Sex Worker Search

I recently arranged for the team at Tryst, an advertising platform made by sex workers for sex workers, to do an AMA, Ask Me Anything Interview on the /r/sexworkers subreddit so that people could ask questions and receive responses in real-time during a four hour time window.

As a volunteer moderator on the /r/sexworkers and /r/sexworkersonly subreddits, I'm sometimes an intermediary when sex workers are having trouble with their Tryst accounts and I comment tagging the username of the Tryst representatives on reddit. They get a notification that their username has been mentioned and sometimes this helps eg to get people's ads online sooner when they're waiting for verification.

Via reddit comments, modmails behind the scenes with the Tryst team and emailing Tryst about their privacy policies for my previous blog post, I've gotten a sense that Tryst are amongst the few good guys out there running escort directories.

I'm not affiliated with Tryst, I'm not on their payroll and I suppose we're in competition, or we will be when Sexworkersearch reaches it's full potential.

But I don't mind saying, I think Tryst is the best platform out there for sex workers to advertise on right now.

They're not perfect. Tryst have their issues.

It currently takes them a month or two to verify each new account.

Scammers are, unfortunately proliferating.

Many accounts are scammers pretending to be in person providers with zero intention of ever meeting a client in person in an effort to direct traffic to online only content sales platforms like Onlyfans.

There's room for improvement but importantly, they are working hard to resolve these issues and do genuinely want to improve.

So far, Only Tryst, out of all the escort directories, has made any effort at all to ask sex workers on reddit what we think.

Megapersonals has also expressed interest in an AMA so I'm working to arrange this too.

Here is the full AMA, and here is a summary of the (anonymised) questions people asked and Tryst's responses =

How did the site become so saturated with ads of people who obviously do not offer in person services, or are scammers?

Alex from SWOP behind bars Community Support Hotline kindly agreed to an interview here on Sex Worker Search blog.

 

As per the SWOP Behind Bars website =

 

The Community Support Hotline (CSL) is a centralized toll-free hotline that can be accessed by anyone in North America for assistance with safety planning, networking and accessing resources. We receive more than 200 calls a week seeking assistance with a wide variety of issues from crisis support around and assault or an arrest, to sex positive resources for medical and mental health resources to housing and transportation requests. All of our services and support are provided by other sex workers and survivors. You are NOT alone! Need help right now? Call the hotline and speak to a peer that understands!

 

1-877-776-2004

 

Can you please share what inspired the launch of the Community Support Hotline, and how its' goals align with SWOP Behind Bars’ mission to Create Community from the Inside Out?

 

The Community Support Hotline was born out of necessity—because sex workers kept telling us what they needed, and we believed them. During the height of the pandemic, we were getting flooded with messages from incarcerated sex workers and folks in crisis: people being evicted, outed, stalked, arrested, ghosted by outreach orgs, or stuck in exploitative situations with no one safe to call. Most mainstream hotlines either ignored sex workers, treated them like criminals, or tried to “rescue” them without consent.

 

So we created something different: a peer-led, harm-reduction-based hotline that listens without judgment and responds with real-world options. The Hotline is an extension of SWOP Behind Bars’ mission to “Create Community from the Inside Out” by centering those who are most often left out—especially sex workers who are incarcerated, in reentry, or navigating state systems.

 

What specific needs or crises faced by sex workers is the Hotline designed to address, and how do you tailor your responses differently than traditional hotlines?

 

We handle a wide range of issues: everything from someone needing help with a bad date or finding housing, to reporting violence from clients or law enforcement, to needing commissary funds, court support, or just someone to talk to who gets it. We’ve helped people get emergency contraception, leave abusive work situations, navigate anti-trafficking “rescue” raids, and even reconnect with lost family members.

 

What makes us different from traditional hotlines is that we don’t assume the caller’s goal is to exit sex work—we’re here to support people where they’re at. That means safety planning, resource referrals, and advocacy—without the saviorism. And we never call the cops.

 

How are your Hotline volunteers and staff trained to handle sensitive, high‑risk, or emergency situations, and what backgrounds or expertise do they bring?

 

Our Hotline team is made up of peer workers and allies with lived and professional experience in harm reduction, social work, crisis response, reentry support, and sex worker rights advocacy. Every volunteer goes through intensive training that covers trauma-informed care, consent culture, safety planning, anti-carceral frameworks, and how to support people navigating criminalization, domestic violence, or trafficking without defaulting to law enforcement.

 

We also roleplay difficult calls, have protocols for high-risk scenarios, and do a lot of debriefing and peer support behind the scenes. The work is emotional and nuanced—and we’re big believers in taking care of each other, too.

 

Can you share any success stories? Either specific if those involved consent to sharing, or in general terms what do Community Support Hotline's success stories look like?

 

Success doesn’t always look dramatic. Sometimes it’s just a text that says, “I made it home safe.” Or someone finally getting a bus ticket and a prepaid phone after being stuck in a bad situation. Or helping a person in prison get their birth certificate so they can apply for a commutation. Or even just a survivor saying, “You’re the first person who didn’t make me feel broken.”

 

When consent allows, we share anonymized wins with our supporters to show that mutual aid and peer-led support works. Every story reminds us why we do this.

 

I was reading your Prank Calls, and Trafficking Conspiracies blog post  and as a moderator on the sexworkers subreddit, I can empathise since I'm often the one who has to intervene when non sex workers post something on the subreddit that's more like an X Files screenplay than reality. Do you have any good techniques for encouraging callers to believe in the lived experience of actual sex workers rather than whatever assumptions, misconceptions, hype, click bait or fake news they've been misled by?

 

Oh, the X-Files of it all. We’ve heard it all—from the caller who was sure their neighbor was running a trafficking ring because of “too many Uber Eats deliveries,” to folks convinced that every OnlyFans creator must be a victim in disguise.

 

Our approach is to meet people where they are without validating their assumptions. We often say, “That’s a serious claim. Let’s talk about what trafficking actually looks like, and what sex workers say would help them stay safe.” Redirecting people toward lived experience, data, and survivor voices—without immediately shutting them down—goes a long way. And sometimes, a little humor helps too.

 

What can people reading this do to help? For example what volunteer opportunities do you have available? What are the pre-requisites for call handlers?

 

We’re always looking for volunteers—especially peer support folks with lived experience in sex work, incarceration, or harm reduction work. We also welcome allies who want to help with admin, fundraising, or social media moderation.

 

For Hotline volunteers, we ask for a strong grounding in nonjudgmental care, reliability, and the ability to manage emotionally complex situations. Training is provided, and we’re especially committed to mentoring folks from marginalized communities into leadership roles.

 

Anyone interested in volunteering can visit The Volunteer page on the SWOP Behind Bars Website and fill out an interest form.

Thank you to MelRose Michaels for agreeing to this interview about GPTease, an AI-powered chatbot platform made by sex workers, for sex workers.

GPTease offers an unrestricted environment for generating NSFW (Not Safe For Work) content, including scripts, captions, and responses to client queries. If you need help drafting social media posts, writing content for your blog or composing a bio page for your website, GPTease is an invaluable tool to have at your disposal.

Unlike mainstream AI tools that often impose content limitations, GPTease is designed to provide a more open and flexible experience for users in the adult industry.

Question 1: Based on the latest news, various AI models like ChatGPT and Grok are starting to be more permissive about sex work related queries.  What features does GPTease offer that help to set it apart from other AI models?

While it’s encouraging to see other platforms beginning to open the door to adult industry queries, GPTease was built with sex workers at the center—not as an afterthought. Having an explicit GPT tool at your disposal makes a world of difference. Unlike mainstream models that may be "permissive," GPTease is purpose-built for adult content creators.

Question 2:  People have commented on the ability for GPTease to customize the tone of content it outputs to match the voice of a specific person. As someone who uses LLMs a lot, I have found this is where others like Chat GPT tend to be ineffective.  This leads me to wonder how GPTease was trained.  Can you go into detail on the dataset used to trained GPTease like where it came from, the size of it, do you keep retraining?

Our features go far beyond surface-level acceptance. We support spicy creators with tools that actually understand the language, tone, and business strategy behind successful content. Our NSFW GPT goes way beyond writing explicit scripts, fan messages, and femdom ideas. It crafts high-converting copy and can organize content ideas by platform - we’ve designed every aspect to meet the real needs of this industry.

Question 3: Your T&C's stress your respect for users of GPTease in terms of how you collect and handle user's data. I'd love to dig deeper into how you prioritize ethical considerations and privacy whilst operating a platform intended for sex workers.  For example do queries get used as part of future training or what your policies are for inquiries into information about your users, their chats, etc?

While we can’t share specific training details (they’re proprietary and if we share the sauce we'll put ourselves out of business), what I can say is this: GPTease has my 13+ years as an independant adult creator, who's worked in nearly every vertical of online adult work, at it's center. That's why GPTease doesn’t just tolerate adult content—it actually elevates it. Every feature is informed by the real workflow, challenges, and creative genius of a sex worker who treats this like the business it is. We’re proud to be the only AI built by and for this community, with no compromises.

Respect is at the core of everything we do—and we don’t just say that because it sounds cute in a TOS. GPTease wasn't just built to be a sexy chat gpt. It was built specifically with adult creators in mind. As one myself, I know how vulnerable it can feel to share content, strategy, or persona-driven prompts with an AI.

We do not use your prompts for future model training. Your personalization & memories inside GPTease are compartmentalized to your account to provide you with better responses. If we were to change that to improve the product for everyone, our creators would have a way to opt-out. We feel strongly that it's our responsibility to protect our users as fiercely as we protect the integrity of the product. Ethics & consent aren't a line item for us—it’s the foundation.

Question 4: Some users have mentioned that they were only getting 20 prompts on the paid plans, but it looks like your tiers are now 500 for Pro and 3000 for Power. Based on discussions on reddit, it looks like some users are using GPTease to generate responses in real time while they are chatting with clients.  The Pro and Power plans seem like ideal solutions to keep up with the large volume of queries generated by this kind of usage.  Have you recently increased your prompts or are you looking at increasing what is offered on the Pro and Power plans? Any chance of an unlimited plan?

You caught us—we did recently increase prompt counts based on user feedback and growing demand. These new limits were built to better support high-volume usage, especially for creators using GPTease during live chats or DM management.We know adult creators aren’t just writing one tweet and calling it a day—you’re scripting, responding, teasing, promoting, and selling. So we made sure the tiers matched that reality.

