Law Commons^™

Data Battles, Platform Shutdowns, And Digital Rights In Surveillance: Labor Politics In The Online Sex Industry, Winifred R. Poster

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Sex workers are often portrayed as groups with little authority over their jobs. But lately they are making much use of online spaces, both large scale public-facing platforms and their own smaller websites. Taking a deeper ethnographic look into their online activities, I recount a story of highly adept, technologically proficient, and expert digital navigation by sex workers online.

The analysis follows the trajectory of platforms in the online sex industry over the last two decades. First it charts the rise of platforms for matching, reviewing, and identity verification, many of which developed roughly around the 2000s, and their impact …