Fighting for visibility: online sex work and social media
Assistant Professor Trine Mygind Korsby has, together with Emma Nitz, published the article ‘Fighting for visibility: online sex work and social media’ in Tidsskriftet Antropologi (in Danish).
Technological developments have paved the way for the emergence of new forms of sex work, which exclusively take place online. Today we thus find sex workers selling access to erotic content on specialized platforms such as OnlyFans. Many online sex workers use ordinary social media platforms like Instagram to promote their erotic content and services, even though these platforms do their utmost to remove and limit their activities.
Based on online ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with sex workers on OnlyFans, the article explores how online sex workers navigate when encountering social media’s opaque rules and regulation practices concerning erotic content. The article shows that the sex workers chase online visibility on social media, but that this takes place under a constant threat of being made invisible via Instagram’s regulation practices, such as the deletion of content and profiles, as well as the phenomenon of “shadowbanning”.
The article explores how – when faced with limiting moderation infrastructures – online sex workers develop creative and subversive visibility tactics to become visible to other users and thus capitalize on social media’s access to visibility. At the same time, the sex workers aim to remain invisible to Instagram’s moderation infrastructure and thus avoid that the platform makes them invisible to potential customers.
Based on a power analysis of agency Nitz and Korsby argue that a continuous – and unequal – battle for visibility and invisibility plays out between social media and online sex workers.
The article is open access and can be accesses on Tidsskriftet Antropologi’s website