Community Under Surveillance: Impacts of Marginalization on an Online Labor Forum

Abstract

A breadth of literature has examined how gig workers use online forums. The past literature focuses primarily on how gig workers for mainstream corporate platforms leverage forums. Yet, marginalization, stigma, censorship, and criminalization all shape how people, including gig workers, use digital technology. In this work, we seek to take a first step toward understanding how marginalized, stigmatized, digitally censored, and in some cases criminalized gig workers leverage the affordances of online public forums to build community and increase their welfare. To do so, we conduct a qualitative analysis of 4,000 posts and 25,851 comments shared over four months in a large online public forum used by sex workers for peer support. Sex workers sit at the intersection of multiple marginalized communities, and thus offer a lens into the broader use of forums by marginalized labor communities. Our findings offer insight into how these workers use moderation to preserve their safety and community. Further, we highlight similarities and differences between how this community utilizes the forum platform and prior scholarship on the use of online forums by gig workers.

440 Sex Workers Cannot Be Wrong: Engaging and Negotiating Online Platform Power

“…Although we surveyed sex workers across the United States, our survey was conducted in English; reaching those who speak a range of languages would have further diversified our respondent pool and our data about sex workers' experiences online. Furthermore, given the emerging evidence of how SESTA/FOSTA and de-platforming shape sex workers' experiences outside of the United States (see, e.g., Burns and Benz 2023;Tichenor 2020;Barakat and Redmiles 2021), further studies to this end will expand our knowledge about how sex workers experience and navigate platform power in and across different regulatory contexts. them in a more formal survey format to our partners for review again.…”

“…Emerging research, which focuses mainly on the post-2018 era, following the passage of SESTA/FOSTA (the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)), discussed more below, indicates that online platforms often remove sex workers from their accounts and/or restrict their access, which compromises their capacity to earn income, screen clients, and communicate with their peers, among other consequences (see, e.g., Wolf 2020a, 2020b;Blunt and Stardust 2021;Burns and Benz 2023;Tichenor 2020;Barakat and Redmiles 2021;Musto et al 2021). In so doing, platforms exercise power, which, as we explain below, we understand as the capacity to define and enforce "the terms of access through which large numbers of consumers access goods, services, and information" (Culpepper and Thelen 2020, p. 288).…”

Polarization dynamics: a study of individuals shifting between political communities on social media

“…This study strictly adheres to ethical considerations by exclusively utilizing publicly available data [16]. No data from private user accounts were collected or utilized.…”