Plenty of sites ban explicit material or the advertising of sex workers’ services. It’s relatively easy to find out which sites disallow that kind of content from their TOS and a cursory Google search. What can be harder to work out is whether a site will allow you to discuss sex work and to what extent you’ll be suppressed and censored and demonetized if you do. Large swathes of the internet are hostile to even the mention of sex work, while a variety of social media platforms allow some level of discussion of it.
Let’s go over some of the more popular social media websites and what will happen if you discuss sex work on them.
X
For now, X still allows discussions of sex work because it allows adult content in general, up to and including users posting nude images and advertising sexual services. This might make it seem like a sex worker friendly platform, but it isn’t. It’s just not as overtly hostile as a lot of other platforms are.
Accounts that regularly post about sex work are likely to be shadowbanned, which means they won’t show up in the search bar or be suggested unless you type out the full username spelled correctly and press enter to look through @ mentions and posts containing the username. This isn’t guaranteed to happen, but will usually occur if you both post about sex work and have low engagement with your posts.
While you can speak openly about sex work on X without running afoul of the TOS, you should also be prepared to receive harassment when you do. There are SWERFs (sex work exclusionary radical feminists) and other groups who oppose sex workers’ rights who will search phrases like “sex work” and “onlyfans” and “prostitution” and “strip club” and comment on any post which does not actively condemn sex work.
Harassment on the platform is widespread and not handled by the moderators at X. Though your speech about sex work isn’t being suppressed as harshly by X as a platform as it might be by other sites, the user base will try to get you to stop showing support to sex workers and they’re a component worth considering. If your posts aren’t being seen by those who could benefit from them, and you’re constantly enduring harassment from people who claim you’re no better than a pimp, that’s going to make you start to self-censor or stop posting about supporting sex workers, after enough time.
Tumblr
Although Tumblr is now infamous for having banned porn, that ban has largely only applied to visual media. This means that written text about sex work, whether it is graphic in nature or not, was not swept away with Tumblr’s restriction on adult content. Still, there are many things to consider when speaking about sex work on the site.
If you make an untagged post on Tumblr where you talk about sex workers’ rights, explain an issue sex workers face, or discuss an experience had whilst making porn or selling sex or stripping, your post will not be removed for that alone. A cheer for the bare minimum! Issues begin when you start tagging, trying to gain traction or spread knowledge, and when you want to find other people posting about sex work on Tumblr (especially if you don’t want to have to wade through porn to find it).
Community labels, allowing you to warn users when a post contains sexual themes or mentions of drugs or alcohol, seem like a great idea when creating a website where many people will want to opt out of posts about certain topics. It’s easier for new users than expecting them to ban every tag that might be used in relation to such posts and it means they won’t be stuck seeing posts about alcohol that the blogs they follow have forgotten to tag, for example. Unfortunately, Tumblr will sometimes apply these community labels without a user choosing them. In practice, any post about sex work may be labelled as having sexual themes, even if all it discusses are the workers’ rights that we are fighting for or the higher rate of violence we experience.
Tumblr also does not allow you to search the phrase “sex work” as a tag, and will warn you that your search is likely to produce results which do not follow their guidelines and thus none of the results will be shown. It does, however, allow you to search “sexwork” with no spaces, or tags like “sex work is work” and “anti swerf” among others. In practice, this means that anything people post about sex work is split across various tags and anyone trying to search for content about sex work will have a much harder time finding it. This limits your reach.
The tags that you can find which are related to sex work and haven’t been censored are unsurprisingly full of advertising and nudes, because Tumblr pushes sex workers into these tags by banning those that sex workers would prefer to use for advertising. Instead of allowing users to avoid porn and adverts for adult content, they see more of it in tags which are about other topics because sex workers have no other option when trying to get their content seen.
I post educational content about sex work on Tumblr and I primarily have to rely on using broader tags like “feminism” with the hopes that the right people will find the content and share it. Some posts are ineligible for the paid Blaze feature because they are considered sexual, even when the content is educational and appropriate for those who are 13 and above (Tumblr’s minimum age) from a sex education perspective.
Perhaps because of how notorious Reddit is for containing porn, being used by many as a way to seek out free nudes, it is built to assume that any content discussing sex work is porn or erotica rather than considering that it might be educational in nature. You can discuss sex work on the platform, but you will be treated as if what you are posting is porn.
Any account that regularly makes posts about sex work will be treated as an adult account. If you post to your own Reddit account feed about something that is not about sex work at all, you will be unable to remove the tag which labels it as adult content and your entire account will be labelled as adult after you’ve been posting for any significant amount of time.
Each subreddit will have it’s own rules, so having your posts labelled as adult content will not necessarily limit your reach too much if you post in the right places. There are subreddits for the discussion of issues that sex workers have, or other subreddits which allow such discussion – though many of them will expect you to label these discussions as “NSFW” simply for the mention of sex work.
Compared to many other social media platforms, Facebook is very restrictive. It frames itself as family friendly in a way that many other sites do not, and disallows adult content accordingly. Educational content about sex work is often swept up in this.
