“I’ve noticed that when I log into my advertiser dashboard the ‘social sharing’ buttons that used to appear are missing. Has Tryst removed them? Why?”
This is a great question! For a long time, Tryst's dashboard featured social sharing buttons that allowed you to quickly share your profile details across social platforms. You may have noticed that those buttons are missing and wondered why. Here's a quick explanation.
Recently, we've received an increased number of reports from providers on Tryst that some platforms are banning workers who use our social share buttons. Basically, as soon as they used those social share buttons to make a post, their accounts are targeted by the social media platform, leading to either shadowbanning or an outright account ban.
This is unfortunately simple - sex workers were getting deplatformed (banned, suspended, limited etc) within minutes of using the social share tools from the Tryst dashboard. Having this feature available was doing more harm than good for our customers.
As you know, there's a long history of online platforms shadowbanning sex workers, or banning them outright. This discrimination has intensified since SESTA/FOSTA and sex workers have increasingly had to navigate this by self-censoring online.
Not everyone that used the social sharing tools was impacted, but there was a higher probability of your social media account being negatively impacted if the tool was used to share a link to your Tryst page. We are unsure if there is a small army of bots specifically targeting the tryst.link URL and reporting any social media posts with that URL in it, or if the mention of an advertising site triggered the automated moderation tools deployed by most social media platforms.
As Twitter in particular continues its slide into irrelevance thanks to its new owner, shadowbanning and outright banning of sex worker accounts was happening more and more often, so the decision was made to remove the feature to prevent further harm.
It sucks, but it's just another example in a long history of social media platforms being hostile to sex workers and adult content in general. The safety of our community will always be a top priority for Tryst.link, and we'll keep listening to you and making adjustments.
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