Big Social Media vs. Sex Workers: The Struggle Continues

LOS ANGELES—It’s not even a secret anymore that adult performers and sex workers have a tough time dealing with unclear and overly broad terms of service on mainstream social media sites. Shadowbanning, de-platforming, account lockouts and lengthy appeals processes are just some of the plethora of issues performers in the adult industry face when it comes to something as simple as marketing their content and personal brands to their followers. Reasons why adult performers face these challenges more so than other digital influencers and public figures stem from a socio-legal environment that essentially codifies puritanical viewpoints on sexuality as law. FOSTA-SESTA, the Trump-era law that gutted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, made it harder for adult content creators to monetize their social media followings. AVN reported earlier this week that a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. upheld FOSTA as a constitutional law, with a caveat. The three-judge panel indicated that narrowing the definition of the law, which was presented as a measure to counter online sex trafficking and limit prostitution sales through digital marketplaces, is necessary to protect the civil liberties of sex workers who consensually engage in this type of work and those who utilize a variety of online platforms, like NSFW-friendly social media networks, to monetize age-restricted content and other materials. Unfortunately, FOSTA-SESTA places adult industry professionals at the whim of randomized trust and safety algorithms and social media company employees with varied definitions of what constitutes a violation of a platform’s terms and conditions. This is a very systematic problem. In recent events, there is overwhelming evidence that connects systematic shadowbanning and user censorship to adverse outcomes for income and revenue generation for creators. Because of this, content creators in droves report roadblocks in paying for costs of living, work-related expenses, filing taxes on time, and ensuring basic needs are met in order to be able to continue their work.  Alexis Tae, a critically-acclaimed porn star and a Spiegler Girl, told AVN that shadowbanning is getting more troubling for virtually everyone in the adult industry. “Almost everyone I know” is facing locked accounts, shadowbans or total account suspension, she said. As a matter of fact, her own primary Instagram account was suspended just over three weeks ago. In her view, these actions are randomized and cause irreparable harm to her ability to earn more. “To start, I keep my Instagram really clean. I was not shadowbanned for years,” Tae explained. “I’ve never had a link in my bio.” She said that only about six times a year she posts her OnlyFans link, and that’s usually at Christmas or a major holiday when she’s running discounts or other campaigns. “The funny part about when I got my account deleted is that I looked the night before in my creator tools ... and cleared my account.” She then proceeded to explain a timeline of events that reflects more a responsible and compliant social media influencer than a person soliciting. Alexis Tae is one of the thousands of creators in the adult segments that are held to higher standards, spoken and unspoken, than a class of influencers and users who are active in other industries either adult-adjacent or completely different. Currently, Tae confirmed that her Instagram account is reinstated. Due to her concerns, she went forward in creating a backup account (with about 13,000 followers) while changing her primary account (with nearly 450,000 followers) to a private account that users have to request to access. Tae said that she is “locking down” her main Instagram account and will refrain from using it for a few weeks until the heat dies down. Even with these self-imposed regulations, Tae is still at risk of having her creativity and brand stunted even more. She stressed that were anything catastrophic to happen to her Twitter, it would in turn be catastrophic for her OnlyFans and premium pages. This sentiment is common, given that most adult creators rely on their large Twitter followings as a primary source of traffic and monetization resources. However, it isn’t like Twitter is such a safe haven for adult creators. Ever since billionaire Elon Musk purchased Twitter for an ownership stake and reorganized it under the new chief executive officer Linda Yaccarino, the social media platform has become more challenging to traverse and use. For example, adult content creators—while still being able to post adult content and link to NSFW websites and platforms—are noticing a decline in viable usability, an increase in bots, a rise in general hate on the platform, and a change in use culture. Musk has issued far-reaching policies that gate off once-free features behind paywalls and self-serving revenue schemes. This was never the intention of Twitter, says former Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey. As a result, decentralized platforms and alternatives like Meta’s Threads moonshot are attracting new users. But, the limitation is that many of these alternative platforms are just as restrictive or more so than Twitter itself. “Social media companies no longer make bold decisions regarding their platforms, and allowing [sex workers] to exist is currently seen as a bold decision,” Pornhub Award winner Gwen Adora told AVN. Adora was featured in the Netflix documentary Money Shot: The Pornhub Story, and has been an outspoken advocate for performer rights, including on social media platforms. “They are not afraid of us—they just currently don’t see us as a viable option for their bottom