Diary #452

I thought last week seemed slower than it should’ve been, since the snow was over and the weather is warming up.  So I checked my Eros ad, and discovered that it was not online because someone over there decided my ad (which has been on the site in much the same form for years) violated some of their new and ever-changing “publishing standards”.  This has become the new normal for US escorts; all of our advertising sites are being murdered, committing suicide, dropping dead of sheer terror or else lobotomizing or castrating themselves.  Eros is in the latter category; although it has periodically installed some new and ninnyish changes over the past few years, ever since FOSTA it has gone completely bonkers, inventing new and increasingly-incomprehensible rules and then declining ads for failing to adhere to them, yet refusing to tell advertisers what rule was broken other than “it’s a picture” or “it’s text”.  So all one can do is to guess, make changes based on the guess, resubmit the ad and then wait a day or two for Eros to either post it or decline it again.  I’ve been watching friends deal with this for the past year, and I reckon it was finally my turn; luckily, I’m a good guesser and got it right in only two tries (taking almost a week).  If you’ve had this problem yourself and can’t understand why they won’t tell you what’s going on, I suggest you familiarize yourself with both the text of FOSTA and the prosecution’s rhetoric in the Backpage persecution.  The law now prohibits “knowing” faciltation of sex work, and the government has claimed that Backpage’s telling advertisers WHICH words and pictures were prohibited constitute “knowing” facilitation (this is phrased as “Backpage told pimps how to disguise their sex trafficking ads”).  So Eros is whistling past the graveyard, thinking that the government won’t simply change the rules again when they feel like it.  And the sooner I can broaden my media exposure to the point where Eros (and every other ad platform) is superfluous to my income generation, the happier I’ll be.