As for an unlimited plan? Our adult creators aren't currently hitting prompt limits on paid plans, so the need for unlimited doesn't appear to be significant beyond the perception of being 'limitless' haha. Never say never of course, but we want to make sure anything we roll out continues to be sustainable and high-quality - because the last thing we’ll ever do is compromise performance to slap on an “unlimited” sticker.

Question 5: With the ongoing changes to age verification laws in the U.S., UK, and other parts of the world, how do you anticipate platforms like GPTease might need to respond? If laws begin to require users to verify real-world identity details to access adult and sex work related content, do you think GPTease will need to move toward age-gating with identity verification, or will you geoblock access in the UK or certain U.S. states? As someone who’s worked with the Free Speech Coalition and initiatives like DefendOnlinePrivacy.com, what’s your perspective on the best path forward for platforms navigating these regulatory pressures?

This is such an important question, and one that keeps coming up more and more as the regulatory landscape shifts—especially around age verification and online privacy.

A big thank you to Adrie Rose for agreeing to speak with me about the upcoming Kickstarter funded anthology, I Hate My Job: Thots on Labor, Sex Work, and Capitalism.

Adrie has brought together a diverse group of current and former sex workers including =

• • Empress Mirage
  • Juniper Fitzgerald
  • Olivia Snow
  • Oyster
  • Miss Mei
  • Emily

Hate My Job is set to be published by Working Girls Press (WGP), a cooperative publisher founded in 2023 by Molly B. Simmons and Emily Marie Passos Duffy. With a mission to publish, promote, and support the writing and art of sex workers, WGP approaches publishing through collaborative and collectivist principles.

Previous titles published by Working Girls Press are available here.

The estimated book launch date for I Hate My Job: Thots on Labor, Sex Work, and Capitalism, is November 2025.

What inspired you to create this anthology? Was there a specific moment or experience that sparked the idea?

A lot of things, I think. This is, first and foremost, the culmination of years in, around, and on the periphery of the industry. I've had a lot of feelings, both positive and negative, about my time, my clients, and my interactions with non-sex workers based on their perception of me, and those feelings have evolved a lot during the last decade or so. It's probably more honest to say there wasn't a single moment or experience that was the catalyst -- just experiences in general.

The through-line for me, especially after I began reading Carol Leigh's work more, has always been that this is just a job. Some people really love their jobs, and some people, like me, are ambivalent at best. It's never felt fair, to me, that sex workers are never given permission to be ambivalent, or even negative, about their work without someone from the outside bearing down on them with demands that they justify their participation in the industry through empowerment or something inane. No other job, no other industry demands this -- not military service, not policing, not health insurance. It's only us. This book was born, if you will, out of a desire to give sex workers a safe place to say all the things we're not supposed to say.

With countries like New Zealand and Belgium leading the way, do you predict that more countries will decriminalise sex work?

I really wish that I could say yes. I think more countries will dabble with the Nordic Model, or iterations of it. But I really do believe we're in for a global wave of repression that hasn't been seen in several generations. I think there are a lot of very angry men, especially white men, who are looking to exact retribution on women, queer people, and people of colour and I think sex work(ers), as always, will be on the front lines of that cultural and legal fight.

At the risk of being accused of giving in to doomerism, I wouldn't say that it's entirely hopeless. I do believe that there are a lot of people, even in powerful positions, who want to create a better world. And I believe they're doing everything possible to make that hope a reality. But, that's an incredibly difficult fight in a world where populism is such an attractive ideology. I think we're just doing a very small, but necessary, part to make the fight a little easier.

I recently read Chokepoint Capitalism and also Technofeudalism and I'm finding the subject of big tech's role in modern capitalism fascinating. What do you see as the implications of big tech in terms of our ability to use online platforms for profit as sex worker's?

I mentioned this in a Q&A with our publisher, Working Girls Press, but I didn't include the impact of technology as a specific theme in the book because I didn't think I would be able to edit that writing in an appropriate way. I spent a lot of years in school fully immersed in how technology companies and financial institutions have an undue impact on sex workers and it's very difficult for me to approach that topic from a non-academic standpoint. I'll do my best with this question though.

I think tech is irrevocably intertwined with the future of sex work. With the loss of Twitter as a viable platform for advertising, we're seeing losses in earning potential that I, personally, haven't seen since Back page was taken offline. As more social media platforms become increasingly hostile to anything "other," I think the consequences will only grow. After the passage of SESTA/FOSTA, platforms like AirBnB started quietly targeting people suspected of "non-desirable" behaviour through the use of proprietary algorithms that scrape a user's device history. Technology and sex work cannot be separated from each other, and it's in every sex worker's best interest to learn as much as they can about how platforms operate, down to the line items of their Terms of Service and arbitration policies.

What was the biggest challenge in putting this anthology together? Any moments where you thought, “I hate this (anthology compiler and editor) job” while working on it?

We're still in the process of writing at the time of this interview, so I imagine the best/worst is yet to come. I have to imagine that the hardest part will be deciding what to cut. We have an incredible group of contributors and I do worry about the boundary between thoughtful edits, and changing their voice(s). I've been at the mercy of editors who were more interested in word counts or changing my writing to better fit their plan, so I would hate to make another person feel that way. Overall, I'm just so incredibly excited about putting this anthology together, and grateful to our contributors for their faith in me and WGP.

What do you hope readers take away from this collection? Is it more about catharsis, public education, social change, or something else?

A little bit of everything, I think? This is certainly cathartic, for me at least. I've spent a lot of time arguing with strangers on the internet, and less time trying to ignore them. This anthology is everything I've ever wanted to say, some of what I've already said, and things I haven't considered saying yet. There's certainly an element of education here, but that wasn't my primary goal. This book is meant to be a conversation between sex workers, for sex workers. We absolutely want everyone to grab a copy, but with the understanding that this is not a book for someone who is still trying to rationalise support or understanding for sex workers. This is not a 101-level course, so to speak. It's probably more akin to a 401- or 501-level. Along with education comes change, ideally, so that's definitely baked in. And of course, this book is meant to function as a safe place for everyone that's ever felt they didn't belong to the community, because they can't say they love what they do.

I already pledged for the E Book duo but if someone else wants to pre-order I Hate My Job, can they do so via the Kickstarter or is there some other way to pre-order or get notified when it's published?

One of the reasons I love WGP is that the Kickstarter is the pre-order process, which feels a little more equitable, because backers can get the book for a little less than the retail cost. Now that the Kickstarter is closed, there is a waiting list where people can sign up to get an email when the book officially launches.-

I had an interesting chat the other day with Image Angel, a digital image protection company, about their invisible watermarking technology designed to protect sex workers from unauthorised copying and sharing of our content.

What is Image Angel?

Image Angel is a tool that websites install to protect digital content. It works by deterring clients from sharing content without permission because they can be identified and held accountable if they do.

How is this technology helpful for sex workers?

Image Angel helps sex workers by adding an invisible marker to their content that identifies clients who share images without permission. This traceable marker acts as a strong deterrent against unauthorized sharing, as clients know they can be held accountable, helping protect the creator’s work and maintain control.

Can anyone install it?

No, Image Angel is designed for content-sharing platforms, websites, or companies to install. They pay for the service to be integrated into their systems. This allows them to protect creators' content, comply with online safety regulations, and enhance the safety of their platforms.

Why can Image Angel only be installed at the platform level?

Embedding an invisible fingerprint automatically when content is downloaded or accessed by the client happens server-side. This ensures consistent protection for all content without requiring individual users to manually apply or manage it.

Who can see the client’s information in the image?

To the human eye, it’s invisible. If there’s been a leak, Image Angel can extract the platform data and pass on that information to the platform to trace. If the creator wants to pursue the issue, the platform and Image Angel then work together to find the best outcome or course of action to hold the individual accountable for the image misuse.

What kind of resolutions can come from opening a case?

When a case is opened, the content creator remains in full control and can choose resolutions such as removing the leaked content, identifying the source of the unauthorized sharing, pursuing legal action, or holding the offender accountable through platform penalties. These kinds of outcomes empower creators and platforms to regain control, hold offenders accountable, and prevent further misuse.

How is Image Angel's watermarking technology superior to using reverse image search tools like Google Lens, PimEyes, or TinEye in terms of proactively protecting creators' content and addressing unauthorized use?

Image Angel’s watermarking technology gives creators stronger protection than image search tools by tackling problems before they happen, not after.

An invisible fingerprint is added when content is viewed, creating a clear link back to the source as soon as the image is opened or downloaded. This means unauthorized use can be prevented right from the start, unlike reverse image searches, which only find content once it’s already been misused.

If Image Angel detects unauthorized use of a watermarked image, will the owner receive an alert?

While Image Angel doesn’t offer real-time alerts for unauthorized use, we do have a dedicated support system to assist creators should the worst happen. If misuse happens, our team can help trace the fingerprint back to its source, providing crucial evidence for addressing the issue.

What is the process for having the content removed?

Our goal is to make sure those who fall victim to this feel supported, protected, and back in control of their content as quickly as possible. Image Angel offers a clear process to support creators in having the content removed, with a focus on evidence collection, support, and bespoke survivor-led resolution.

Would the presence of the watermark be sufficient proof of ownership for a takedown request, or would creators need to provide additional evidence such as raw files or identity documents?

While the watermark establishes guardianship of the image (showing it originated from a specific source), takedown requests often require stronger evidence to confirm actual ownership or rights over the content. Image Angel’s invisible watermark can add credibility to claims by providing traceable, tamper-proof data showing the image’s origin and timeline. This could help corroborate and support cases of repeat image-based violence rather than serve as standalone proof of image ownership.

Does Image Angel comply with the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) standard?

It's better! C2PA data is generally stripped from an asset when it’s sent via a website like OnlyFans or WhatsApp, so even with this standard, images can be easily taken and repurposed. The principles of Image Angel's technology—embedding invisible watermarks to establish guardianship—align closely with the goals of the C2PA, which are to ensure transparency, provenance, and authenticity of digital content but cannot be removed unlike C2PA. Because Image Angel’s fingerprint is within the image, not attached to it, it also remains if the content is screenshotted, unlike C2PA data.

Could Image Angel’s watermarking technology be adapted to function as a proof-of-authenticity tool for verifying that content is genuine and not a deepfake?