lines, which, yes, does include the ability to process payments.” Adora pointed to how the social media crackdowns are a symptom of the same thing: FOSTA-SESTA and the fight over porn, sex trafficking and speech. Suzanne Hillinger, the director of Money Shot, developed the arguments in the film based on outlandish beliefs from anti-porn hate groups like the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), which was central to the social media and news campaign, à la controversial Pulitzer winner Nicholas Kristof and The New York Times opinion section. Adora, among dozens of other adult performers, was named in legal filings and anti-porn screeds that were able to convince major credit card companies Mastercard and Visa to completely block payment processing for monetization through sites owned by Pornhub parent MindGeek and independent sites swept up in the moral panic. And, due to FOSTA-SESTA’s haunting of the social media space, there is ample justification to lump shadowbanning and financial discrimination into the same issue. “The banks have equally as much stake in sex workers being banned on social media as the actual companies do. But I do think the backlash from the ‘think of the children’ crowd also has a lot to do with why we’re not supported on social platforms,” Adora concluded. She’s right in many ways. Hillinger interviewed members of the anti-porn movement and Kristof, and they completely dismissed the harm their censorship campaigns do to those who are engaged in otherwise legal forms of speech and expression. This includes Dani Pinter, a senior counsel for NCOSE. The NCOSE group is a very controversial organization because it has a far-right and religious conservative background, despite trying to co-opt the credibility of legitimate anti-trafficking advocacy groups like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which receives funding from the U.S. Department of Justice. As Adora, Hillinger and the other industry participants laid out in the documentary, the anti-pornography movement focuses on issues that aren’t even related to the actual activity of the industry. However, it is individuals like Kristof and Pinter who were able to strike fear in companies that are far more powerful than MindGeek—large banks and credit card companies—and resulted in a massive censorship campaign that is still harming all performers. TikTok was named to the NCOSE "dirty dozen" list—an annual fundraising scheme used by NCOSE to publicly shame for-profit and non-profit mainstream organizations for supposedly enabling systematic sexual exploitation. TikTok was characterized as an enabler of sexual exploitation, which was a talking point added to the far-right’s efforts to ban the video app due to concerns over unlawful surveillance linked to the Chinese government and Communist Party of China. Former President Donald Trump turned TikTok into a flashpoint in a large trade war between Washington, D.C. and Beijing. NCOSE’s campaigning against TikTok was just adding fuel to the fire. That fire directed TikTok, in a generally smart business decision, to overhaul its trust and safety program and implement new age restriction tools and parental filters. While this isn’t necessarily an issue for an influencer, the overhaul of the trust and safety programs resulted in something we’ve seen at other major platforms: broad policies, and puritanical results. This isn’t to say that most adult entertainment professionals don’t want policies to restrict underage users or users who don’t want to interact with explicit content from seeing it. The vast majority of these professionals do. But, as noted, this has resulted in spoken and unspoken rules that place sex workers and adult entertainers in situations where they’re scrutinized much more than others.  Allie Eve Knox, a Texas-based fetish performer and advisor at SpankChain, has dealt with the ongoing hassles of mainstream social media. Knox posted on Twitter Wednesday about how her TikTok account is unrecoverable. Despite TikTok having a clear ban on nudity and sexual activity, adult content creators and porn stars have managed to grow their online presence through the controversial social media network. In fact, TikTok is proving to be a central component of an adult entertainer’s overall digital strategy. Knox was first banned from the platform last October and attempted to appeal the decision, but was immediately denied. She proceeded to press TikTok’s trust and safety team to address the ban, but it turned into an eight-month affair resulting in her account being unrecoverable. “I'm all about keeping the internet safe,” Knox told AVN. “But if it takes a company 8 months to respond to something that had to be done in 30 days, then their moderation and support is obviously not sufficient enough. I lost my followers, my friends, my content.” Her account had no previous violations, she said, nor did she ever appear nude or push the platform rules on nudity. “It was a blatant attack on a sex worker and a slap in the face to creators on their platform,” regardless of whether the creators are creating explicit content, she said. Due to this external pressure and a variety of factors, including FOSTA-SESTA (which NCOSE campaigned for aggressively), it is not surprising that mainstream social media is a discriminatory environment against sex workers. “These types of blanket bans for sex workers severely hurt our income, for sure,” Knox added. “But we also lose our community and content we work very hard for. That's super frustrating and sad. I haven't made another TikTok account since, despite being active every day on my previous account. I'm still very much heartbroken about losing all of my friends and my videos [on TikTok].”