WASHINGTON — The religiously motivated anti-porn lobby NCOSE, formerly known as Morality in Media, has launched a new campaign to eradicate all adult content on Reddit.
In an open letter released yesterday, NCOSE calls for the platform to take action against “hardcore pornography and sexually explicit content.”
Founded in 1961 by clergy, NCOSE rebranded in 2015, adopting its current name, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation — but has maintained its media censorship focus, even recently labeling mainstream publications like Sports Illustrated and Cosmopolitan “hardcore pornography.”
In the letter from 320 “international anti-sexual exploitation and violence experts from 31 countries,” many directly connected to NCOSE, the organization frames the call for censoring Reddit — one of the main platforms that allows open sexual expression from users — as addressing “abuse and exploitation.”
The NCOSE-led statement demands that Reddit “stop facilitating image-based sexual abuse,” its term for nonconsensual and illegal content.
The group minimizes Reddit’s efforts to improve its response to nonconsensually shared explicit images, including its updated 2022 policies and several hashing initiatives, and condemns the platform’s supposed “failure to enact meaningful age and consent verification practices or to overhaul ineffective moderation strategies continues to allow such exploitive content to flourish on its platform.”
NCOSE's 'Bait-and-Switch' Argument
NCOSE’s rhetoric about nonconsensual material ultimately serves as a Trojan horse for a call to censor all sexually explicit content and eliminate accounts that share it, regardless of consent or legality.
While most of the letter refers to nonconsensual and illegal content, the final demand is for Reddit to “adopt strong policies against hardcore pornography and sexually explicit content, due to the inability for Reddit to sufficiently verify the age or consent of people depicted in such content.”
NCOSE calls for Reddit to “ban users who upload sexually explicit material, especially if the material depicts child sexual abuse material or non-consensually shared explicit images, and prevent them from creating another account.”
The group also demands that Reddit “institute proactive moderation and filtering solutions to enforce such a policy” and that it “work with NCOSE and survivors to implement survivor-centered practices and reporting mechanisms specific to image-based sexual abuse.”
Reddit and Twitter are among the very few open social media platforms that tolerate open sexual expression. They are also important sources of community-building, harm reduction and education for sex workers, the LGBTQ+ community and other marginalized groups.
NCOSE considers all sexually explicit content, regardless of consent, to be exploitative, likens it to trafficking, and has denied the very possibility of consensual sex work.