Owners of the social media platform Switter posted an announcement today, about the closure of their site. The site will remain open until March 14th, 2022. Here is their message about the closure ….

It is with a heavy heart that Assembly Four has decided to shut down Switter. The shutdown will occur on the 14th of March, 2022 and as of today, the 14th of February, 2022, new user registrations are disabled. We will shut the instance down and delete all data on the 14th of March 2022 at 11:45PM (Australian Eastern Daylight Time).

The recent anti-sex work and anti-LGBTQIA+ legislative changes not only in Australia, but in the UK, US and other jurisdictions have made it impossible for us to appropriately and ethically maintain compliance for over 430,000+ users on a social media platform.

Switter was founded in early 2018, and it grew exponentially. We never could have anticipated how important the platform would become to the survival of Sex Workers in an increasingly hostile legislative environment. Big tech and the internet itself “owes a debt of gratitude to the smut peddlers” who helped popularise them.

We have worked tirelessly, trying to find a way where closing Switter wasn’t our only option, as we know it is a refuge for marginalised people during a politically and economically turbulent time; where surviving has become that much harder.

Over the years, Assembly Four has engaged with various regulatory bodies, including but not limited to the Australian eSafety Commission, via submissions, consultations and public callouts of harmful and abhorrent behaviour.

Every time we have tried to engage with these bodies, we and other human rights groups are dismissed and gaslit by policy makers in government, private industry and not for profits who have a vested financial interest in the ever expanding industry of carceral techno-solutionism.

Multiple organisations, including DiGi (Twitter, Google, Facebook, LinkTree), Electronic Frontiers Australia, Digital Rights Watch AU, Scarlet Alliance and Freedom United have raised concerns about the powers that have been created and granted to the eSafety Commissioner as a part of the introduction of the Online Safety Act (hereafter, ‘The Act’).

‍DiGi has raised that the eSafety Commissioner’s current allowance of certain types of content like fetish practises to remain online is inconsistent with the wording of the Online Safety Act, leaving room for varying interpretations in other areas of the legislation and confusion for companies trying to comply.

If big tech with millions of dollars in funding and access to the best talent are confused by these regulations, how do we or any small business stand a chance?‍
‍At the end of the day, the national legal system is an imperialist invention that upholds white supremacist ideals designed to oppress and disenfranchise marginalised communities.

The ability to exist offline was a hard won fight from our collective Elders who were just trying to survive. We face the same fight online and we are actively having our human rights trampled on. We are being denied our digital citizenship and humanity.

Due to the constant sexualisation and fetishisation of LGBTQIA+ existence, the tools that are purported to protect children and young people online are causing more harm through the normalisation of surveillance and censorship.