How the Social Media Censorship Of Sex Workers Affects Us All

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By Chingy Le Gay


Ramona Flour is accustomed to being seen by others online. “I’m used to looking at a chatroom with 10,000 viewers and at least 50 to 100 people having a conversation with me,” says the 27-year-old adult performer and dominatrix. While Flour has no issues cultivating her following on cam sites, navigating social media as a sex worker is growing more and more tough. Despite exceeding 35,000 followers across both Instagram and Twitter, she has noticed that her posts rarely appear in search engines or on explore pages; some days, they vanish from her followers’ eats altogether or will be deleted erroneously for violating community guidelines.


“It’s totally different,” she says. “I feel like I’m just screaming into the void, and maybe one individual will reply.”


Flour isn't alone, either: Since advent of the world wide web, sex workers have leveraged its access and reach to market their services and build their fan bases, just as other entrepreneurs, artists, and freelancers do. However the recent implementation of new content policies by a couple of sites have resulted in a tightened view of what content those firms believe is or isn’t suitable for their platforms. Users whose posts fall outdoor of this scope can often penalized as a result, in ways ranging from having their posts removed without warning to finding that their accounts have been deleted. And while not the only sort struggling under these policies, sex workers are disproportionately affected by these changes.

I feel like I’m just screaming into the void, and maybe one individual will reply.

Take Instagram, as an example. In 2018, the platform’s parent agency, Facebook, updated its community ideas around sexual solicitation to include “content that implicitly or indirectly facilitates or encourages sexual encounters between adults” and “suggestive elements” as grounds for removal. In the ensuing weeks and months, a host of users reported a uptick of what they thought to be censorship: Posts and entire accounts would seemingly be disappeared, and often for vague reasons. Throughout her tenure as a social media publicist for a webcam modeling site with a Instagram presence, Flour estimates the company’s profile was removed from Instagram no much less than four times, although she says their content followed Instagram’s community guidelines.


Several digital platforms — including those geared toward person-to-person payment, social media, fan engagement, and even crowdsourcing — have tweaked their terms of service in recent years, around the same time because the advent of FOSTA/SESTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act). A set of two costs marketed to voters as anti-trafficking laws, FOSTA/SESTA passed in April 2018, making it unlawful for anyone or any agency to knowingly facilitate or promote prostitution online.


Crucially, the charges never differentiate between trafficking and consensual sex work; this gray area has resulted in organizations seemingly feeling pressured to censor content and remove sex workers from their platforms. And anti-FOSTA/SESTA activists believe these laws infringe on the rights of sex workers, putting both voluntary sex workers and trafficking victims in further danger by limiting online resources, and pose a threat to the freedom of expression online.

With the surge of censorship online, navigating sex work by way of the world wide web is hard. Folks are going to be forced into a IRL sex work life they aren’t ready for.

“What’s ironic about FOSTA is it’s actually perpetuating trafficking situations,” Sol Sombra, a New York-based sex worker, tells MTV News. “With the surge of censorship online, navigating sex work by way of the world wide web is hard. Folks are going to be forced into a IRL sex work life they aren’t ready for.” Limiting sex workers’s social presence takes away both their business and inability to screen customers, Sombra adds, which opens people up to several potential threats, including sexual and physical violence, and getting caught up in actual sex trafficking with pimps.


A clear example of this effect can be seen in San Francisco: In 2018, the San Francisco Police Department reported an increase in human trafficking by 170 percent since the previous year, while St. James Infirmary, a San Francisco-based clinic operated by sex workers, reported the quantity of street-based workers encountered while in outreach had tripled since the implementation of FOSTA/SESTA.


Violet A. Savage, a full-service sex worker, says she’s had countless financial difficulties in the year-plus since FOSTA/SESTA was made law. “I’ve had my checking account closed and lost a bunch of advertising options” on social media, she tells MTV News. While she’s maintained independence, Savage says she has seen other workers have to resort to involvement with pimps to get by. “I notice more women choosing up,” or allying themselves with a pimp, “because they aren’t sure how to tweak on their own right now that they can’t just post an ad on Backpage or other sites,” she explains.


On April 12, 2018, the day right after FOSTA/SESTA passed, Craigslist shuttered its personals section. Backpage, the popular personalized advertising site, was seized by the FBI within weeks on the grounds of facilitating prostitution. Both sites had frequently been used as free-to-low-cost options by sex workers unable to afford ads on escort-specific sites like Eros and Slixa. And in the time since the opening version of FOSTA was reported back in 2017, increasingly platforms have changed their terms of service to remove or suppress those users marketing any adult content. The business Survivors Against SESTA curated top list of over a 100 platforms they believe discriminate against sex workers.

Because of my visibility as a sex worker, corporations have blatantly, regardless for my organization, removed me from their platforms. Right now, every time Instagram glitches, I assume my account is gone.

“Sex workers are not a protected sort under US law, meaning Firms and institutions have a wide berth any time it comes to setting policies to discriminate against people working in sex-related jobs or at sex-related firms — everything from full-service sex workers and porn performers to people who make and sell toys or safety products,” the sort points out on its website. While escorts, fetish workers (such as professional dominatrixes), and sugar babies are a few of the workers operating within a gray area of legality, all sex workers (including strippers, porn performers, and cam models) are affected under FOSTA/SESTA.


“Because of my visibility as a sex worker, agencies have blatantly, regardless for my organization, removed me from their platforms,” says Flour. “Now, every time Instagram glitches, I assume my account is gone.


