some people do not know what that means. At the bottom of the comments, one reader said “No more unexpected “vulva” titles!”
That kind of nailed it.
My Publications On Medium
We are currently accepting writers. Submission guides are in the nav.
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xo,
Linda
I find it ironic that we can’t use the word “vulva” but it’s ok to endorse an entire publication about “bitchy” women.
So let me get this straight. We can call a woman a bitch but god forbid we use the medical term for her genitals? And then we wonder why the U.S. rate for rape is seven times higher than the average for Europe. Maybe if women were educated on their vulvas and not their bitchiness, we wouldn’t have these problems.
I get where Medium is coming from, but I worry for social justice and LGBTQ writers, since violence and sexuality are often themes that come up. Terrie told me that as long as it's a productive conversation, and not just drumming up additional outrage, then it can be boosted.
Yet, it's so subjective what is considered a productive conversation vs just outrage. (E.g. I personally think Jessica Wildfire's pieces are thoughtful and insightful, often with practical takeaways at the end that give us hope. But many other people think she just writes doom porn. :( )
So some queer and trans writers at our pub, worry that this will disadvantage them a lot, that they'll have to be careful to avoid all topics related to sexuality or violence... :(