You can make posts to your Facebook account where you mention sex workers’ rights or books and media about sex workers. Even if reported, these posts are likely to be allowed to stay. For Facebook, these posts will cross the line when they’re considered to be graphic in nature. If everyone who follows your Facebook account is fine with what you post, posts about sex work generally won’t be auto-flagged as inappropriate (though it can happen depending on what words you use in the post), and you can get away even with breaking Facebook’s guidelines on appropriate posting… but there’s always the risk someone will maliciously report you!
Anything you post that is considered graphic, even signs with slogans like “blowjobs are real jobs, and real jobs suck”, are likely to be deleted by Facebook if a moderator gets a look at them. Typing out phrases like this may be caught by Facebook’s automatic filters, too. Your posts on this platform will need to be sanitized and vague.
TikTok
Your best bet if you’re determined to talk about sex work on TikTok is to censor yourself and use euphemisms.
Using the phrase “sex work” will often trigger automatic moderation of your content. Even if your post ends up being approved, it won’t be shown to anyone or show up on the “For You” page and it’ll be hidden whilst it’s in review. By the time the video is up, it will be days old and deprioritized anyway and you can expect only a handful of views coming only from your followers.
Tagging videos as being about sex work is pointless, because these tags will trigger a review of the content and get your videos far less views. This also means you cannot search for videos using tags either. There are a few old videos which became popular against the odds which will show up if you search for videos about sex work, but you won’t find new videos once you’ve watched the small number available to you through those searches.
Since everyone is censoring themselves, the only way to reliably find content about sex workers’ rights or experiences on TikTok is to follow people who you know frequently discuss the topics and who heavily self-censor. A lot of these creators are people who are using TikTok as a way to advertise, who will make videos about their experience of doing sex work in between TikToks which show off their outfits or where they make jokes to charm people. The downside to this is that these creators are incentivized to talk about sex work in a more sanitized and exclusively positive way, because they’re aware that they have many potential customers following them and don’t want to put them off.
YouTube
Discussing sex work on YouTube isn’t banned in its entirety, but it is restricted. You cannot make videos with graphic sexual content on YouTube, but you can discuss sex in an educational way. The catch is that many videos which discuss sex work will end up being restricted to 18+, or will be placed under review and restricted this way temporarily, which lowers the number of people who will see the video in that time and it is only accessible to people who are logged in and over 18. These videos are also highly likely to be demonetized.
Some videos on the topic of sex work do very well on YouTube, such as this video about sex work by Philosophy Tube, or various TedTalks about it like this one by Juno Mac.
Large accounts which attract more views are going to be treated more favourably when it comes to posting videos which discuss sex work. They will be given more leeway and decisions will be looked over more carefully by moderators, whereas decisions to demonetize or restrict videos by smaller accounts may be made entirely by automated systems which no-one reviews. Unfortunately, you cannot rely on looking at what other channels have been permitted to say and use that as a benchmark for what you can put in your own YouTube video if your channel is not of a comparable level of popularity.
Accounts belonging to sex workers are often deleted from Instagram, even when they are not advertising the sale of sexual services, out of concern that they will do so. Non sex workers will have an easier time posting content related to sex work for this reason. The content itself is not the issue, so much as the person who is posting it and whether Instagram thinks there is a risk that the sex worker will begin to advertise sexual services there.
Although it is not their official policy, I have noticed that Instagram generally bans accounts for posting about sex work (even in an educational way or with memes and fun projects about our experiences) if that is the majority of what the account posts. Making a singular post about sex workers’ rights or an event is very unlikely to result in your account being removed. Collectives of sex workers who put on events are also much less likely to be banned than individual sex workers are.
Just like plenty of other sites, the tagging system around the topic of sex work is a mess. You can’t search #sexwork but you can search #sexworkers and #sexworkiswork, which is arbitrary and ridiculous.
Your Own Site
Having your own website gives you the most freedom to say whatever you want about sex work. This is precisely the reason that I use this blog to publish writing about sex work, collate the resources I make, and then post those articles onto other social media platforms. Using an external link allows you to bypass a lot of the rules or censorship which will be placed upon you. It is much easier to write a short description to explain what’s in the post that complies with the rules of each website than it is to rewrite the post in a dozen different ways to try and comply with the rules of each site and avoid being censored or hidden for it.
The current legal landscape around sex work is growing more messy every day, with legislation passing that makes social media companies nervous about allowing mentions of sex work on their platforms. Posts made on those sites which are created to follow all of the rules and to be seen by as many people as possible are only as safe from being hidden as they were on the day they were made; the rules around posting about sex work could change at any time. The rules don’t change for your own website unless you decide they do.
If you can, support sex workers who go through the effort of talking about sex work despite all these restrictions. Follow us, subscribe to us, like and comment, buy media we make about sex work – anything you can do to keep us from bring driven off the internet is immensely helpful.
(If you’re interested in reading about sex work offline, in a book written and published by sex workers which has no need to self-censor, please check out my current project Working Guys: A Transmasculine Sex Worker Anthology!)
Jack Talks About Sex Work 