GLR November-December 2022

You’ve Been Pigeonholed

D ESPITE the generally held no tion that the Internet is a “pornotopia” where any and all kinds of sexual activity can be found, author Alexander Monea argues in his informative and disturbing The Dig ital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight that the web suffers from a het eronormativity problem. The types of porn and the opportunities for online discussion

would be forced to institute. “Nearly every major internet platform today engages in systemic overblocking of sexual expression,” by web filters and sloppy labeling of almost any sexual con tent as porn. Hashtags like #gay, #lesbian, and #bisexual have been banned by Tum blr for the iPhone because it associated those terms with searches for pornogra phy. YouTube’s automated content filter in

R EGINALD H ARRIS

THE DIGITAL CLOSET How the Internet Became Straight by Alexander Monea MIT Press, 280 pages, $29.95

its Restricted Mode (meant to be used by schools, libraries, public institutions, and others who want a more limited view ing experience) has routinely censored LGBT content, block ing videos with the words “trans” or “transgender” in the title, for example, while the same content without those words is left up. While Facebook uses offshore “human algorithms” to analyze content that has been flagged to insure it meets the company’s community standards, these employees are given heteronormative guidelines, have only seconds to make deci sions, and are expected to review thousands of pieces of con tent per day. The Digital Closet also contends that the ownership of porn websites and tube sites by a few large corporations like

about sexual matters have been limited by a bias in coding, over-blocking of content, and attacks by conservatives, which have led to restrictive legislation “routinely censoring art, lit erature, and LGBTQ + content across the world.” For Monea, “heteronormativity is not a glitch online but a feature of the in ternet writ large.” After outlining the occasionally contradictory definitions of heteronormativity, which “in part constitutes the attempt to universalize a white, middle-class morality and is subse quently always permeated by class and racial tensions,” The Digital Closet looks at how the “unlikely bedfellows” of anti porn feminists, conservative groups such as Morality in Media (now renamed NCOSE , the National Center on Sexual Ex ploitation), and alt-right groups like the Proud Boys have in fluenced the development of the Internet. These groups share traditional views of family and sex roles within society and use pseudoscientific arguments to make their aims more palat able to the general public. Many of their views on gender and sexuality are also shared by a large number of Silicon Valley coders and executives. Monea asserts that “much of the work force that is charged with creating the algorithms that govern the internet hold heteronormative biases about gender and sexuality. Their ideology tends toward the biologization of talent and the belief that brilliance is innate to individual coders. ... All this looks eerily similar to the worldview es poused by the alt-right, particularly their anxieties around gender and sexuality.” The 2000 Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) legis lation pushed to protect minors from “cyberporn” and required schools and libraries to install internet filters. The passage of the overly broad regulations in the Fight Online Sex Traffick ing Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act in 2017 has also had detrimental consequences for the LGBT community by accelerating the censorship of resources, sex education ma terials, art, literature, and other forms of online speech. And such legislative efforts to regulate the Internet have not stopped. In 2020 Senator Lindsey Graham introduced the EARN - IT Act (Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of In teractive Technologies Act) which would expand the surveil lance of sexual speech online and create a commission to develop “best practices” that ISPs and social media outlets Reginald Harris, a writer and poet based in Brooklyn, is the author of Ten Tongues (2003) and Autogeography (2013). November–December 2022

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