By adding invisible watermarks that include details like who created the content, when it was made, and where it came from, Image Angel can create a unique digital "fingerprint" for each image or video. This fingerprint makes it easier for platforms, users, and authorities to check if the content is real or has been altered, helping to spot fakes and confirm authenticity. However, in cases involving sex work, including too much identifying information could risk the creator’s anonymity, which is critical for their safety and privacy. This is why we choose to embed the client’s data to act as a deterrent against sharing.

What current, emerging, and future digital privacy concerns (e.g., deepfakes, catfishing, deposit scams, scrapers, etc.) should sex workers be aware of, and how can Image Angel's technology help protect our content?

Technology is advancing rapidly, and while new challenges like content theft and deepfakes emerge, innovative solutions are keeping pace. There will always be bad actors, but tools like Image Angel are helping to protect creators and shift behaviors toward a safer, more respectful online world.

Image Angel’s invisible watermarking acts as a powerful deterrent, making clients think twice before sharing content without permission because they know it can be traced back to them. This accountability helps shift behaviors over time, encouraging a culture of respect and consent. Combined with stronger online safety laws that hold platforms and offenders responsible, these changes can create safer online spaces where sex workers have more control, confidence, and security over their work.

Additionally, what other steps would you recommend we take to safeguard our digital assets effectively?

Choose your platforms wisely! It’s important to share content on platforms that prioritize privacy, have tools to block content scraping, and act quickly to remove stolen or misused material. Look for platforms with strong user protections, clear policies on unauthorized sharing, and systems like user verification to reduce scams and impersonation. Don’t be afraid to move to another platform if your current one isn’t providing the safety or support you need. Using multiple platforms can also help diversify your income, reach new audiences, and reduce reliance on any single service. By choosing wisely and staying flexible, you can better protect your content and have more control over where and how it’s shared.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Cory Doctorow, (craphound.com), a renowned science fiction author, activist, and journalist.

Cory is a passionate advocate for digital rights, privacy, and freedom of expression. He fights against corporate overreach, surveillance capitalism, and monopolistic practices in technology, emphasizing the need for open, interoperable systems that empower users rather than exploit them. A strong supporter of copyright reform, Doctorow champions creators' rights while opposing draconian laws that stifle innovation and access to knowledge. He also highlights the intersections of technology with labour rights, social justice, and economic equity, calling for systemic change to create a fairer, more democratic digital future.

Cory's latest novels are THE BEZZLE (a follow-up to RED TEAM BLUES) and THE LOST CAUSE, a solarpunk science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency.

The most recent nonfiction book by Doctorow is THE INTERNET CON: HOW TO SEIZE THE MEANS OF COMPUTATION, a Big Tech disassembly manual.

He is the author of the international young adult LITTLE BROTHER series. He is also the author of CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM (with Rebecca Giblin), about creative labor markets and monopoly; HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about conspiracies and monopolies; and of RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults, a YA graphic novel called IN REAL LIFE; and other young adult novels like PIRATE CINEMA.

Upcoming books include Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 and Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from his novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025. 

Doctorow maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. I highly recommend following Pluralistic via RSS.

He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. 

Born in Toronto, Canada, Doctorow now resides in Los Angeles. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

In 2022, Cory earned the Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Awardee for lifetime achievement.

In 2024, the Media Ecology Association awarded him the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

York University (Canada) made him an Honourary Doctor of Laws; and the Open University (UK) made him an Honourary Doctor of Computer Science.

I've been reading Cory's books and watching video clips of his presentations and interviews and am greatly impressed by his opposition to, and proposed strategies for dealing with, the likes of Facebook Google, Twitter et al  in terms of their disregard for the rights of their users, prioritising monetization over functionality, evading accountability to laws and regulations, abusing our rights to privacy and data security and generally behaving like cartoon supervillains.

Sex workers, and other disfavoured minority groups, are all too familiar with mistreatment at the hands of big tech. Social media likes to ban or shadowban us with no warning or explanation and the platforms we use to advertise (escort directories) blatantly abuse our rights to privacy, data security, deletion requests and ownership of our intellectual property.

Cory is an absolute wealth of information on how we can fight for our rights online and a goldmine of knowledge that I hope we can apply at the point where his ideas intersect with some of the difficulties sex workers face using both platforms intended for us (eg escort directories), and platforms where we are almost, not quite, kind of, sometimes, barely tolerated eg Twitter, Google, Reddit, the various messenger apps like Whatsapp and pretty much any site or app we use for advertising our services, networking with other providers and seeking support and information.

Here is our conversation =

---

Cory: Hi Oz, how are you?

Oz: Good, thank you Cory. How are you?

Cory: I'm honestly not great, but happy to talk. I've had some recent health complications.

Oz: Sorry to hear that. Thank you so much for taking this time to talk to me. I really appreciate it. I'm a fan of your work and I think what you say about technology and digital rights is really interesting. So, I'd love to hear your thoughts on those topics in the context of sex work.

Cory: Sure. I'm not an expert on sex work. I'm happy to tell you what I know but I'm also humble enough to know when I'm not an expert and not qualified. To the extent that I'm qualified to speak about this from the internet and human rights angle, I'm happy to chat with you.

Oz: Yes please, from that angle it should be very interesting. First of all, my commiserations regarding the election result, I know you're not a fan of the orange terror there.

Cory: No. That's pretty terrible indeed. I'm just trying to post through it and wait for other people to have better ideas than I have right now for what to do next. I figure being stressed out about it doesn't hurt Donald Trump and it does hurt me, so I'm trying not to dwell on it.

Oz: That's a good philosophy, I think. Best not to stress. I think sex workers all over the world are following what's going on there with interest, though, because a lot of the platforms that we use are based in America, operated by Americans. We're worried about things like this Project 2025, and whether that might progress now that the Republicans are in. What do you think about that? Is there much we can do to mitigate the effects of  something like Project 2025 if it happens?

Cory: You know, the characteristic of the first Trump regime was a lack of administrative competence. There are a lot of people who are saying Trump is going to address the main stumbling block to administrative success that he had in the first term by packing his agencies with personal loyalists who are really firmly committed to his cult of personality and not making concessions to the party grandees by putting in older line conservatives that might not jump when he says frog. But I don't know that those people are actually administratively competent, right? They, themselves are also, chiefly weird and not necessarily good at getting stuff done.

Rick Perlstein who is a very, very, very good historian of right-wing movements has written I think the best take on Project 2025 which is that the most interesting thing about it is not how extreme their proposals are but how irreconcilable they are. So, in every key area from migration to abortion to labour rights to trade policy, there are multiple conflicting proposals for how to undertake them.

Oz: A lot of Project 2025's proposals just don't make sense from what I've seen.

Cory: It's not that it doesn't make sense, it's that what you see is that within the coalition that has given us Trump, there are irreconcilable differences and, you know, maybe relevant to what we do about Trump. Every change that we see in society almost without exception is the result of a new coalition.

You know if there's a bunch of people who want some stuff and they try really hard to get it, maybe they just have the wrong tactics and eventually, they'll hit on a better tactic and figure out how to make this stuff happen. But usually what you're seeing if someone's trying to make something happen and failing is that they don't have enough clout to accomplish their goals and so when things change it's because a coalition is formed. You fuse together two or more groups who inevitably don't agree on everything and so the coalition is how things get done.

After the Thatcher years you had new Labour which is a coalition of business interests and trade unions. With the trade unions taking the role of junior partner. That coalition was very powerful. We see lots of years of Blair with a strong parliamentary majority able to enact policies that punish the junior partners, the working people, to the benefit of mostly the finance sector people who joined the Blair coalition, and eventually that crumbles. Eventually, the Labour coalition crumbles and Labour ends up in the dark again for 14 years because that line of power is also a line of weakness or a line of brittleness.

There's a vulnerability as well as the strength. When we look to Project 2025, if we're taking a critical eye to it and saying, ‘What can we do to avert the worst outcomes?, What we can treat Project 2025 as is a roadmap to the fractures within the coalition.’

If these predatory, irreconcilable proposals actually aided in to Project 2025, what we can say about that with some degree of certainty is that the people who disagree about this are each of them sufficiently important and powerful enough in the movement that no one can dominate the other.

Which means that what you have is unstoppable forces and immovable objects in conflict, and that's an area where things could really shatter, right? So if we can figure out how to heighten the contradictions around those areas of fracture that they've so helpfully diagrammed for us, that's a good tactical place to start, to start pulling that coalition apart.

Oz: The part of Project 2025 that I worry about is that they're going to criminalize pornography. That consenting adults selling images and video online could become illegal, but as you say, that could be a fracture line in that people that are profiting from porn are not going to want it to be illegal.

Cory: Oh, not just that, right? Remember that a huge part of this coalition are libertarians of various types. Some of them are libertarians because they want to live in polycules and hire sex workers and consume all the pornography they want, and some of them are libertarians because they don't want to hire black people. Most of them are libertarians because they don't want to pay any taxes.

All of those groups, broadly speaking, are going to be really upset about porn bans, both on ideological and sort of personal grounds.

They represent a really significant bloc, and moreover, they represent a really significant fraction of the financial backing to the movement. And so, that fracture line is going to be a really important one.

Oz: Definitely. Well, a lot of people watch porn for sure, so it's something that affects everyone.

Cory: Yeah, you know, you can see this in the inverse, right? So if you recall, second-wave feminists who were anti-pornography, like Andrea Dworkin, found themselves in coalition with evangelicals like Jerry Falwell, even though they disagreed on other things.

You could imagine a coalition of libertarians who absolutely oppose rights for sex workers of any description, still forming a coalition with sex workers to defend the right to have pornography and do sex work. So that would be a very weird coalition. It's going to be really uncomfortable. You're going to be in the room with people who are marching side by side along with them or signing letters with them, with people who you really dislike and who have no interest in your well-being, but who might be tactically useful.

Deciding whether or not you want to make that compromise or form that coalition is going to be a really hard call. There's no right answer. And as far as I know, there's no heuristic to actually say, ‘Okay, well, this is the compromise that you should make’ and these are the compromises that are beyond the pale.

