YouTube has yanked the channel operated by Alice Little, a licensed sex worker and social media influencer from the Moonlite Bunny Ranch brothel in Carson City, Nevada, in the latest example of the war between powerful social media companies and sex workers.
Little, the highest-earning legal sex worker at the legal brothel, had her channel deleted this week for an as-yet-undisclosed violation of YouTube’s terms of service.
She received no warnings from YouTube prior to the removal of her channel, which had nearly three million video views at the time.
The sex worker had been leveraging the popularity of her YouTube channel and her other social media accounts not only to post adult product reviews sponsored by nationally recognized adult lifestyle companies such as Adam and Eve, Wet Lubricants, and Sweet Vibrations, but also to cultivate a conversation about legal sex work in America.
Deleting sex worker voices
Presently, six US billionaires — the “Silicon Six” — control the most powerful social media and information platforms (and some, such as Sacha Baron Cohen would argue, the biggest propaganda machine in history): Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, Sundar Pichai at Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Alphabet, Susan Wojcicki at YouTube, and Jack Dorsey at Twitter.
“My YouTube channel was free from nudity, vulgar language, and any type of content that would be considered blatantly sexually suggestive,” Alice Little said. “Other YouTube personalities, many verified by YouTube, have posted videos reviewing sex toys and other adult-oriented lifestyle products. None of these channels have been targeted by YouTube as being inappropriate for the platform.”
Little believes that YouTube is specifically discriminating against her because she is open about her profession as a legal sex worker, and that the termination of her YouTube channel is another example of the ongoing double-standard exhibited by social media entities like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook.
“Just like Kim Kardashian can post her bare butt on Instagram while many sex workers are banned for posting similar images, a non-sex worker on YouTube can review sex toys and talk about adult entertainment while actual adult entertainer voices are silenced,” Little said.
“What bothers me most about losing my channel is that my first-hand perspective on what it’s like to be a genuine legal sex worker in America is now totally eliminated from YouTube,” Little said. “My voice as a sex worker is gone and all that’s left are the videomakers that are empowered by YouTube to talk about my profession without having experienced my profession.”
“YouTube claims that its mission is to ‘give everyone a voice and show them the world’,” Little said. “If YouTube’s world doesn’t include the voices of the most unfairly marginalized in society, then it’s not a world that will change for the better in the 21st century.”
Visit Alice Little’s Twitter @thealicelittle
One Response
I believe the FBI or other government agency is forcing YouTube, Instagram, etc. to close accounts of anyone connected to sex work (and others have agreed with me, including people that I hadn’t heard of before their comment). I believe “Omid” of Instagram fame is actually a group of FBI agents doing the government’s bidding to force sex work to the shadows. I hope I am wrong but that is my best guess and what my gut tells me to be true. At this point Alice needs to decide whether to open another YouTube account for her sex work videos but she definitely needs to open a backup account that she does not mention sex work on. As long as Trump and his buddies are in power this is what sex workers have to look forward to. BTW, I have seen some of her videos, none are obscene and none have nudity on them. My YouTube account was also closed recently and I used it as a commenting mechanism — never even posting a video. My comments were sometimes very explicit, sexually crude and non-PC enough that I think that got caught in the FBI dragnet as well. However, nothing had changed in my commenting from several years ago, if there were a more logical explanation I would have been warned and given an explicit reason why. I also did not receive a warning although they did adopt a new TOS as of December 10. I suspect that bans anything even remotely sexual on YouTube — I do need to read it thoroughly, though. I wonder how long before the FBI forces Twitter to kow-tow to their overly conservative and 1900’s prudish requirements. Long term, the industry needs to create its own YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr like accounts, hosted in some far-off country that won’t kow-tow to the US Government. That is the only long term solution if we want to have these services available for adult performers, escorts, etc. Kelli Roberts (a reporter on here) has mentioned several times on this very site that (paraphrased) the best option is adult-specific services like the above, credit card processors, banks, etc. This site may even need to be hosted off-shore before Trump’s “moral minority” get done with the industry.