It’s forced on us by rich Christians

My guess is people are tired of it. When you go through life and pretty much everything is sexualized, it starts to get boring and annoying. I hate how most movies used to have a romance or sex scene. Just imply it, is it really necessary to completely ruin the mood of a movie for it? We know people have sex and it doesn’t really contribute to the story.

This is organized purity insanity. Well funded.

Have you completely forgotten the war on drugs? We never stopped letting the Puritans run things in this country.

I noticed this too. Looking back on how things were in the’80s and '90s. Seems like a lot of those things are not OK today. Seems weird in a society that so routinely treats people like trash. You can kill them but you damn well better say on YouTube that you “unalived them.” Stupid.

I’ve been thinking it’s a combination of the opinion solidifying nature of social media, going through the “me too” movement, and exposure to a US administration completely bereft of morality, ethics, or intelligence that highlights the worst of our society.

It’s driven by advertising money. YouTube people self-censor their speech out of fear of being demonetized.

There are several issues here.

The lemmy instance thing is because people don’t like being spammed by onlyfans ads, torrents of AI generated porn spam, deluges of random penises men are happy to post assuming lots of people want to see it, and in some cases operators have ethical objections to porn production itself, or don’t want to deal with the possibility of rehosting and being responsible for content containing minors being hosted on their services and the legal headaches that entails.

The last one about legal problems has arisen due to increased awareness yes but also increased pressure. The amount of hosting companies out there who look the other way for violations are fewer and fewer by year out of their own fears from payment companies, technical partners, etc. Even accidentally hosting that stuff besides the risk of getting you raided by cops at 2am and having your whole life gone through (while automatic weapons are being pointed at your face) could lead to your hosting being terminated and having to pay more and more each time that happens as you move up from the cheapest hosts to the ones left. It’s also a hassle to move.

Censoring tarot cards, swear words in memes and on TV that’s an example of corporate prudishness. That’s an example of fear of upsetting advertisers, of people self-censoring to go viral, to avoid Zuckerbook removing their post and actioning their account because Zuckerbook has this weird notion of being family friendly and appealing to advertisers. So much of that lays at the feet of advertisers and Christian pressure groups who exist to beat the drums of fear of losing advertisers and pressuring those same advertisers to pressure the tech companies.

It’s about risk compliance for those tech companies as well. Your bank would rather close all your accounts and refuse to do business with you ever again if you have less than several million dollars with them if you bring too many automated red flags. They won’t care you have half a million with them, they won’t care you protest your innocence, even the chance the system is right in flagging you a risk and getting hit by authorities leads them to a behavior similar to self-censoring where they self-police overly aggressively out of fear because you’re just not worth the trouble and risk.

In the same way these companies don’t care about artistic expression, they don’t care about freedom of speech, they care about maximizing profits and that means minimizing compliance risks, minimizing risks of being legally actioned because there’s even a chance what you shared could turn out to lead to legal liability, and minimizing risks of upsetting overly sensitive prudish customers and advertisers.

So at it’s core its driven by a capitalist drive to avoid government scrutiny, fines, interventions, and by that same desire to offend the least amount of people and not upset advertisers by placing their ad for a new burger next to erotica art or bared human body parts or naughty words.

The problems you’re talking about in the OP are purely monetary. Advertisers don’t want it so media/content can’t do it and survive.

The upcoming generation are behaving less unruly these days I think for 2 reasons :

• Everything is being recorded and shared all the time. You fart in an elevator and you might go viral. God only knows the fear you’d experience waking up hungover after a party in this world.

-Regular rebellion against the previous generation. We had eminem, limp bizkit, rage against the machine, Bart Simpson, an entire barrage of “fuck authority” as a culture. Only real way to rebel against that is “fuck yeah, authority”.

adult art being restricted from most Lemmy instances

That one is probably a liability issue. Especially a problem with real-life porn, but even with drawn material, you’ll often get characters which don’t look like adults. So then the mods would have to review each post, which is too much work, and they’d also likely see shit they’d rather not.
Considering this platform is mostly volunteers, if not fully, it’s just not worth it.

not people. the system is getting more prudish.

As a child from the seventies. YES.

If by “this generation” you mean the generation of people owning companies (that don’t want their advertising associated with this stuff), the generation owning social media companies (that fold to the real or imagined pressures of advertisers), and the generation who writes the law… then I still have no idea.

It’s the major social platforms pushing people to self-censor, mostly. It’s a well-known phenomenon called “algospeak”, where modifications to the language intended to bypass social network censorship end up seeping into in-person interactions, such as the verb “to unalive”

it’s not a generational issue, but a marketing issue. It’s not “ad-friendly”. It’s also a fascism thing. Performative moralizing and pearl clutching that rightoids use to smokescreen their pedophilia and their other favorite forms of rape. If they can construct an image of being hallowed crusaders of family values, it makes predation easier. because, you know, camouflage. It doesn’t even have to work or be convincing for everyone; all they have to do is hijack the ideologically-possessed simps who line up to suck the same fuhrer’s cock and the flock will immediately surround the wolf to defend them from any scary accusations, and even shield them from accountability when they ARE caught.