Oz: Yes, that's very interesting and I guess now we'll see how it plays out. Now when I was researching that blog post that I sent you about the privacy policies of the sex worker directories, I got a lot of mixed messages about how those platforms handle our identities and why. Some of them say it's because of the GDPR or the FTC or the requirements of their payment platform or Visa or MasterCard.  But then they're claiming to be in Cyprus or Malta to avoid these things or they end up charging using Bitcoin anyway. So, it's all a bit of a mess, but I was wondering what do you think about what needs to change before they'll actually show any respect for our privacy and change the way they do things?

Cory: Well, I think that what you're seeing is different kinds of regulatory arbitrage. So, firms that pretend to be Maltese are not pretending to be Maltese to avoid the GDPR or the FTC, they're pretending to be Maltese to avoid tax and also to avoid disclosure of beneficial ownership, right?

When you see these problems within the EU, they're actually, I think downstream of intrinsic contradictions within Federalism. So, if you have a bunch of independent or quasi-independent states and you say, okay, we're all going to form a single bloc, there's always going to be some tension there that's completely legitimate.

You know I'm Canadian and it wasn't until after World War II that Newfoundland, which is population-wise, a very small territory, joined the Canadian Confederation. People from Newfoundland were legitimately concerned that everyone else in the country might gang up on them and say, okay, well, we have these new policies for our eastern coastal waters that are quite broadly beneficial to the whole country, but fuck over everyone in Newfoundland.

So whenever you have Federalism, you have these humanitarian rights for otherwise small things during federations. The problem is that that creates opportunities for small states to sell out the bloc.

So in Europe, you have Ireland, Malta, Cyprus, to a lesser extent, the Netherlands, and Liechtenstein, selling out the EU on tax and to a lesser extent, but still in a related matter, selling out the EU on regulation and enforcement.

Broadly, if you're a tax haven, you are relying on companies that, by definition, can change their flag of convenience, because that's how they got to your country. So the way that they decided to pretend to be Irish is they figured out how to do the paperwork.

If they can do the paperwork to pretend to be Irish this week, they could do the paperwork to pretend to be Luxembourgian next week. So you have to have something besides low taxes to keep them there.

What that ends up being is things like, oh, we just don't enforce the GDPR, which is Irelands big thing, their "data commissioner".

So, in terms of these contradictions you're seeing, you're seeing the intersection of a whole ton of different problems. One is this problem of European Federalism, where you have these different territories with different privacy regimes and different degrees of enforcement, and they're doing this tax haven shit that is luring companies there, even though they're not really there.

So obviously, Luxembourg is where Mindgeek mostly pretends it's based, even though they're a Canadian company and everyone knows it, right? I mean, that's like one source of the problem. And then within European Federalism, you have this other problem of enforcement, where it all starts in Ireland and the Irish Data Commissioner sucks.

Then you have a lack of antitrust enforcement, and that all of our payment processes have these incredible arbitrary and ever-changing lines. And so counsel for these firms, as well as their business strategists, just say, okay, well, we don't want to colour up to the edge of the line, because if the line moves even a bit and we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line, we lose everything.

So, we are going to colour really well inside the line. So, now you're trying to reconcile GDPR stuff with the tax haven stuff, with the monopoly payment processor stuff, and then there's the foundational thing that they just don't give a shit about your privacy, right? They don't give a shit about anyone's privacy broadly, and they really don't give a shit about the privacy of disfavoured minorities like sex workers.

So, in terms of what has to change before any of that can move, well, one way to think about this is that any change that we make to any part of the puzzle will result in some material improvements to the policy that flow out of it.

So the FTC has brought a case against Visa for domination of payment processing and monopolisation of payment processing. If that results in more competition in the payment processing world, broadly those companies will be less beholden to Visa and less conservative about pissing Visa off. So that's one thing that might help.

The EU, with the Digital Market Act, has said, okay, well, we're going to move frontline GDPR enforcement to the federal court and out of the national courts.

And so perhaps sex workers will have the ability to use this multi-use flag of convenience against sex worker platforms and say, you know, the European Court of Justice is going to order you to knock this shit off.

Now, again, this was not going to be an easy win because there are lots of good fundamental justice reasons not to want the federalization of European policy enforcement. But like your federalization of European public policy enforcement is how we got Greek Austerity that collapsed the Greek economy and the rise of fascist groups, right, like national sovereignty isn't always bad you know and so there's going to be a lot of countries that are going to be legitimately pissed off for really good reasons that you and I will probably support about the federalizing of European policy enforcement.

But you know, I don't want to say it swings around abouts because that's cheap but I want to say that like there are just as with coalitions there are tactical levers that we can pull on and none of those tactical levers operate just the one issue that we're trying to move.

They change the orientation of many issues that we want to move on and that impacts our ability to form and maintain coalitions so there'll be coalition partners who will be with you right up to the moment you say ‘and by the way we support European federalism and federal enforcement of European policy’ at which point it will become your bitter enemies and you're going to have to figure out right which side of those fights you're going to be on and which kind of coalition is going to get the most done and there there is a point where if you just prioritize coalition happiness above all other things and you say okay well today I'm going to side with these guys who I hate on 99 things but like on this hundredth thing and you are going to I'm going to be in partnership with these other guys who I hate on almost everything but like on this completely different thing, eventually you kind of look yourself in the mirror you go like it kind of seems like I don't stand for anything but I seem to be like marching alongside Maoists and like neo-Nazis,  depending on whether it's a Tuesday or a Wednesday.

Oz: We have to draw the line somewhere.

So I'll give you an example from my own career.

You know, in most democracies, you have these expert agencies, right?  Like the FTC or, you know, the European Commission or the various ministries within the UK. When they propose a regulation, they have some kind of notice and comment. So they say like, “Hey, we're thinking about banning lead in petrol.

What do you guys think?” Everyone submits comments, and then those comments are published, and then everyone submits reply comments, and then they propose a rule, and everyone submits comments, and everyone submits reply comments, and then the rule is ratified or modified or struck down.

That's broadly speaking how administrative agencies work everywhere.

There was a proposal to revamp the portal by which administrative agencies received comments, right, so all administrative agencies irrespective of what policy they were making.

The proposal was that they would develop a system to identify and discard, quote, substantively duplicative comments.

So comments that seem to be the same, so like spam. The problem with that is that once you say that an agency has leeway to decide whether a comment is duplicative, then what we're saying is that if 10 million people all say, “fuck no, this is a terrible idea”, the agency can say,  “well, you're pretty duplicative, we're just going to count that as one now”

Everyone was likely very worried about this, so we created a sign-on letter for different kinds of things.

Oz: That's kind of the opposite of democratic.

Cory: Indeed. I mean, there is such a thing as spam. But it's badly conceived. So we put together a coalition letter to oppose this, and people poured in There were pro-abortion activists, anti-abortion activists, pro-gun activists, anti-gun activists, you know, everybody on every side just understood that this was the wrong discretion to put in the hands of the administration, that they should have to recognize and attend to every comment, or if they were going to discard comments. It would have to be on the basis of something more than this kind of automated opaque system. We got to this point where the guy I was working on this with called me up and said, ‘We don't want to accept comments like a sign-on from the KKK, right?’, and I was like, ‘No, we really don't’, right?

But this is how it might be. Somewhere along the line, you're going to have to draw that line about who you agree with and who you don't. You know, everyone, I think, around the world who follows American politics has heard of that Koch brothers, which is now just the one Koch brother, because the other one died. And the Koch brothers are terrible monsters. They're also prison abolitionists. They want shorter sentences.

They want more emphasis on rehabilitation. They are a libertarian in the best sense of the word partly because they understand that prisons are very expensive and they don't want that public expense, but also I think, because there is some genuine feeling that imprisoning people is an insult to their liberty.

The question is, ‘How do you feel about joining up with the Koch brothers to demand a better justice system?’ when they're also on the wrong side of every other issue? So, this is going to be like, this is the challenge that sex workers and other people from disfavoured minorities face.

Another way of saying a group that's not big enough to make the change that they want is disfavoured minorities. If you're a disfavoured minority, getting the change that you want is going to require forming coalitions.

Those coalitions, if you're very lucky, will just consist of, you know, lovely chaps who don't see your issue as their issue, but probably you all agree.

So I think of the environmental movement. You care about owls, I care about the ozone layer, foundationally, we don't really care about the same thing, but we're both environmentalists, so we can form a coalition.

But sometimes it's going to be like, you care about owls, and I'm a raving, swivel-eyed eco-fascist who thinks that the climate crisis is going to bring millions of migrants into the country, and I want to keep our borders strong. So we're both environmentalists. And do we end up in coalition together? It's not a question with one answer.

Oz: No, it's really not. I'm getting the impression from your answers that a lot of the troubles that we're facing are due to borders and conflicting interests of different nations. I was thinking of a science fiction scenario, I read a lot of  Ian M Banks, if we were to ever have The Culture where we really were one civilization, one culture, that would kind of eliminate the borders and countries kind of problem in making decisions.

Cory: I don't know that that's true, because then you just have the problem of regions, right? You know, I loved Ian's work, and I knew him slightly, and thought the world of him. But, you know, I think that, like, if you look at the United States, which started off as 13 independent colonies unified and then absorbed several other independent territories over the ensuing century, the elimination of borders within the United States did not create a more robust democracy, it created a series of regionalisms that each of them represents a fracture line that can be exploited by bad actors.

When I lived in London, I lived in Hackney, which was the largest borough in the UK, it's larger than most cities in the UK, and I was having a classic local government problem where there was a legal hotel going into the building next to mine and they were doing all their renovation works, they were legally removing their asbestos without any remediation and they were doing it from midnight till 6 in the morning by jackhammering the wall of my bedroom every night. This is just a classic local government issue, right?

The noise abatement team was useless, they only had two people, they took eight hours to respond to a call and if there was no noise when they arrived, then they didn't do anything. So we never got any action out of them. So I went to see my counsellor, so I attended his surgery multiple times, he never showed up, I sent him emails, I sent him calls, never heard back from him, and eventually I called him out on Twitter.

And I was down at my local coffee shop and someone recognized me and said, ‘Oh I saw your tweet about your counsellor, you need to understand that because this is an absolutely safe Labour stronghold, that whoever wins the selection, the in-party selection, through Labour just has the seat, right?’

The election doesn't matter. Once you're selected you win because Labour always takes the counsel. I was at the selection meeting where your counsellor was selected, there were 12 of us there, he was elected by seven people. So, the reason your counsellor is not answering your phone calls or turning up for your surgery is because he doesn't give a shit and he doesn't have to give a shit.

