WASHINGTON — A top executive for NCOSE, the religiously inspired anti-porn lobby formerly known as Morality in Media, wrote this week that members of the organization have “met regularly” with Meta executives responsible for Instagram moderation.
In a fundraising article published Monday on the organization’s website, NCOSE Vice President Haley McNamara boasts of a decade’s worth of alleged successes by the organization’s annual “Dirty Dozen” campaign. That campaign shames corporations that NCOSE accuses of contributing to sexual exploitation — a term it applies extremely broadly, including to the entire adult industry and any platform or company that does not subscribe to its censorious standards regarding sexual content.
Claiming success in NCOSE’s efforts targeting Instagram, McNamara asserts, “While Instagram still has more work to do, they have met regularly with the National Center on Sexual Exploitation to hear and address our concerns.”
McNamara adds that those meetings have resulted in “increasing some protections for children by improving systems to identify grooming behavior patterns, and no longer allowing adult strangers to send unsolicited direct messages for minors. Each policy improvement helps prevent abuse for its 1 billion monthly users.”
XBIZ contacted Meta for comment on McNamara’s claim about regular meetings affecting policy, but received no answer.
NCOSE's Extreme Anti-Porn Beliefs
One of the stated goals of NCOSE is to eradicate pornography and all forms of sex work by “striking deep at the roots of the systems which support and sustain sexual abuse and exploitation.”
Formed by clergymen in the early 1960s, NCOSE views pornography as “a deeply damaging social influence that corrodes relationships, erodes the sensibilities and sexual freedom of consumers, and dehumanizes those used to make it.” Over the years, the group has labeled as pornography everything from 18th-century novels that mention sex work, to Sports Illustrated and Cosmopolitan magazines, to mainstream movies and TV shows depicting human sexuality.
McNamara’s article also celebrates supposed NCOSE wins forcing Carl’s Jr. to “stop producing hyper-sexualized, misogynistic ads for their fast food products”; CVS to “remove the annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue from their checkout areas and promotional displays”; Army and Air Force stores to stop selling what the group terms “pornographic magazines”; Hilton Hotels Worldwide, Hyatt Hotels & Resorts and InterContinental Hotel Group to stop showing in-room adult content; Snapchat to deplatform all sex workers; and Walmart to “remove Cosmopolitan magazine from checkout lines at all of its stores across the country.”
“Cosmopolitan, like Playboy, places women’s value primarily on their ability to sexually satisfy a man and therefore feeds a culture that premises male sexual entitlement,” McNamara declares. “NCOSE is grateful for Walmart’s leadership to reduce the amount of unsolicited sexually objectifying material that bombards youth and adults alike.”
As XBIZ reported, McNamara, in her capacity as head of the NCOSE-controlled International Centre on Sexual Exploitation, was a crucial contributor to the recent anti-porn document by the U.K.’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation, which repeated anti-porn myths and recommended a state crackdown on sexual expression online.