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Reducing Bias

In order to gather enough data for this report while also not occupying too much time during the data gathering phase, it was decided that a select number of posts would be utilized for this report. This report utilizes a 10% sample rate on the estimated 4,017,836 total posts on Fur Affinity. This sample rate was choosen in order to get the most accurate picture of the Fur Affinity community. These posts were randomly selected from a set of all the posts from January 1st, 2018 to December 31st, 2018. In order to reduce the amount of bias in post selection, a cryptographically-secure pseudo random number generator was utilized to select posts for study. The full code utilized in this report is avalible on Github as open source software and the analysis of the data gathered is also avalible as a JSON file download. It is our intent to ensure that this report is as fair to the furry community as possible.

Content Ratings

The furry community creates a lot of content. Most of this content is harmless fun, however some of this content may be inappropriate for some audiences. This content may vary from suggestive material to graphic nudity. FurAffinty offers three different ratings for content: general, mature, and adult. General is typically content which is meant for the consumption of all ages. Mature contains content that may be inappropriate for a minor to view. Adult contains content which is sexually explicit and is only meant for adult consumption. More information about these ratings can be found on FurAffnity's Acceptable Upload Policy page.

Identifying Sexualized Content

Content ratings, however, do not tell the full story of the variety of content avalible on Fur Affinity. Often suggestive content or content which might have a sexual background can be found mascarading itself as General content. Contrastly, content which is classified as Mature does not necessarily mean a sexual nature. For the purposes of this report, a different set of classifications has been created in order to identify this content in the General and Mature content ratings. These identifiers have been gathered from the top 200 tags and themes of the General and Mature content ratings and were selected for their known sexualized backgrounds. The top 200 tags for each content rating is avalible as part of the downloadable analysis file at the bottom of the page. While not all these identifiers were solely utilized for sexual content, more of the content under these tags were of sexual nature than that of other popular identifiers.

Tags

Themes

With these identifiers established, we can now get an approximate percentage for the content in the General and Mature ratings which may contain a sexual background.

We can now also create an estimation of the total ratio of sexual to regular content. This data shows that while sexual content is not negligable in the furry community, it is also not a majority of the content offered. Sexual content appears to make up about 43% of the total content avalible on Fur Affinity.

Types of Sexualized Content

Sexual content in the furry community ranges from soft-core content which is primarily suggestive and contains little to no nudity to hard-core content which contains graphic sexual acts. In this report, we attempted to classify certain types of this content and measure it's prevalence in the community. These content types were chosen for their known sexual connections in the community. The tags utilized under each classification were gathered from the top 200 tags of the general, mature, and adult content ratings. If a tag associated with a type of content does not appear, it is most likely because that tag was not in the top 200 tags of any content rating. The downloadable analysis file at the bottom of this page contains a listing of the top 200 tags for each content rating. The number of tags utilized in each category depended on the prevalence of the category in the top 200 tags. Certain tags may not contain all sexual content, however, we believe that it is better to overestimate the amount of content available than to underestimate. All categories were analyzed and these were the best identifiers we could assign to each category.

Is it important to note that each of these content types are their own independent group of the furry community with their own subgroups. Some groups may sexualize the content type more than others. This report makes no judgement on how sexual these content types are, and presents these content types as a whole cohesive group for easier analysis.

With these categories and identifiers established, we can now create an estimate for the relative prevalence of each category in relation to one another.

Closing Remarks

This report was created to find tangable data about sexuality throughout the furry community. This report goes to show that sexuality is not a majority of the content avalible on Fur Affinity, the largest furry community on the internet. Even so, sexuality is not a negligable potion of the content avalible on Fur Affinity. When attention is given to the sexual content avalible, much of the content is diversified among a large range of different sexual interests making broad generalizations of the sexuality of the furry community hard to make. This goes to show that the furry community is quite diverse in their feelings towards sexual content and their particular taste and expression in sexual content.

If you have an issue with this report in our methodologies, presentation, or data gathering, please open an issue on our issue page on Github. This is one of the first reports of its kind and we need feedback in order to improve it. https://github.com/dumbhaus/openfur/issues

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