Having a system where there's no competition, where there's no ability to move from one territory to another and seek a better system, and so on, it doesn't necessarily make for a system of more responsive better governance. It can actually create a system of extremely stagnant one-party rule where you don't see much responsiveness and you know, a lot of the, I think if you look at Liz Truss-Toryism, a lot of that is driven by the fact that the electoral map in the UK has been carved up in a way that makes many of the seats uncontested.

So when a seat is not contested, the actual contestation for the seat is in-party and what you get are the civilized loons, who are the only people who are really into how their party is governed, who turn up at the selection meeting and say, ‘I want the maniac who believes in a greater place’ in theory. Because that in-party selection process is so weakly democratic, it doesn't have the safeguards of a general election. It's like, you can take people out for lunch and offer the money to change.

Like, it's not election fraud to bribe someone on in-party selection stuff. All of the stuff that is illegal in a general election is permissible in an in-party selection. So you have these in-party selections that end up with these very weak candidates.

You know, the US election last night had the lowest turnout ever, right? The lowest vote for federal candidates ever. The federal top of the ticket. People just didn't vote for anyone for president yesterday.

Even the people who voted for president, voted in yesterday's election, in record numbers did not vote for the president because they just didn't like the candidates. The candidates are selected by party grandees who are completely disconnected from the will of the people. So without any kind of credible threat of loss of personal power, right, these party grandees can be insulated from the consequences of making poor decisions in the same way that the councillors or the other officials that they install into power are then subsequently insulated from any consequences for failing to serve their constituencies and you get bad governance downstream of that. 

Oz: It's a pretty strange system where if you're not in a swing state a lot of people feel that their vote's not going to count and they might as well not bother voting so you do get these very low turnouts. 

Cory: But even against that, we still have record low numbers because that's not new. We still have record low numbers of people saying I don't want either of these people for president. 

So even people who turned up and voted, even in the swing state, in record numbers they left the top of the ticket blank. This is the party grandees going like we will feed the public a rasher of shit and they will eat it and the public saying ‘no thank you’. 

Oz: Yes, as they should. What if we abolished the career politicians altogether and instead drafted in random members of the public to serve short-terms of compulsory political service, just reward them if they do a good job, punish them if they don't, and then kick them out at the end of their one year? Perhaps we could get sex work decriminalized that way. 

Cory: So certainly sortition, which is more or less what you're describing there, has been a very effective way at breaking through issues where there's broad public support but the political consequences of siding with one issue over another are so intense that you get political gridlock. 

The most famous example is abortion rights in Ireland, where broadly the Irish public supported the rights of women to have abortions but the political situation in Ireland with such that a party that supported it would get completely pasted in any kind of upcoming election. 

Sortition created that basis for legalization without the political consequences. But sortition is not as punitive as you just described. Sortition does not need to include that we punish them if they make bad decisions. The advantage of sortition is that you've got sort of neutral experts who advise people, and then if they turn out not to be very good, they're balanced out by other people in the sortition jury.  And sortition, I don't think anyone, even the biggest fans of sortition say that sortition should be exclusive of elected politicians as well. 

Sortition is a badly needed tool in the governance toolbox, but it's not the only tool we should have.  There's a place for elected legislatures, there's a place for expert drafting, there's even a place for continuity. So one of the things is that if you don't have continuity within political elected leadership, all your continuity comes from your bureaucracy, from the permanent bureaucracy. I think that civil servants can be very good and career civil servants can have this kind of longitudinal view of how things work. But, civil servants do not have the democratic legitimacy of elected leaders. You need at least some kind of long-term governance among at least some of those leaders to understand how things work, and why things are there. 

There's the Fence Principle, where it's like if you find a fence, you shouldn't remove it until you find out why it's there. Because you remove it and it's like, oh shit, this fence is here because like twice a year the bulls come through here, and the fence stops the bulls from running through the schoolyard. It's not obvious when you see the fence, you think, ‘Oh, this is a stupid fence, I'm tearing it down.’ So, you know, you do want continuity because there are policies that are in place that are facially weird, but actually, have some long-term purpose. 

An example of that would be that after the Great Depression, Western democracies around the world instituted separation between retail banks and investment banks. Your high street bank was not an investment bank, they didn't gamble with depositors’ cash. In the GoGo- Blair- Clinton era, we removed those restrictions, and then we had the great financial crisis. That was directly because you had a retail banks that erased the wall between themselves and the investment banks. 

Well Ruth Bader Ginsburg said this when they struck down the Voting Rights Act, she said, ‘if we observe that we are not getting wet because we go outside with our umbrellas, it doesn't follow that we should discard our umbrellas because we don't have a problem getting wet anymore.’ 

The policies that work are the ones that are going to be the hardest ones to understand the reason for them because the problem has been so far in our rear-view mirror that we don't even know it's a problem anymore. 

Oz: The political side of things is clearly a bit of a tangled web, the online side of things, the “enshittification” as you put it in your book, The Internet Con, which I really liked. I did say in the email I sent you that if I could wave a magic wand, I'd decriminalize sex work and give everyone their own personal website, their own blog page, and a payment portal so that people can just pay us directly. And then clients could use a privacy-oriented search engine like sex worker search or DuckDuckGo so that people can find us that way, pay us directly our deposits and for our content, and stay up to date with our blogs via RSS instead of scrolling social media. Basically, I'd like to cut out the directories and the big social media companies because that's where all the enshittification happens in sex work in my opinion. But how can we get there? 

Cory: I think that there are a couple of different things to note about that lovely dream. The first one is that technically none of it is particularly challenging except maybe the payments piece. I'm sceptical of cryptocurrency for payments and decentralized payments more broadly. But I think that all of that stuff is stuff that exists, some of it like RSS is stuff that has existed since I was a young man and I'm decidedly not a young man anymore. 

There's not a real technical impediment. I think that people who use those technologies in their ascendancy and people who can make them work for themselves today greatly prefer them to the platforms. 

The problem isn't, broadly speaking, that people don't like it, and people just like the wrong things. 

If we can say that these things are technically possible and broadly people like them and would prefer them, then you have to ask why aren't they using them. 

Now, the right-wing economists will tell you that what we're seeing is something that they call a ‘revealed preference’. So in other words, if you sign away your privacy, every time you use a service, you must not value your privacy very much. No matter what you say, your actions speak louder than your words. I think this is nonsense.

That's like saying poor people like living in flats with cockroaches because if they didn't, they wouldn't, you know, like you gotta have a roof over your head, okay? I don't know, you know, people sleeping rough do not have a revealed preference for getting frostbite, right? 

You have to factor in power relationships to understand what's going on. So really what's happening with these big platforms is that on the one hand, they did solve a problem, right? 

It was hard to establish yourself online when Web 2.0 came along. So Web 2.0 solved a bunch of legitimate technical problems that people faced when they were trying to, you know, establish an online presence. They also created barriers to switching that are now what has cemented their dominance.

The normal life cycle of platforms up until the kind of monopolization of the internet was a bit like a leaky bucket. So people came in, but people also left. They churned out. The way that they churned out was that they had the ability to use third-party tools that made it easy for them to migrate accounts from one place to another and the best example of this was that Facebook lured away MySpace users by offering them a bot that you could feed your login and password to. Then would go to MySpace several times a day, grab all your waiting messages and put them in your Facebook inbox, and then you could reply to them and it would post them back out to your MySpace friends. So you didn't have to choose. Between the people you were already connected to on MySpace and the superior service on Facebook as Facebook was, in many ways superior to MySpace, including the fact that they had a really robust privacy policy where they promised not to spy on you, which is a thing I think a lot of us forget about Facebook's origins.

What Facebook did was they took advantage of a policy environment where it was permissible for a new market entrance, a new firm, to create these interoperable layers, what I call adversarial interoperability, right? When you modify a service without the permission of its owners or operators.

They took advantage of that and then they took great measures to end that policy. So you can't do that to Facebook again. So I think that Facebook will tell you that the reason people stay on Facebook, even though they don't like it, is because they have a revealed preference for Facebook.

Oz: No. It’s just difficult to leave.

Cory: Right, and I think that when you look at what Facebook does whenever someone makes it easier to leave, right, the litigation threats, the technical countermeasures, sabre rattling, that what you find is that Facebook has a strongly revealed preference for not making it easy for people to leave.

So Facebook does not act as though people just prefer Facebook. Facebook acts as though people would leave Facebook at the drop of a hat if they could. So I think that we can actually use these revealed preferences here a little. And we can say, actually, when we look at Facebook's actions, these are not the actions of a company that thinks that it has a bunch of secretly satisfied customers. These are the actions of a company that thinks that their customers are champing at the bit to leave.

So one thing that we can do is take Facebook at their word here, at least at their revealed word, and we can make it easier to leave Facebook in the other big platforms. That's something that we see in the Digital Markets Act where there are these interoperability mandates that require the largest gatekeeper platforms to have what are called APIs, which are just like programmable interfaces, where instead of having bots that go and write stuff, you can just say, “hi, I'm Oz's registered agent for this new service. Please give me everything waiting for him on Facebook and put it in his inbox over here. I hear all the things that he's sending back to the Facebook users who haven't left. Please put them in there in boxes, right?” This is something that's in the DMA.

The devil is in the details about how it gets implemented. The digital markets unit in the UK has just received authority to do similar stuff in the UK. And indeed, if a big bloc like the EU does this, it's probably going to come to the rest of the world anyway. So that's pretty exciting. It's a slow-moving process. There are lots of ways that it can go wrong, but it's pretty cool.

The other thing that we can do here is we can re-establish the rights of individuals and the people who serve them to not have to wait for official channels like this and simply reverse engineer, scrape, modify, and do that adversarial interoperability. There's not as much of that coming into law, but it makes for a very good adjunct to these mandates.

One of the problems with a mandate like this, as you say to Facebook, you've got to create an API that allows people to compete with you. Then Facebook says, ‘Okay, we'll comply. Here's our API, and it's just shit, and it won't work.’ So then you have a long argument about whether it works or not. You can be tied up for years.

Facebook can then like, even if you come up with something that does work, you would want Facebook to be able to shut down that gateway if they thought that it had a defect and someone was exploiting it to steal people's private information.

