Politics Online: Sex Workers and Platform Power

• In Event: Celebrating Fifty Years of Queer Scholarship at APSA Mini-Conference: Negotiating Queerness in Policy and Politics

Abstract

With the expansion of internet technologies, online platforms—understood broadly as the websites that host, organize, and circulate users’ content, ranging from Instagram to Amazon to AirBnB (Gillespie 2018)—shape and facilitate our social, economic, and political activities. In the process, they have accrued what Pepper Culpepper and Kathleen Thelen term “platform power”—that is, an intimate connection with their users, who depend on the platforms’ services for many aspects of their daily life and livelihoods. The platforms, in turn, benefit from this alliance with consumers, who provide a formidable source of opposition (as allies in public opinion) to any regulation that may threaten these platforms.

While these platforms may not always have their way, their power is significant and remains under-explored in political science. To date, emerging research about online platforms and their related power has focused largely on the platform side, offering important insights about how platforms shape political engagement and policy outcomes. However, there remains less attention to how platform users are affected by—and engage and resist—platform power. To fill this gap in research, our paper considers US-based sex workers’ experiences with the online platforms they use to advertise and provide services, screen clients, collect payments, and interact with their peers (among other activities).

Studying sex workers’ online engagement and experiences losing access to platforms provides important insights about the operation and effects of platform power because, while many online platforms have worked to resist or evade regulation, they have succumbed to public concern about and governmental efforts to prevent sex trafficking. As a result, many online platforms have taken it upon themselves to restrict access to and ban those who appear to produce sexual content. Additionally, multiple platforms for sex workers have been shut down by government agencies and technology companies, who claim that these actions will help to keep individuals safe and prevent crimes such as sex trafficking, even as sex workers and other affected communities have indicated otherwise.

To better understand sex workers’ experiences with online platforms and their related power, we developed a national, online survey of sex workers in the United States about how they use and engage with various online platforms and their experiences losing access to different types of platforms. To develop the survey, we consulted 5 organizations and 2 individuals in the process of developing it. In this initial process, sex workers informed us that we should seek information about platforms’ negative effects on sex workers’ health, safety, income, and access to their community. We then tested the survey with 14 additional sex workers and made changes in accordance with their input. In the process of the consultation, we have already learned that even as platforms may derive their power from their connection with their users, they tend to favor some connections over others, often with significant consequences. However, when we distribute the survey (in January 2023), we expect to find that sex workers challenge these platform practices by turning to alternative social media sites and developing their own platforms. As a result, we argue that while platforms may derive power from connections with their consumers, they also foster what we term a “reluctant alliance” with consumers from more marginalized and stigmatized groups, like sex workers, who rely on these platforms and generate significant content for them, but also frequently find themselves punished for their work here.

Author

• Samantha Ann Majic, CUNY-John Jay College