Digital Rights
Internet services are vital for sex workers. We use them to advertise, make and sell content, connect with clients, manage payments, build community and share health and safety information. When platforms and governments crack down in the name of ‘online safety’, sex worker communities are left behind.
Pushed off and locked out.
Increasingly, laws intended to target online harms are forcing sex workers off the internet. In the US, anti-trafficking law FOSTA-SESTA resulted in mass deplatforming of sex workers and sex work spaces, with negative impacts on income, health, safety and community.
In Australia, the Online Safety Act 2021 is intended to stop young people from seeing adult content. In practice, it pushes tech companies to use blunt content moderation and ‘age assurance’ tools that incorrectly classify content and deplatform users. Sex workers lose accounts, income and the ability to reach our communities.
Financial discrimination and digital surveillance.
Digital surveillance and algorithmic technologies empower discrimination towards sex workers from banks, financial products and services and payment processors.
Banks routinely close or refuse accounts for brothels, escort agencies and individual sex workers, often citing vague “reputational risk” policies rather than anything about how the business is actually run. Payment processors do the same: PayPal automatically flags anything linked to “sexually oriented” services, and Stripe shuts down sex work accounts on the same grounds. Airbnb uses algorithms to identify and exclude users it suspects are sex workers, based on flawed assumptions about risk rather than evidence.
This isn’t a side effect – it’s discrimination by design. These technologies cut sex workers off from basic financial infrastructure that every other business relies on, even in places where our work is legal.
Privacy and encryption.
New rules pushing platforms to scan messages and files for ‘illegal’ content may sound reasonable in principle. In practice, it means one of two things. Either breaking encryption, the protection that keeps what you send and store online private, or tech companies scanning all content on every users’ device before content is sent. These systems aren’t accurate enough to be trusted with this kind of power, and sex workers are more exposed to their mistakes than most. There are no proposed means of avoiding, appealing or challenging incorrect categorisation of content – leaving sex workers open to being treated unfairly and at risk of privacy breaches.
Platforms increasingly over-use AI to target, detect and remove sex worker content, but this software can't tell the difference between sex and sex education, or between consensual content and abuse.
This technology does not consider state or territory laws such as sex work decriminalisation or anti-discrimination protections. The result is shadowbanning, deplatforming and real harm - worse mental health, less political participation, and less ability to share safety information with each other. The laws sex workers fought for to protect our real life work lives do not currently extend our online lives.
Porn and age assurance.
As social awareness about gender-based violence has increased, some commentators have pointed the finger at porn and online sex work as a big part of the problem. However, research does not demonstrate a causal link between porn and violence, and there’s no solid evidence young people are consuming more porn than previous generations did through other media. Every new technology, from 1960s pulp fiction, to ‘video nasties’ in the 1980s and internet forums in the 1990s, has triggered the same panic.
Australia’s Online Safety Act 2021 requires tech companies to implement ‘age assurance’ technologies to prevent people under the age of 18 from seeing adult content. These technologies do not hold up as a solution – they are expensive to implement, often inaccurate, encourage platforms to collect and store unnecessary data, and easy to bypass with a VPN or someone else’s ID.
Rather than introducing expensive age-gating technologies or investing in human-moderated compliance measures, many tech platforms see mass deplatforming and blanket content removal as the easier option. This approach undermines sex worker rights by removing platform choice, driving users towards pirated sites and content and failing to address actual harms like content scraping and non-consensual intimate image sharing.
Porn performers and adult content creators are sex workers. Policy built on moral panic rather than evidence doesn’t make anyone safer. It just makes it harder for us to work, connect and stay safe. Real online safety means listening to the people most affected by these laws, not designing around us.
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from seeing adult content. These technologies do not hold up as a solution – they are expensive to implement, often inaccurate, encourage platforms to collect and store unnecessary data, and easy to bypass with a VPN or someone else’s ID.
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from seeing adult content. These technologies do not hold up as a solution – they are expensive to implement, often inaccurate, encourage platforms to collect and store unnecessary data, and easy to bypass with a VPN or someone else’s ID.