So all of a sudden, the successful competitors start showing up and saying, Facebook is turning off the gateway six times a day, and our users are just going back to Facebook because they're fed up with us. They need a reliable service. And Facebook says, ‘Oh, we're sorry, those were legitimate mistakes, you know, we do not want to expose our users, we have 4 billion users, we don't expose them to risk.’  So now you have these very complicated evidentiary questions that you have to resolve, you know, whenever this happens. It's very easy for Facebook to sabotage a rule like this. 

Oz: It would be very difficult to prove that they're breaking the rules. 

Cory: But what if we have this rule and we complement it with another rule that says, broadly, people are allowed to reverse engineer Facebook and wage guerrilla warfare with it? They're allowed to scrape it, they're allowed to break the DRM on the apps, they're allowed to do all kinds of things.

Now, Facebook can probably, like, tap engineers to, like, fight them and figure out what they're doing and block it, but that's a lot of unquantifiable risk for Facebook. And it can create, like, really big problems for them and make their shareholders really angry. If Facebook shows up at the start of the next quarter and says we did have this big feature we're going to roll out, but instead, we spent the last three months just fighting with people who are scraping us because the law no longer allows us to shut those people down.

All we can do is throw engineering at it. Facebook is going to be in trouble. We then create a kind of carrot and stick for Facebook where either they play nice and offer an API that is fit for purpose, or they task a completely unquantifiable amount of resources to fight reverse engineering.

One of the ways that we can figure out whether the API is good is whether or not people prefer to use the API or that they're just scraping and doing reverse engineering which is always going to be harder than using an API that's fit for purpose.  So it gives regulators a kind of diagnostic tool.

We can do both, and I think we should. There's not much of this kind of adversarial interoperability in law. Where we are seeing it come up a little bit now is in right-to-repair rules where we are seeing prohibitions by state-level governments in the United States on invoking IP law to block legitimate kinds of reverse engineering.

So that's in the Oregon laws and the New York law. It's basically saying you're just like, if someone is reverse engineering for the purpose of fixing the thing, you just can't use IP law against them.

You’re just carving out that kind of litigation threat. So now you've got these companies that either can fight this guerrilla warfare with the independent repair sector or they can play nice and give everyone the diagnostic tools they need so that anyone can fix anything and the kind of the cheapest and most commercially advantageous route for them broadly is to play nice and not cheap.

We're setting up an environment where not cheating at the rational thing to do. If you're irrational and they cheat anyway, we still have an escape valve. We still have things that we can use to go around the firms and their intransigence while we wait for the justice system to make a determination that they are cheating, which might take many years.

So I think that's like, I know it's a very wonky answer, right? But that is the policy stuff that we need to try and make it easier to realize the promise of a world in which people who don't like platforms don't feel that they can't leave them.

Oz: If that kind of policy goes through, that's a big deal for everyone, I think. And for sex workers specifically, platforms like Twitter that make it difficult for us to leave are kind of a big problem. Like recently, Elon cancelled their function to block people so that somebody that you've blocked, can still read your tweets. As a sex worker, if you block somebody, often it means that that person is dangerous, they're stalkers, so that's been a bit of a tipping point. People have actually started to leave Twitter and go to things like Bluesky or Mastodon, things like that, which will be great if that happens. If more people start leaving, then maybe they'll stop treating us the way they do, like a second-class user of their platform.

Cory: Yes, indeed. You know, people who fear your departure, broadly speaking, treat you better.

Oz: That would be really nice to see. Also, regarding intellectual property, I’m all for your proposals about free sharing of digital media and the copyright only existing to stop people from selling somebody else's content that they own, like for your own profit. But from a sex worker perspective, I think a lot of us value the right to have our images removed from the internet, if they're stolen or they're misused or we're retiring or have a stalker. People want to be able to take their pictures down, which I've recently written a guide for people on how to send takedown requests.  What are your thoughts on intellectual property rights specific to sex workers in those kind of scenarios?

Cory: Well, I think that these are totally understandable priorities and they're not unreasonable. I use takedowns when my books are sold on Amazon's Audible platform. People record pirate editions and sell them there, which I get quite affronted by and have them taken down. That's fine. I recognize that the takedown process is somewhat tedious. It can be complicated and daunting. What I would urge sex workers to understand as they navigate that process is that the barriers to removal are themselves of enormous benefit to sex workers.

Anything that we do to make it easier to remove things without adequate proof that the person requesting removal is entitled to do so without some kind of review and so on makes it possible for people to just remove sex workers' voluntary and consensual work from the internet, makes it possible for harassers to remove their stuff as a way of attacking them economically, makes it possible for bad clients to have factual and true information about their abuses of other sex workers removed.

I'm not saying that we should never be able to take an intermediary and require them to honour a takedown request, but I am saying that it's very easy as someone who's only interaction with intermediaries, and by an intermediary, I just think you're not hosting your own server in your own data centre with your own website that you wrote yourself on an ISP that you own. You're relying on an intermediary somewhere to connect you with the rest of the world. Anyone who thinks that the intermediary should be less careful because, quote unquote, obviously this is bad, it was someone who has not thought through how their own enemies would have used that facility. I think that sex workers have a lot more to fear from spurious takedowns than they do from bureaucratic requirements around takedown.

That again is like not to say that all bureaucratic requirements are good, they could be nonsensical and so on, but the idea that we should have precautions, that we should have guardrails around takedown notices is in fact hugely beneficial to sex workers and any other disfavoured group because it's what protects our ability to communicate with each other.

Oz: In building the search engine, I'd like to try and encourage more sex workers to build their own personal websites because I see the benefit in it myself that as my own website has improved in search ranking, I'm relying a lot less on directories and a lot less on social media. It feels like something that I personally own and I'm a lot more motivated to work on it. I think the main stepping stone that discourages people from doing that themselves as they feel that it's too complicated to work on SEO. They think they're going to be permanently on page 100 and nobody will ever see their site.  I know you've had a lot of success with your own blogging with Plausible. I was wondering if you have any hints about how to promote a blog and get better ranking.

Cory: I think this is a huge problem. I think that we have seen a sharp decline in Google search quality and Google having 90% of all search means that we're seeing a huge decline in search more broadly. There have been a lot of people who've been writing about the failures of Google in respect of SEO.

Giselle Navarro runs this website that's really good, that reviews air purifiers, called ‘This House Fresh’ and consistently her extremely careful reviews where they have a lab and they do a lot of you know very serious technical analysis get weighted below like Forbes spam reviews where they just take the top 10 items off Amazon, summarize the consumer reviews and add ad affiliate links and those are the ones that Google sends people to and not to these very careful reviews.

This is happening all over the place there was just a thing this week where a bunch of smaller publishers were invited to Google for kind of workshop and they all came away from it saying you know like this was terrible. Google basically admitted that their only priority now is making you know, large brands happy that our content will never gain priority again, it doesn't matter how good it is. 

I think if this is one of those things where you do not have an individual fix, what we have is the Department of Justice convicting Google of being a monopolist over its search engine and demanding, among other things, that Google be broken up.

I think that's the kind of thing that we need to be engaging with here, that you don't solve SEO by getting better at SEO. You solve SEO by making SEO less important. There is a lot of movement on this, both in the EU and in the US. So I know these are obscure wonky issues, but there are issues that we really need people to engage on.

Oz: Absolutely. I wish it was as simple as just writing quality content that people want to read from start to finish, which is what I advise people to do when they ask what to do with their blog. But as you say, the algorithm is gameable, and there are people out there that are very smart and very good at that, that figure out how to pass off something that they've built with a bot or containing basically spam, which will end up higher up in search results than quality content.

Cory: Yeah. No, I agree. I mean, you know, Google has been saying, oh, just make quality content since the year dot. I've been I've been hearing them say this forever and ever. And, you know, I think it was a cop-out when it started. I think it's a much bigger cop-out now. You know, I think when it started, it was legitimately that there was a small group of technical people who were kind of connected through social bonds to Googlers who wanted to know why their content wasn't rated more highly. It was literally just a way for Google to get out of awkward party conversations where someone said I made the ultimate cat website so why isn't it the top cat website on Google, they could just say make your content better.

These days, it's just a fig leaf right around the fact that they are under-investing in blocking SEO, that they themselves are selling two-thirds of the front page to the highest bidder instead of preferring the best content.

If you go back to the PageRank paper, which was the paper that Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote in 1998 about the search engine that they just built, there's an appendix where they say advertising-based search engines are serving two masters, quality and sell the results, and the advertising is always going to win at the expense of search quality, and website search engines should not be advertising supported.

They understood it in 1998, more than a quarter of a century since they made this prediction, and it's come true.

Oz: That's when they were saying, do no evil. That seems to have gone by the wayside a bit.

Cory: Well, “don't be evil”, and it's an interesting distinction because the difference between do no evil and don't be evil is the recognition that you might slip up and do something wrong, but you will do it out of good faith.

You know, anyone capable of making a mistake, but everyone should strive to operate in good faith to make a better world, which is where their other motto, ‘which is organize the world's information and make it useful’, comes in.

So maybe, in that process, they'll inadvertently doxx someone or something or, you know, promote some spam or something, but they should always be striving to do it.

If you look at the memos from the DOJ case, the antitrust search case against Google, you see that there's this fight in 2019 where Google's advertising revenue was dropping off, and the reason it was dropping off, their growth was slowing was because they had 90% search market share. You can't grow once you've got 90% search market share, right? You don't get more. It's not like the remaining 10%, those people just haven't heard of Google, and once you reach them, you'll grow to 100%. Like, at 90%, that's as high as you're going to go.

Those people understand what Google has to offer, and they haven't chosen.

So that's it. You reach maximum growth, and so the only way to grow from there is not by growing market share, but by growing revenue per customer in the Google memos in the DOJ case, you see that the head of advertising revenue is butting heads with the head of search, and the head of advertising revenue is saying, if we were to make the search quality lower so that it took more than one search to find what you were looking for, we would generate more ads. Because instead of finding it in one search and then leaving, and we only show you four ads, you would do three searches and we'd show you 12 ads. The head of search is like, no, we can't do that. I've been with the company since it was a search server under a desk at Stanford, I've grown it to here, I refuse, and he gets fired. And the head of revenue becomes the head of search.

If you look back to 2019, that's about when Google search quality started to drop off. This is a big piece of the DOJ case against Google, not just that they were raising prices, but they were low on quality.

