Digital Rights - Scarlet Alliance

Platforms increasingly over-use AI to target, detect and remove sex worker content, but this software can’t tell the difference between sex and sex education, or between consensual content and abuse.

Sexual and reproductive health promotion often includes frank discussions and images, such as diagrams of anatomy, condom demonstrations, and depictions of sexual acts. Empirical studies show that automated and human moderators routinely misclassify such content as pornography. This has created a systematic suppression of sexual and reproductive health information across major platforms, and the suspension or removal of accounts by not-for-profit organisations, creators, and small businesses.

For sex workers, the consequences extend well beyond losing online visibility. Content moderation systems do not recognise state and territory laws such as sex work decriminalisation and anti-discrimination protections. The result is shadowbanning and deplatforming which undermines our income, mental health, political participation and ability to share vital safety information with each other. The laws sex workers fought for to protect our real life work lives do not currently extend our online lives.

Digital surveillance and discriminatory algorithms are enabling banks, financial services and payment processors to deny sex workers access to the same services and platforms as everyone else.

Banks routinely close or refuse accounts for brothels, escort agencies and individual sex workers, often citing vague “reputational risk” policies rather than anything about how the business is actually run. Payment processors do the same: PayPal automatically flags anything linked to “sexually oriented” services, and Stripe shuts down sex work accounts on the same grounds. Airbnb uses algorithms to identify and exclude users it suspects are sex workers, based on flawed assumptions about risk rather than evidence.

These technologies cut sex workers off from basic financial infrastructure that every other business relies on, even in places where our work is legal. This is discrimination by design.

Rules that push platforms to scan messages and files for ‘illegal’ content may sound reasonable in principle. In practice, it means either breaking encryption (the protection that keeps what you send and store online private) or tech companies scanning all content on every users’ device before content is sent.

These systems aren’t accurate enough to be trusted with this kind of power, and sex workers are more exposed to their mistakes than most. There are no proposed means of avoiding, appealing or challenging incorrect categorisation of content – leaving sex workers open to being treated unfairly and at risk of privacy breaches.

Censorship is no substitute for comprehensive sexuality education or meaningful online safety.

When schools and parents fail to provide comprehensive, age-appropriate relationship and sexuality education, young people may turn to pornography to fill those gaps. Rather than addressing these gaps, Australia’s Online Safety Act 2021 requires tech companies to implement ‘age assurance’ technologies to prevent people under the age of 18 from seeing adult content. These technologies do not hold up as a solution – they are expensive to implement, often inaccurate, encourage platforms to collect and store unnecessary data, and easy to bypass with a VPN or someone else’s ID.

Faced with the costs and risks of compliance, platforms may instead choose blanket content removal and mass deplatforming over introducing expensive age-gating technologies or investing in human-moderated compliance measures.

This approach restricts sex workers’ access to digital platforms, and undermines our rights by removing the choice about where and how we work. It also drives users towards pirated or unregulated content and does little to address harms such as content scraping and non-consensual intimate image sharing.