SESTA/FOSTA

SESTA/FOSTA

SESTA (Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act) and FOSTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) are two bills that not only work to defeat sex trafficking, but on a more contradictory note, they both are responsible in silencing and deplatforming sex workers. Since it’s conception, SESTA/FOSTA has done more harm for sex workers than good. Both highlight how sex trafficking is confused with sex work. 

Sex trafficking involves forcing someone into acts of sexual work for pay without consent or permission. This usually involves children or young adults who are placed in this situation against their will. Sex work, on the contrary, is a CONSENSUAL sexual act, fantasy, fetish, kink, videography or photography between two adults, for the exchange of currency. Sex work includes: stripping, escorting, webcamming, domme work, etc. 

SESTA/FOSTA works to shut down social media platforms of current sex workers. This also includes banning them from common payment processors or holding earned funds if their work is deemed as “unacceptable”. For example, think about how quickly your Instagram can get shut down if you “show too much” or even having to censor certain language. This creates dangerous situations where sex workers have to find less safe or discreet ways to post their content. 

So how do you get around it online?

This can be done by finding loopholes on social media platforms and taking the one step extra to protect yourself against these cyber attacks. Here are some loopholes:

• Never discuss exchange of paid content or sessions on social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Fetlife, Kink’d, etc 

Although some of these websites appear sex work friendly (Fetlife for example), they are against the discussion of monetary exchange. It is best to take these kind of conversations to text messaging apps or messengers apps like Kik

• Be careful about what email platforms you use 

Yes, Gmail is super beneficial and accessible in vanilla life, but most sex workers use email platforms like Proton Mail instead. This provides encryption and privacy to discuss monetary exchange

• Don’t overload the hashtags 

On websites such as Instagram, be mindful of the hashtags you’re using and how many you’re posting.

• Edit profile settings 

On my page, I’ve changed my gender to ‘Male’ and set my page to private once I got up to 500 followers. I’ve noticed I haven’t been tracked since doing this. 

• Setting up payment processing 

Platforms like PayPal allow you to switch to a business account and from here, you are able to get by without using your real name. Also when receiving tributes I’d money, be sure to tell the client NOT to put anything in the description box.