Paper Short Abstract:

This paper investigates how social media platforms’ post FOSTA/SESTA moderation and regulation of sexual content impacts users’ online and offline behaviours, with a special focus on sex workers and pole dancers.

Paper Abstract:

Media platforms encourage sharing practices and create an alternative economy where creators can profit off selling services as much as access to their private lives. Following the 2018 FOSTA/SESTA bill, platforms have implemented new, and more more pervasive algorithmic surveillance mechanisms and automated moderation systems that allow to flag, invisibilize, and remove content. However, because algorithms are not trained to understand context, platforms often issue warnings about content that does not actually violate their Terms of Service while failing to moderate dangerous material or abusive user interactions. Under the guise of complying with legislation and keeping communities safe, platform governance has become even more opaque, leaving many users to feel powerless against the constant threat of silencing and deplatforming.

In my work, I explore how within the post-FOSTA/SESTA digital landscape, platforms’ attempt to curb sexual content has radically changed the ways in which people interact with social media. Specifically, considering how platforms’ crusades against nudity and sexual activity targets both sex workers and pole dancers in the same way, I look at how these groups merge algorithmic folklore and human creativity to test, implement, and globalise new media strategies to adapt their lives to algorithms (and survive them). Drawing from Foucault (1988), I define these as the Technologies of the FOSTA/SESTA self, a complex mix of self-censorship, code-cracking, and semantic shifts that offer the promise to improve online visibility, escape algorithmic surveillance, and obtain digital immortality.