I think that this just make good web pages stuff was never great, but it's been significantly less true ever since this regime change, where we saw an emphasis on increasing the number of times you had to search for something rather than increasing the quality of the results that you got from your search.

Oz: I'll keep trying to make quality content anyway, just because it's something that I like to do. And I hope that people are reading it and finding some value in my work. And you never know maybe Google's algorithm will reward me for it.

Cory: Yeah, or maybe we'll just get rid of Google and there'll be more than one way to find information on the internet and other people will have a better theory as to how to do that. I prefer that.

I really like Kagi. I think it's a really good search tool. It's not free. It's $10 a month, but I love it. I've been using it since last spring and I've accidentally switched back to Google once or twice in my search bar on Firefox and I noticed it immediately because the search quality was so poor. Even before I noticed that the logo at the top was different, I was like, oh, the search results suck. And then I look over at the top of the page and I'm like, oh, I'm on Google.

Oz: I'll look them up for sure, Kagi. Nice one.

Thank you very much Cory for your time and sharing loads of really interesting information. All the best too with your new book and with your kids' college applications.

Cory: Well, thank you very much.

Oz: And thanks again for talking to me.

Cory: I appreciate that. Have a great day.

Oz: You too. Have a great day.

Cory: Thank you. Bye.

Oz: Bye.

---

My Thoughts

It was a real pleasure and privilege to speak with Cory. He's so knowledgeable and eloquent and I'm very pleased that we were able to find so much common ground in terms of the Venn diagram of his expertise as a campaigner for digital rights, privacy, and freedom of expression and my own understanding and interests related to sex workers facing discrimination on mainstream social media platforms, the political landscape as pertaining to policies and regulations likely to impact sex workers ability to do our jobs safely and lawfully, and our access to, and use of, online spaces, banking and our rights to privacy.

Every hyperlink in the text above is a link to more information on the topics we discussed. Many of the links lead back to Pluralistic, Cory's blog, which I highly recommend following via RSS or email newsletter.

Cory's ideas around coalitions have given me a lot to think about.

I really hope he's right about the lack of quality coalitions and conflicts of interest within the Trump regime meaning that Project 2025 is unlikely to ever happen.

If you're reading this and you're a sex worker or a client or a sex worker ally, please vote in elections. Please find out which politicians have policies that are pro sex work and vote for them. Or at least figure out which candidate has the policies that are the worst for sex workers and vote for someone else.

If you ever want to know how an election or referendum is going to turn out, ask me. Whatever I tell you, assume that's wrong and the exact opposite will happen.

Also, don't let me anywhere near your fence (principle). I really would kick down the fence without knowing why it's there. I genuinely wish "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms" wasn't true. There has to be something better than career politicians making promises they have no intention of keeping, getting into office and achieving nothing because other career politicians block every proposal based not on merit but purely based on perceived threat to their own political aspirations. I still think my sortition idea is worth a shot and I'd tear down every border on earth and put an AI in charge of the entire planet if I thought we'd end up with something more like Ian M Banks, The Culture and less like Donald Trump. But I'm an uninformed weirdo so I'll do my best to read more about how democracy actually works from actual experts like Cory and hopefully, for all our sakes, nobody will listen to my ideas about politics.

Regarding coalitions between sex workers and other disfavoured minorities (I very much dislike this term. Not that it's inaccurate but because it's so unjust that consenting adults trying to do business like any other sole trader should be "disfavoured"),  I think following Cory's advice here could really reap rewards for us in terms of finding a path to decriminalisation of sex work and a future where we are legally protected from financial discrimination, have equal access to online platforms and the ability to insist that escort directories provide proper data security and adhere to privacy policies where our identities are not going to be sold to spammers or handed over to the feds without any kind of subpoena.

But who can we form coalitions with? Which groups face similar problems to sex workers while sharing similar enough values that we  could work together to achieve our goals? Industries me might consider forming coalitions with could include Cannabis and marijuana product suppliers, Online dating and social networking, Online gaming, SEO and online marketing services, Crypto, Gambling and online casinos, Web design companies, E sports and sites and applications using AI/neural networks/large language models/machine learning.

All of the above are considered high risk merchant categories by credit card companies. Mentioning any of the above on social media is likely to lead to a shadowban. Legislation around these products and services is complicated, ever changing and inconsistent. I think we could easily find some common ground with any, or all, of the above and stand united in pursuing some common goals.

Following on from speaking with Cory about flags of convenience, I spoke to Adult Biz Law, regarding how to go about registering Sex Worker Search as an offshore company. I also got them to confirm that the requirements sent to me by a certain payment portal provider seem to be legit and that business is known and trusted in the industry so I seem to now have a path to monetising SWS which I'm very happy about. My main motivation with SWS is to encourage more sex workers to promote via their own personal websites and rely less, or not at all, on escort directories with terrible customer service and dodgy privacy policies or on hypocrite social media that makes billions from our content while treating us like criminals. If I can start charging for premium listings to appear above other search results, that will take SWS to the next level and I hope enable me to use SWS as a force to do a lot of good in the online sex work advertising space.

The DOJ case suing Visa for anti trust is potentially a really big deal for sex workers. If we end up with more competition between payment providers, we could end up being able to easily receive credit and debit card payments directly from clients via our own personal websites. No more handing over 30% of every payment to giant corporate digital pimps like Onlyfans.

Cases like this need our support. If you're in the UK, I recommend joining the Sex Workers Union (SWU) and getting involved in lobbying for issues that affect us eg the recent move by the UK finance regulator to warn banks against discriminating against sex workers wanting to open business accounts was thanks in part to lobbying from SWU. In USA the Free Speech Coalition does a lot of incredible work protecting the rights and freedoms of the adult industry and they could really use your support.

I find the concept of adversarial interoperability absolutely fascinating.

When reddit announced their plans to charge for access to their API, I spoke with the other moderators on /r/sexworkers and /r/sexworkersonly and we made the subreddits private in protest along with over 7000 other subreddits in the hope that our 500,00 users along with millions more users of other subreddits no longer generating any ad revenue might give reddit the hint that we like using third party services that depend on the API and did not want to see these apps driven out of business.

We failed.

But the blackout did give me motive to leave sexworkersonly as private and now only verified sexworkers have access so it has become a valuable resource enabling us to speak about topics like screening and blacklists in a space which non sexworkers including dangerous clients who might use the information there to figure out how to circumvent our security cannot access. 

The blackout plus other sex work related subreddits getting banned leading up to the IPO, also inspired me to create a  backup of /r/sexworkers so that if the entire subreddit ever gets banned, sex workers will still have access to all the posts and comments there. Doing so is technically against the rules on reddit but there's 14 years worth of knowledge on there. Losing it would be like watching the library of Alexandria burn down.

These are examples of adversarial interoperability for sex workers.

I think creating products, services, or systems that are designed to interoperate with an existing platform, system, or technology without the permission or cooperation of the original creator, eg reverse-engineering, creative workarounds, or using open standards to make different technologies compatible, are all worthy pursuits that I would love to see more of when it comes to online platforms used by sex workers.

The mass exodus of sex workers leaving twitter for Bluesky continues. Cory's thoughts on platforms making it as difficult as possible for their users to leave will ring true for all the sex workers leaving twitter. Many of us have put in immense amount of time and effort into building up our twitter accounts only to be rewarded with shadowbans. Having now reached the point where we have almost zero engagement, no new followers apart from bots, no visibility in search or on feeds, twitter has rendered itself completely useless to us. So there does come a time when we have to cut our losses and just leave no matter how hard big tech tries to make the move.

I've emailed Bluesky to ask whether sex workers are welcome on their app, or whether they will start shadowbanning us like Twitter. Here is our conversation. They replied and said adult content creators are welcome. I have emailed back and asked what about in person providers and gave them my best pep talk about why I hope they won't become another twitter. I hope to receive a positive response. Let's see. This conversation was inspired by Cory's ideas about social media and could lead to us having a social media space where we're welcome.

I've been putting a lot of work into SEO lately using AHREFS and Yoast to try to make all my websites as compliant as possible with Google algorithms tastes. It really does not sit well with me that those tastes are largely concerned with training googles bot to respond to people's search queries and discourage them from clicking on links to sites like mine so they'll stay on google and generate more ad revenue at the expense of myself and other sex workers and anyone with a website not getting any visitors to our websites. The algorithm is effectively bullying us into rendering ourselves obsolete. Cory's words on the subject of SEO for google really opened my eyes to how badly I wish not to help google get bigger and richer. The case going on at the moment with DOJ trying to make google sell Chrome and become less of a monopolist supervillain, could be a real gift to sex workers. If other, less anti sex work search engines get bigger pieces of the web search pie, we might get some hard earned rewards for those of us who have built our own personal websites.

I switched from using Google for search, to using Kagi, on Cory's recommendation and the difference is night and day. The top results on google are almost always some kind of spam, scam, fake news, or just disappointing content that's very high on SEO optimisation but very low on actually conveying any useful information.

All the links in the text above were found via Kagi.

Kagi results tend to take you directly to real content, written by real humans who have made an effort to convey actual information intended for other humans to read and understand. Try the free 100 searches and see if you think it's worth $10 per month for unlimited access.

After the interview, I went out and bought a copy of Little Brother. I'm currently in Dubai and it was nice to spend time relaxing by the swimming pool getting some vitamin D and reading about teenage hackers going up against draconian measures taken by the authorities to spy on, and take away the civil liberties of, the general public. It's a brilliant book. Great fun to read and highly recommended. Somewhat disconcertingly, for a book published in 2008, everything described within as a worst case scenarios for how things could go if we don't defend our rights to privacy are all completely normal parts of our day to day lives now in 2024. With the exception of facial recognition which Little Brother said was deemed too invasive so gait recognition was used instead. Now facial recognition anywhere and everywhere is normal too.

If you take anything away from this interview, I hope it's a sense of optimism that if sex workers do work together, form some quality coalitions, vote, support organisations fighting for our rights and make a habit of asking questions and standing up for ourselves when platforms we use online show no respect for our privacy or our rights to safely advertise and effectively conduct our business, and maybe hack a little when needs be, we can win. Even vs the biggest of big tech. We can even win in our pursuit of decriminalisation of sex work everywhere and win the fight for changes to policy and legislation that would grant us the access to payment providers as other businesses and the right to use websites and apps in the same way as any other legal business. These goals are not unreachable and ideas like those proposed here by Cory could really help us to achieve our goals.

