Surveil to protect and surveil to punish: Strategies to tackle sexual exploitation between national law and global corporate policies

Author: Morgillo, Carmela & Lannier, Salomé

Abstract: This article offers a transdisciplinary contribution to the debate on the global impact of the U.S. Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2018 (FOSTA) by examining the terms of services and community guidelines adopted by Meta-owned Instagram and X. While aiming to curb sex trafficking, FOSTA-enabled platforms to adopt U.S.-centric moderation practices that censor sexual content globally, regardless of national legal frameworks on sex work and both international and country-specific definitions of trafficking. Beyond their failure to effectively support antitrafficking efforts, platforms’ decision to align their policies to the language of U.S. legal discourse can be understood as a breach of state sovereignty. Through their punitive approach against content that fails to comply with their post-FOSTA policies, platforms effectively force users to internalize American legal consciousness, regardless of their geopolitical location. Sex workers are the ones who are most impacted by these decisions, even in countries where their work is not criminalized. To survive online and the offline harms of deplatforming, they readapt their social media behaviors to what we define as the technologies of the FOSTA-self, a set of self-disciplining and self-censoring practices aimed at bypassing platform surveillance and retaining visibility.

Keywords: sexual exploitation, sex work, FOSTA, platform governance, surveillance, sovereignity