Regulating and representing camming: Strict limits on acceptable content on webcam sex platforms

Stegeman, Hanne Marleen

doi:10.1177/14614448211059117

Cited by 40 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…Most webcam platforms provide an algorithmically ranked homepage, which is largely opaque to performers and can reinforce social inequalities . In addition, webcam models have to also deal with ambiguous moderation practices (Stegeman 2021). With regards to generating revenue as a performer, ranking and moderation systems are not the only elements that matter.…”

Section: What Is (Un)seen In the Webcamming Industry: Business Models...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Platforms and the Precarity of Creator (In)visibility

Stegeman

Poell

Duffy

et al. 2023

SPIR

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This panel examines the tension between visibility and invisibility in the platform-creator relationship with a focus on highly precarious areas of cultural production, including online sex workers, body activists, and LGBTQ+ content creators. Together, the panelists consider: what kinds of creators are made visible on platforms? Conversely, who remains invisible? How do platforms and their algorithms afford (in)visibility to marginalized and stigmatized creators? How do these groups resist top-down (in)visibility regimes? Finally, how do such (in)visibility regimes challenge or reaffirm other forms of social marginalization? Primarily drawing on interviews with creators on a variety of social media and webcam sex platforms, the panelists examine the complex dynamic between visibility and invisibility. The first paper studies the role of algorithmic labor and capital in the wider hierarchies that structure the contemporary creator economy. In turn, the second paper further develops this inquiry, studying how people of size grapple with their datafied presence and develop strategies for safely navigating algorithmically mediated hyper(in)visibility. The third paper focuses on performers on webcam sex platforms, showing how these performers engage with visibility beyond that provided by platform algorithms, while simultaneously seeking invisibility, where possible. Finally, the fourth paper—drawing on an interface analysis of 50 high-traffic webcam sex platforms—analyzes the information and affordances available to performers. Taken together, the panelists show how platforms shape the kinds of (in)visibility afforded to precarious laborers, while also showing how they seek to resist this erasure and challenge the vulnerabilities of being “seen.”

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Section: What Is (Un)seen In the Webcamming Industry: Business Models...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Platforms and the Precarity of Creator (In)visibility

Stegeman

Poell

Duffy

et al. 2023

SPIR

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“…Online sex work shares these factors and should be included in mainstream debates on gig work (Hardy & Barbagallo, 2021, p.44; Rand, 2019, p.535). On adult platforms, as on other gig working platforms, workers are seen as independent contractors (Gregory, 2020, p.4; Stegeman, 2021, p.10), in competition with each other for jobs managed by algorithms (Jones, 2016, p.229; Van Doorn, 2017, p.904).…”

Section: Situating Online Sex Work As Digital Labormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Online sex work, with the increasing popularity of platforms, such as OnlyFans, culturally shift sex work into a space of ‘influencer’/content producer (Easterbrook‐Smith, 2022), distancing online sex work from direct, in‐person sex work through the platforms' governance frameworks (Stegeman, 2021). In this context, media reports of ‘easy’ and ‘excessive’ incomes from online, indirect sex work become an attractive option for many.…”

Section: Negotiating Affordances In Gendered Labormentioning

confidence: 99%

Navigating and resisting platform affordances: Online sex work as digital labor

Rand,

Stegeman

2023

Gender Work & Organization

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The context in which labor occurs shapes work. In online work, the platform is one site of work and therefore influences the experiences of workers. Current research on affordances considers how these platform features create value for the platform, shape workers' rights and safety, and reinforce existing racial hierarchies through algorithms. This project, researching online sex work practices in the UK, adds to this literature on platform work by analyzing how workers themselves experience and view the role of platform affordances in their work. With sex work as gendered and stigmatized labor, it also provides unique insights into the role of platforms in valuing typically feminized work both economically and culturally. Drawing on 19 interviews with workers on the UK‐dominant platform AdultWork and platform observations, we show that platform affordances do create, shape, and maintain the valuation of online labor but in dynamic and relational processes with workers. Structural analysis shows how platform affordances may create competition that decreases the value of labor, but individually sex workers revealed strategies to engage with these affordances to resist devaluation and set boundaries in what appears to be a highly competitive market, thus, highlighting the multidirectional, relational agency, and connectivity between platform affordances and workers. By focusing on the experiences of sex workers, the findings contribute to discussions on the role of platforms in valuing feminized online labor.

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“…Jones' Camming is an in-depth study of webcam workers [70], and she has also investigated racism in this area [67], and the experiences of fat [69] and transmasculine workers [71]. Stegman examined the terms and conditions of camming platforms, finding that these platforms attempt to re-frame the webcamming work as "not-work" in order to preclude online-only sex workers from worker rights [126]. Nayar [97] investigates the way professionalism and amateurism interact in webcamming while Vlase and Preoteasa [139] investigate whether camming is a flexible and/or insecure type of platform gig work.…”

Section: Sex Work and Techmentioning

confidence: 99%

Risk, Resilience and Reward: Impacts of Shifting to Digital Sex Work

Hamilton¹,

Barakat²,

Redmiles³

2022

Preprint

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Workers from a variety of industries rapidly shifted to remote work at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While existing work has examined the impact of this shift on office workers, little work has examined how shifting from in-person to online work affected workers in the informal labor sector. We examine the impact of shifting from in-person to online-only work on a particularly marginalized group of workers: sex workers. Through 34 qualitative interviews with sex workers from seven countries in the Global North, we examine how a shift to online-only sex work impacted:(1) working conditions, (2) risks and protective behaviors, and (3) labor rewards. We find that online work offers benefits to sex workers' financial and physical well-being. However, online-only work introduces new and greater digital and mental health risks as a result of the need to be publicly visible on more platforms and to share more explicit content. From our findings we propose design and platform governance suggestions for digital sex workers and for informal workers more broadly, particularly those who create and sell digital content.

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Regulating and representing camming: Strict limits on acceptable content on webcam sex platforms

Cited by 40 publications

References 50 publications

Platforms and the Precarity of Creator (In)visibility

Platforms and the Precarity of Creator (In)visibility

Navigating and resisting platform affordances: Online sex work as digital labor

Risk, Resilience and Reward: Impacts of Shifting to Digital Sex Work

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