‘Lips’ Social Network Flips The Finger At Instagram By Not Censoring Sexuality
Image via Shutterstock
The social media industry’s handling of sexuality has left little to be desired. Time and again, you’ll come across reports of social networks mistakenly banning photographs and accounts, as well as flagging female nipples while letting male ones remain online.
A new social network called Lips aims to be the opposite of apps like Facebook and Instagram when it comes to free sexual expression. It positions itself as an open space for women, erotic artists, activists, BIPOC and POC, the LGBTQIA+ community, and sex workers—creators who are more likely to get shut out on mainstream channels.
The folks at Lips have noted that social media platforms often struggle with discerning between sexual expression and sexual exploitation, so those networks would “ruthlessly” exclude all sex-related content. Lips says that by doing so, the sites are “doing significant damage on female and LGBTQIA+ creators as individuals and on their businesses,” as well as feeding to a “sexist system” that objectifies the female body.
Lips, on the other hand, encourages genuine self-expression on its feeds. It also takes queer creators seriously, citing studies about LGBTQ+ voices often being flagged. Recent research by digital media cybersecurity firm Cheq suggests that 73 percent of positive or neutral news from LGBTQ publishers are shut out due to blacklisted keywords.
The social network can’t be downloaded on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Instead, it functions as a web app that can be added to your home screen, partly because Lips may not pass guidelines with its sexual content. “This is our way of circumventing the Apple Store and Android Store monopoly,” described Annie Brown in an interview with Mashable.
A distinct feature of Lips is a consensual pre-defined tag algorithm, where users will pick the topics they want to see and which kinds they want to avoid before they get to their feeds.
In addition, Lips weeds out trolls by requiring members to go through a unique approval process. Users will first be asked to submit examples of the sort of content they would like to upload, and if they choose not to, “they can’t do anything but follow and ‘lips’ (like) other people’s content,” Lips UX designer Julija Rukanskaitė told Mashable.
To limit trolling, Lips currently doesn’t allow comments or messages on the app. “We do hope that through approval, the content on the platform, reporting and possibly hate-speech detection we can discourage trolling as much as possible in the future,” Rukanskaitė explained.
Check out the sex-positive social network here.
[via Mashable, cover image via Shutterstock]
Also check out these recent news
