It’s been 2 years since FOSTA-SESTA was signed into law. There’s been immense damage to sex working communities, but there’s also been an explosion in sex worker-led organizing, digital and offline. The U.S. sex workers rights movement has grown remarkably in the past 2 years

Despite socio-technological power becoming increasingly concentrated in the wrong hands, sex workers continue to mobilize their communities via new technologies. The hashtags #LetUsSurvive and #SurvivorsAgainstSESTA show one case of digital resistance against criminalization

The #LetUsSurvive and #SurvivorsAgainstSESTA hashtags acted as vehicles for novel sex worker-led organizing efforts that continue to persist today. They also exemplified the long existing sex worker movement networks and movement histories in the U.S.

The campaign against FOSTA-SESTA (like the ones led by sex workers before and after) shine a blinding light on the paradoxical conditions of mobilization via threat for sex workers, especially in a digital age, and *especially* in a FOSTA-SESTA surveillance state

While social media and other internet tools offer new opportunities, sex workers are facing new dangers—including online harassment, privacy invasion, state and corporate surveillance, the cops, etc. Sex worker organizing efforts fall prey to these additional threats and risks

After 2 years of tracking these tags and several years of analyzing sex worker movement activity, I have so many concerns and questions (as do most people involved in sex worker advocacy efforts)

How are we reinforcing the power we’re building online, how are we extending those networks offline? How are we working to strengthen our connectivity in a way that reflects and addresses the harsh conditions criminalized workers are forced to organize under?

How are we addressing power and privilege? Why is it that #LetUsSurvive and #SurvivorsAgainstSESTA gained so much traction while other hashtags such as #BlackSexWorkersMatter & the slew of tags boosting campaigns to free incarcerated sex workers struggle to stay in the spotlight?

How are we addressing burnout? 50.5% of respondents on @hackinghustling’s recent survey said their community engagement increased after FOSTA/SESTA. There’s been an influx of ppl getting involved in movement work, but burning out severely on top of criminalization getting harsher

We need to be clear how sex workers are organizing under conditions of threat, not necessarily conditions of traditionally defined opportunity. With harsher surveillance and criminalization, sex workers are forced to exist and resist under increasingly paradoxical conditions

Virtual worlds themselves are sites of repression and censorship is absolutely a form of state political power to stifle movement activity, especially spontaneous mobilizations. These forms of digital repression frequently target sex workers, with #FuckEARNIT being the latest

What’s truly remarkable is the resilience of sex working communities. We are seeing sex workers organize in areas of the U.S. that have zero recorded history of sex worker collective action, we are seeing new groups + coalitions form across the country. This is A VERY HUGE DEAL!