For Chloe Venom, the hugest hit came with Tumblr’s site-wide adult content ban in December 2018. In its heyday, the site was a hub where several underrepresented communities and individuals came to explore, discuss, and display their identities and sexuality. “Tumblr was where I promoted [camming and porn clips], and the context ban killed my clip revenue,” Venom says. “The much less I'm seen, the much less people purchase clips or interact with my content.”


And several people believe the policy change affected not only their bottom line, although Tumblr’s, also. In 2013, the agency was estimated to be worth $1.1 billion. At that time, 22 percent of its traffic and 16.6 percent of its blogs focused on exclusively pornographic content. As of August 2019, eight months right following the ban, Verizon sold the site to Automattic (owners of Wordpress) for less than $3 million. Venom specifically believes that “porn supported that platform,” adding that she may visualize similar fates befalling sites like Twitter “if they don’t value their sex worker users.”


Overt TOS changes are only one side of the fight. Just as insidious are tactics like shadowbanning, which several people believe is a concerted effort by platforms to effectively render a user’s profile nearly impossible to find, and to further make their content invisible particularly to those not already following them. No site has ever confirmed they shadowban accounts, although the tactic generally seems to align with Instagram’s April 2019 announcement of taking “new steps to manage problematic or inappropriate content” that goes community points, including making such content only visible to those already after the poster. Likewise, Twitter has stated that visibility of content can be affected for accounts violating their terms of service. (MTV News also reached out to Twitter for comment on the experiences intricate in this story.)

The truth is, what affects sex workers eventually affects everyone.

It’s key to center sex workers here, as they are currently on the front lines of such censorships. And the allocate problem of such blanket screening could have wider repercussions about freedom of expression online.


“The truth is, what affects sex workers eventually affects everyone,” says Cora Harrington, founder and editor in chief of The Lingerie Addict, the internet’s leading lingerie blog; she believes that shadowbanning has affected her social media presence and, in turn, traffic to her site, given that several of her posts feature models in lingerie. “Sex workers are most vulnerable to having their livelihood and lives threatened, nevertheless anyone having any conversations related to sex and sexuality, or perceived as being related to sex and sexuality, are likely to be marginalized and excluded from platforms that are needed to modern-day marketing and advertising.”


Platform censorship often affects the most marginalized people first, something that Harrington, a queer Black woman, is aware all also well — especially given that her site makes a concerted task to highlight lingerie for people who aren’t the Victoria’s Secret model archetype. “These censorship ideas first affect those whose bodies and identities are seen as most transgressive. People of color, plus-sized people, and LGBTQ+ people are all more likely to have their content announced than thin, white, cis women,” she says; a survey by the newsletter Salty that compiled marginalized peoples’s experiences with censorship or reporting on Instagram and Facebook highlighted similar concerns.


In a statement offered to MTV News, a spokesperson for Instagram's parent corporation, Facebook, mentioned, “Over a billion people use Instagram each month, and operating at that size means mistakes are made — it is never our intention to silence members of our community.”


Although users are already worried that reporting might affect algorithms, or set a regular for what content is acceptable or should be policed: “In essence, the further away you are from normative standards of aesthetics and gender and sexuality, the more likely you are to be silenced,” Harrington adds.


In my own experience using social media to explore and document my relationship with sexuality and queer womanhood, I have seen my own pictures and memes removed or disappeared numerous times. The deleted posts have ranged from including the word “dyke,” which is how I sexually identify, to photographs where I’m engaging in consensual BDSM while being totally clothed. Two pictures in particular — a headshot of me wearing a gag, and one showing my ex-fiancé spitting in my mouth — were flagged as violating community ideas by “featuring nudity,” though no such nudity existed. While I posted about this supply, a number of queer content creators expressed their own frustrations with similar experiences.


While several social media platforms assert that any of their policies that may inhibit sex workers from existing on their sites are usually done to preserve “content suitable for a diverse audience,” their removing and suppressing of marginalized content creators effectively decides whose firms, voices, and stories deserve to be seen and heard. While sex workers and their allies are holding sites accountable to discriminatory practices, they’re also pressuring lawmakers to fix the problems created by FOSTA/SESTA. Some presidential candidates have come out in support of decriminializing sex work, while others have been much less committal; sex work is now illegal in most of the United States, though the state of Nevada is the notable outlier.

If enough non-sex workers talk about it, changes will come.

When sex workers are able to use social media, it could make a large difference, both business-wise and also in activism. Sombra was an organizer throughout the New York City Stripper Strike, a worker’s rights movement that launched in 2017 and went national the following year; she says going digital played a large part in the strike taking off and reaching others. “Even me contacting Gizelle Marie [the founder of the strike] was from seeing her post and being like, ‘Yo, this is bigger than just New York culture and bartenders — it’s the underlying nuances of workers rights,” Sombra tells MTV News. “I’ve learned things from a lot of URL hoes or just connecting with bombass people from similar backgrounds, so we don’t feel like we just out here alone.”


This begs the question that if sex workers’ voices are being suppressed or removed by the platforms to which people pay attention, who will speak up for them in a way that still permits them organization? Flour believes a key segment of affecting change is through continued conversation and allyship, particularly from non-sex workers.


“Understand who has privilege in posting and hopefully encourage people to continue discussing it,” she says. “If enough non-sex workers talk about it, changes will come. People mention they are progressive and sex positive, although we stay in a very fake woke culture. They carry so much shame for consuming erotic labor that it’s hard to get [anyone] to discuss it. And those are the people we need.”


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