To browse Academia. In April , the Trump Administration approved two acts that frame sex work as human trafficking. Subsequently, the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized popular adult personals site, Backpage. This led to the increase in censorship of online spaces, which sex workers require to safely conduct their independent business through advertising, processing secure transactions, and maintaining safe communication with clients and the sex work community.
My work aims to understand how these changes have explicitly impacted sex workers as they advertise and communicate their services, working predominantly as escorts in Canada and the United States. Backpage, an adult advertising website, was pre-emptively seized by the FBI. Other platforms began to censor or remove content related to sex work, includin Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy, Purpose: Assess the impact of online platforms on the sex industry, focussing specifically on direct sex work, and evaluate what approaches to platform regulation is likely to align with the interests of sex workers.
Findings: Online platforms generally make sex work safer. Regulation aimed at preventing platforms from serving sex workers is likely to harm their welfare. This chapter reflects on how data privacy on third-party for-profit advertising websites geared towards sex workers is managed and which types of vulnerabilities are generated through this corporate model. This chapter begins with the documented and possible further harms of the Rentboy. Lastly, this chapter turns to the data privacy strategies of online advertising platforms created and managed by sex worker-owned cooperatives like Ottawa Independent Companions OIC in Canada.
Drawing on the largest study of the United Kingdom online market in sexual labour to date, this article examines the legal and regulatory consequences as aspects of sex work increasingly take place within an online environment.
Our research shows that while governmental policy has not kept abreast of these changes, the application of current laws which have, since the s, focused on public nuisance and, more recently, trafficking and modern slavery are pernicious to sex workers and unsuited to recognizing and responding to the abuses and exploitation in online markets in sexual labour.
