Abstract Online platforms exert significant power: While offering users opportunities to earn income, they may easily deplatform them by removing their accounts for breaking platform rules. Policy feedback literature and analyses of survey and in-depth interview data about US-based sex workers’ online platform experiences illuminates how users may respond to this platform policy. Sex workers offer a particularly instructive case because, while all workers are potentially vulnerable to deplatforming, sex workers face additional risks in the form of criminal penalties (for prostitution, in most of the United States). Even as one could expect that the threat of deplatforming would suppress sex workers’ civic and political engagement, they often demonstrate “user” and “political” feedback effects instead. Sex workers advocate for themselves by interacting with platforms and navigating their restrictions to continue working and maintain peer contact (user effects). Deplatforming also motivates sex workers to share organizational, legal, and policy-related information and calls to action, despite risks accompanying these activities (political effects). Altogether, their experiences with deplatforming advance policy feedback research by elucidating the implications of corporate policies for contemporary work and civic life, particularly for marginalized communities.
Majic et al. (Mon,) studied this question.