How censorship algorithms are changing the world of art

"It is easier to spread an anti-vax conspiracy or a racist declaration, than to share an image of Schiele or Modigliani”

That’s what Chiara Bardelli Nonino, Photo Editor of Vogue Italia, told nss magazine, commenting on the choice of the Vienna tourist office to rely on Only Fans to spread their content, following several incidents of censorship on canonical social networks, as in the case of Facebook's removal of a post depicting the Venus of Willendorf, a limestone statuette of 25,000 years ago because it was "pornographic".
A decision that seeks to find a solution to a problem, the controversial relationship between social networks, art and explicit content, widely discussed and difficult to resolve.

One wonders if Botticelli would have ever imagined that his Venus would appear alongside the hot pics of sex workers and influencers to escape the censorship of an algorithm trained to uncover clandestine nipples on feeds. One also wonders how much the Vienna tourism authority believes it will be able to bring users to OF, or if it is just a political statement in a social sauce.
The leaders of social media have never wanted to open up to a dialogue with the art world despite repeated requests for transparency on the guidelines, and, now that social media are really the key to success, for both emerging and affirmed, in the absence of other alternatives, all that remains to artists is to open a Only Fans profile as a statement.

A site that despite over 100 million registered users, of which over 1 million creators - has little chance of becoming mainstream since it was born as an entertainment platform for adults and is perhaps difficult to approach for most, but in which artificial intelligence he does not need to distinguish between the nude art and pornography. 


However, the censorship of social media and OF's exit strategy is a topic that concerns much more emerging artists in search of visibility and alternative methods of monetization.
“It is extremely difficult to enter galleries, museums and the art market in general. It is undeniable that social networks are removing enormous barriers, however the control of algorithms often strongly penalizes our artistic freedom: being obscured or even worse canceled, when art spreads and makes itself known through social networks, becomes a very serious form of censorship of any form of expression." said Andrea Crespi, an emerging Italian artist. 

nss faced the same problem firsthand.
On the occasion of the release of Body, a film shot by Tommaso Ottomano for the fifth digital cover of the magazine, that tells the relationship with their bodies of seven characters with their bodies filmed first dressed and then naked, nss has chosen OnlyFans as the only landing platform of the film, today awarded as Best Fashion Film at the FFF Amsterdam and at the Berlin Commercial festival. 

"From the WSJ investigation on Facebook Files, we know that there is a whitelist of famous people who are not subject to the restrictions of the Facebook group, but we see very often profiles of artists and professionals that are deleted without any explanation or apparent reason, as in the recent case of the photographer Carolina Amoretti, whose work is all about female gaze and female corporeality, who has had her profile deleted all of a sudden despite having applied the required censorship, with enormous professional damage" - explains Chiara Bardelli Nonino, opening up the problem of artists' self-censorship.

The risk is that artists develop projects based on the social platform on which they will be shared.
The diffusion of art in general is a big problem: creators see the visibility of images drastically decreased in favor of new features created to outperform competitors: stories, reels, IGTV bypass the creators' contents by binding them to a sort of perpetual shadow ban.
In this regard, Amoretti herself underlined the contradiction of Instagram, explaining that "the same post triggered different consequences when it was posted on two separate accounts: my personal profile was deleted in its entirety while on the profile of my brand, Fantabody, the photo is still there, it has never been removed, hence the profound difference in the treatment that Instagram applies between private profiles and paying profiles".

Part of the problem is the influence of common morality on the collective perception of nudity: that the female body is still a taboo is well known, but the relentlessness of algorithms against nudity reaches a paradoxical dimension if one thinks of how many controversial contents there are, spread undisturbed without bots or reports serving to stop them, animal violence, racism, bullying.
“Facebook took radical steps to tackle human trafficking and domestic servitude on their social networks only after Tim Cook threatened to delete apps from its store. It is also now clear that Zuckerberg has no interest in investing some of his immense earnings in a fairer moderation system" - explains Chiara Bardelli Nonino.

The need for an alternative social network for artists and enthusiasts is pressing. Some have therefore ridden the hype around OF and the recent backtracking on the ban on sexually explicit content. The platform is still an easy way to directly monetize one’s fan base with exclusive content, already used by influencers and celebs such as Cardi B, Tyga, Bella Thorne, Mia Khalifa, Gue Pequeno.
Then there are Discord's NSFW servers, visible only from Desktop, Telegram, Twitter, Patreon, on subscription as OF, but designed specifically for artists and creatives with the same possibility to publish content that is forbidden to minors under 18 years of age. 
But none of these platforms offers the vertical and widespread diffusion of institutional social networks, nor sponsorships, greatly limiting the possibilities for growth.

"If there was the will, we could imagine a situation in which certified artists and institutions can share nudity images with artistic and educational intent, and we could even think of a team of moderators with knowledge of art history who can distinguish between a porn and a photo of Helmut Newton."
Chiara Bardelli Nonino