In recent weeks, a new campaign to push back against the anti-sexual expression rhetoric of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) has emerged online. Dubbed “Expose NCOSE” by its co-founder, who goes by “John Smith” and carefully guards against being doxxed, the campaign’s participants gather on various platforms, centered largely on a Discord server established by Smith and his partner, who goes by “Pandora Iridiana.”
The core of the Expose NCOSE movement is a small but growing number of earnest anti-censorship activists, many of whom found the group via other Discord servers dedicated to combatting censorship.
Smith’s motivation to found Expose NCOSE stems from his own direct experience with social media censorship – a stifling of his expression that he pins directly on NCOSE’s efforts to sanitize the internet of sexual expression.
“I like to consume a lot of adult art, a lot of lot NSFW content online,” Smith told YNOT, explaining that NCOSE’s efforts to get policies changed on platforms like Tumblr and Reddit has resulted in the disappearance of massive quantities of such content.
Smith himself used to operate what he described as “a pretty successful Tumblr” page of his own – until Tumblr’s content policies changed and “everything just went Thanos” as Smith put it.
Later, another artist whose NSFW work Smith enjoyed, “Mr. Peculiar”, tweeted about NCOSE’s involvement in efforts to get platforms like Tumblr and Reddit to ban NSFW images from their sites, in the name of combatting sexual exploitation.
“These fuckers crawl out of the woodwork whenever they feel like they’re not getting enough attention,” Mr. Peculiar wrote of NCOSE. “They don’t care about exploitation.”
Combined with the prior removal of his own work, seeing Mr. Peculiar’s tweet – and understanding the implications of what was being suggested about NCOSE’s behind the scenes work – sent Smith into a “deep depression”, he said. But the evolution of his emotional response didn’t end there.
“Not to be hyperbolic about it, but I felt a rage beyond description,” Smith said. “I felt anger, but I couldn’t express it. So, I fell down this rabbit hole of finding out what NCOSE has done.”
Smith’s research quickly led him not only to the well-publicized recent efforts that NCOSE has made under its current moniker, but its past efforts when the organization was known as “Morality in Media”, and even further back to its roots as “Operation Yorkville” – when the fledging organization famously took up the cause of fighting against the spread of “blasphemous” works like Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
“I was a bit worried, because I’d heard about these age verification laws that would require people to submit identify verification docs,” Smith explained. “I kept digging and found that (NCOSE is) behind all these laws. And I thought ‘something needs to be done.’”
The more Smith dug into NCSOE and the organization’s history, the more convinced he became that there was more to the group’s lobbying than its ostensible mission to combat sexual exploitation – or perhaps more to the point, that the group appears to think of all sex-related media and expression as “sexual exploitation.”
He also came across examples of the group’s rhetoric, largely from its Morality in Media days, attempting to link same-sex marriage to an increase in mass killings and the fact that NCOSE’s President, Patrick A. Trueman, was associated to other controversial conservative organizations, like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council.
Smith’s response to his growing concern over the influence of NCOSE (and other anti-porn groups, like Exodus Cry) was to establish Expose NCOSE – and start an effort to have the organization labeled a hate group.
In working towards that designation, Smith said he hopes to “raise awareness of their past mistakes” and “make politicians not want to work with them.”
“We want to force them to be honest about their past and their motivations,” Smith said. “I just want to hold them accountable for their hateful past. Isn’t that what they want – accountability?”
In chatting with other members of the group – most of whom didn’t even want their screen names to be used in quoting them, so well-rooted is the concern over potential doxxing and harassment if they were to be identified – a definite theme emerged. The membership of Expose NCOSE is strongly opposed to the notion of “sanitizing” the internet, by imposing a standard based on what’s appropriate for children onto all internet users, including hundreds of millions of adults who have long since passed the age of majority.
“My reason for joining this group is to help combat the conservatives’ dangerous and regressive campaign to ‘sanitize’ the internet, AKA get rid of anything and/or silence anyone who does not completely conform to their views on how the world should work,” one member wrote. “This is especially prevalent for LGBTQIA+ people and those that make their careers through online work, such as journalism and adult film workers. I also am very concerned that they would try to strip our intrinsic right to privacy via line encryptions, because that safety net may be the only thing between a person and certain harm at the hands of those that know them or want to exude power over them.”
Another member of the group said NCOSE is “pushing dangerous surveillance and censorship bills that can hurt a lot of people” and “harassing people and even attacking groups that actually help people (NCOSE) claim to help.”
A group member called Tharmin.124 told YNOT they “joined from the anti-censorship server as well,” and “I’m really just here because if anyone threatens my friend group (mostly LGBTQ+ as well) I want to do everything I can to stop them.”
Asked what those in the adult industry – and the fans who enjoy their work – can do if they want to assist in the Expose NCOSE campaign, Smith said that in addition to signing the group’s petition on Change.org, the answer is to take a page from the NCOSE playbook.
“Just call them out – it’s that easy,” Smith said. “Just literally say ‘these people are a hate group and need to be exposed.’ That’s what they do.”
Smith also suggested that those who want to aid the Expose NCOSE campaign can contact the Southern Poverty Law Center, which serves as something of a clearinghouse for designating hate groups, with their concerns about the NCOSE and its efforts, both within the U.S. and overseas.
“We’re gong to force honesty on these groups,” Smith said. “My hope is that if were successful we can turn this into an anti-porn/anti-trafficking watch dog group to help enforce honesty and help actual victims.”
Those interested can read and sign Expose NCOSE’s petition on Change.org here.
