How Media Platforms Screw Indie Film Promotion
Hollywood torture porn? No problem. Nuanced depictions of sex and sexuality, nope.
Imagine if John Waters tried to market one of his early films online today. Would Facebook or Instagram allow his posters or trailers? If he wasn’t John Waters, would you be able to rent his movies through Apple or Amazon? I’m not so sure. In this article for Filmmaker Magazine—Doc (and Art-Film) Blocking: How Algorithmic Content Moderation is Hurting Indie Films)—I spoke with indie distributors and digital marketing executives about the challenges they face promoting and releasing movies with any kind of sexual content at all—or not even sexual content, just innocuous forms of nudity or sexuality—on digital platforms.
While it might not come as too much of a surprise that Hedwig and the Angry Inch director John Cameron Mitchell's explicit 2006 follow-up Shortbus is banned from Amazon and Tubi, the real frustration for filmmakers and distributors is two-fold: the seemingly random rejection of mostly inoffensive posters or trailers, and the double-standard that indies face compared with larger companies and studios.
After I wrote the article, I did some further experiments on Facebook, and found, for example, that a key image (above) from the Cannes Film Festival for Joanne Arnow’s darkly comic The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, which Magnolia is releasing this spring, was automatically flagged and pulled from the platform, whereas a similar image of a cheerleader bound and ball-gagged from Hostel III was perfectly okay with Meta’s content guidelines: Sardonic S&M sexuality, not okay; torture porn, go!
Even more disturbing, however, is the chilling effect this is having on distributors, with one company executive admitted they pass on acquiring good films every year because they’re concerned that online content policies will hurt their ability to release them.
At this year’s Sundance, I was thinking about this chilling effect in regards to Desire Lines, winner of a Special Jury Award for “boldness and care,” which is largely set in a bathhouse and examines the history and sexuality of the gay transmasculine community. Because the film features images of male nudity and sexual acts, will distributors be hesitant about acquiring a film that might need to be sanitized in its marketing and release? What a strange online marketplace it is in which hardcore pornography frequently shows up on Twitter, and indie distributors can’t put out paid ads of a poster of a man’s butt?
What a strange online marketplace it is in which hardcore pornography frequently shows up on Twitter, and indie filmmakers can’t promote a movie with a poster of a man’s butt?
The censorship of political content is another headache, which I only scratched the surface of in the article. But if you’re a documentary filmmaker, you probably know the lengths in which you need to go to market your nonfiction movie on the big platforms.
It didn’t make it into my article, but Oscilloscope’s Nick Camacho told me that even climate change is now flagged as “political” by Google Ads. “We recently had a film called Canary, about a scientist whose pioneering work helped prove climate change,” he said. “These ads were rejected by Google for ‘not complying with our Ads About Social Issues, Elections or Politics policy.’”
Who are these content policies trying to protect when even climate change gets flagged as potentially controversial?
Free speech is being gagged far more by liberal media than by the right which is a tidal change in America. At times I feel like I’m in an alternative universe.