Maverank Adult SEO kindly agreed to an interview on the topic of search engine optimisation for independent sex workers.

Here is our conversation.

Oz > Thank you for agreeing to speak with me today.

Maverank> Thanks for having me! Excited to get started 😁

Oz > So for my Oz website, for SEO, I blog regularly, use Yoast and follow all their recommendations, keep images small and try to encourage backlinks, do link exchanges, get lots of links every month by doing Elust etc. I have Ahrefs and have tried to follow their recommendations too but find that all quite complicated. I'm curious how your SEO audit works and would love to hear your recommendations. I'm very curious about your audit. Is the Maverank SEO audit your own invention or a third party site?

Maverank> Audit's a standard agency process. I'd usually ask for GA4/GSC logins if you have them but for SW discretion this is something you will only want to grant once the contract is signed.

So the whole point of SEO should be to drive and build your audience toward your key service offerings, ideally from most to least margin.

For SWs I'd balance that with from least to most annoying as an overnight/FMTY can be lucrative but intense.

Oz > Agreed. My preferred services are duos, couples, cuckolding and forced bi so those are the terms I target.

Maverank> My SEO auditing style starts by looking at your existing content strategy, identifying gaps, and creating a content plan to address the gaps in line with the point of SEO and your own business goals.

I also always ask at a minimum: are there any particular services you'd like to grow, locations to target, or buyer personas you have in mind for your business?

Oz > For now the search terms above are my main target but I'm working on trying to get a payment processor to work with sexworkersear.ch so if that works out I'll set up credit card payments on ozinlondon.co.uk too and then I'll be looking to work on keywords related to selling video clips.

Maverank> Excellent, let's start there. You mentioned forced bi on your homepage but ideally you'd have a dedicated service page for each of your main services. This can be as simple as incalls and outcalls, or as niche as sounding or ABDL.

Whatever the service, a keyword is a keyword but spamming your site with keywords won't cut it with Google's current algorithms. You want to methodically break down said keyword into all the relevant queries your client may have about your service. Off the top of my head, this would include:

• location and disabled access
• discretion and privacy
• kink shame and anxiety
• kink safety and training
• rates and special offers

To organise all this info you need to use

H1s, H2s and H3s tags.

These are topical headings like you'll see in Wikipedia, word or a mommy blog (they look sweet but they don't play about their SEO).

Oz > That's a good idea. Currently I just have categories within the blog for those services so each post on a topic eg cuckolding is tagged and clicking the tag returns a list of all previous posts tagged with that word. But I like the idea of having them as menu items too.

Maverank> You should have blogs around each service page and they should crosslink to demonstrate expertise and detailed coverage of your niche.

The same can be done with location/FMTY pages (Tyler Badwolf does this quite well) as well as any industry pages of you're an non SW adult business (i.e. sex toys for adults venues, sex toys for party planners).

Oz > I've neglected internal linking in the past. Just getting into the habit now of including at least a few internal links in each post.

Maverank> Internal linking is important because it tells search crawlers which parts of your site you want to pass link juice (ew) to.

Link juice (ew again) is essentially your recommendation of that content. For SWs this is why publishers like VICE use nofollow so this does not happen.

Adult sites tend to be seen as less reputable by Google search, though I'd argue part of this is poor SEO optimisation.

As an aside, there may be parts of your own site you don't want to rank or that aren't as important. In these cases, you can use nofollow on certain internal links (though this is almost never necessary) or no noindex and disallow to stop the pages appearing and being crawled by google.

Oz > I'm looking at moving my sites to headless wordpress with astro soon so that should improve page load speeds and hence SEO too?

Maverank> In terms of load speed, I'd argue that the hosting platform (generally) doesn't matter so much as content. Same with backlinking- Google has deprecated their status as a ranking factor.

The main thing is to ensure that you keep plugins to a minimum, that APIs are well connected and that any direct uploads to your site are done at the minimum filesize. Usually this means:

• embed, don't upload videos (i.e. pornhub/YouTube)
• make images jpg or webp
• reduce/eliminate animations and any autoplaying audio

Oz > I always use webp and no videos or gifs directly uploaded just a few embedded in posts. Good point.

Do you know what the algorithm looks at as most important factors now?

Maverank> The main focus is content, and technical and links to a lesser extent.

For content, focus on:

• whether you have a unique or more extensive take on the given topic you want to rank for
• the logical structure and flow of this information;
• niche but high intent related keywords in addition to larger volume keywords;
• adherence of writing style to Natural Language Processing (how machines read and understand text). While you're writing for your client, it's more like telling a gossipy friend who then tells your client for you

Oz > Thank you. That's really interesting. The last point especially. I hadn't thought of that. I want my posts to be appealing to humans and as I understand it, the algorithm knows whether people stay on page and read posts start to finish so holding their attention is important. But I also want my posts to work with natural language processing too.

I do use ChatGPT a lot and find it invaluable but I wouldn't publish whole paragraphs written by AI. I use it more for research and editing. And image generation.

Maverank> You can definitely use AI to plan and write your content calendar but I'd recommend hand finishing each blog because we have the lived experience that brings granular context. Remember, you always want to be saying more than the competition or the same with a different take.

Oz > Agreed. Fortunately there's not much competition for cuckolding and forced bi but it pays to always aim for the best quality, highest authority posts. You've given me a lot of great ideas and things to think about. Thank you so much.

Maverank> Yes but SEO is also a game of oneupmanship- down the line someone may do competitor analysis on your site and outwrite you. It's partly why most sites no longer do keyword tags on their pages.

For low competition SERPS (first page search results) you want to outwrite what's already there. Before writing/editing any page:

• get the html page structure (heading structure) of the top 3-5 competitor pages
• read a few Reddit/forum posts in the SERPS to identify unusual queries and pain points you can cover in your content
• use keyword research tools (keysearch is cheaper but not as good) and ai to generate keywords that are relevant to yout page. Don't worry so much about keyword volume as relevance and interrelation

Oz > Thank you. That's excellent advice. I have Ahrefs now but it is expensive. I'll look at KeySearch.

Maverank> It's not as good but you won't get amazing data for SW related terms unless you're more of an e-commerce brand or fansite creator. You can also list down your keywords, use AI to generate related, and paste them all into your keyword research tool to get search volumes.

Oz > How would I know whether something I've written adheres to a style that natural language models rate as high quality?

Maverank> I mentioned on Reddit, writing for NLP is a bit like being questioned by a journalist if you're a SW. Or better yet, like you're an expert on the witness stand.

You want to give short but insightful answers, using or paraphrasing your keyword where it naturally makes sense. You want to use simple language, and keep paragraphs to 2 or 3 lines where possible.

You're essentially writing a YA novel (the wrong metaphor here but it's apt) for horny grown men.

Going back to internal linking, you'll also want to do external links to reputable sources (particularly anything YMYL such as finance or physical/mental health). Academic, peer-reviewed papers or compliance/chartering bodies work best. For SW I'd mix both SW and non-SW sources.

Oz > Understood. Sort of. Yoast is good at poking me in the direction of writing like this. I do my best to follow the directions while still producing a post that a human will want to read.

Maverank> As a general SEO workflow:

1. Setup Google search console, Bing webmaster, and (advanced) Google analytics and Google tag manager.
2. Determine your ideal services, locations and industries (5-10 per).
3. Search these in Google to identify competitors.
4. Get and collate their html page structures. Remix these with your own unique ideas and any missing context. Rewrite each title in your own way, considering who/what/where/why/when/how
5. Use keyword research tools to identify additional keywords.
6. Write, or tell AI, to write based on these page structures. If you've done the structures and write them right it should almost feel like an interrogative.
7. Index these in Google search console and Bing webmaster tools.
8. Repeat 2-5 for related blog topic.

Remember to create/edit pages from highest to lowest margin unless they're seasonal or time based.

For blogging cadence aim for 1-4 per month. They will each take about 4-6 hours to do in an SEO optimised way, half the time with the right AI prompt.

Excel/Google sheets will be your bestest friend to organise. Use a timer and take breaks if you have ADHD like me.

(re taking card payments on Oz and SWS) This is an amazing idea! The holy grail is a self-hosted fansite where you own the traffic, profit and audience (reducing trolls and other foolishness).

Oz > It's hard. I've spoken to dozens of payment processors that say they work with high risk merchants and they all said no. Most said they can't work with anything escort industry. One called ticklecharge said they might be able to help but they're asking for a lot of personal and business details from me so I'm going to get a lawyer to look at what they're asking for before I proceed.

Maverank> RE processors we know this changes hourly but Paxum and ccbill have been going for a while now.

Oz > Ccbill said no unfortunately. Paxum never replied to my email but that's a good call. I'll try to find alternate contact details and ask them again.

Maverank> It's such BS and it's choking the market with corrupt, entrenched and inefficient platforms.

I'm supposed to be professional though so I'll say that you may have more bargaining power if you can evidence major demand for your site, or use your network (particularly your SW friends who straddle the line between sex and tech) to lobby on your behalf behind the scenes.

The lawyer is an excellent idea, and should be one of the first things anyone attempting to setup a platform like this does.

Maverank> Thanks for having me on! I didn't cover everything but if anyone wants to find me they can email me on [email protected]. I'm a SWer too and I want to help my community!

Oz > This is a worthy goal! I really want to see sex workers succeed on their own terms building their own personal websites rather than just giving away money to directories and free content to hypocrite social media companies that make billions from our content and treat us like undesirables. Viva la SEO optimised independent sex worker personal website!

Maverank> I agree, the directories just don't cut it anymore, particularly if you're outside of a major city, and SEO will reduce your long term spend. This is why so many FSSWs leave the directories behind once they gain a decent following. That said, social platforms are capricious so it's very important you drive traffic to your own site where you can.

You should also capture traffic where you can with an email or text list, and backup this list regularly. This will future proof your site/socials in case of a van. You should regularly communicate here, even if it's just once a week, with content to maintain repeat sales and bookings.

Oz > This is the way. Thank you very much for sharing your time and valuable expertise. Have a good evening.

You too and thanks for having me on! It was fun.

If you'd like to work with Maverank, and would like a free SEO consultation, you can use their contact form or send an email.

Cover image courtesy of Dall E.

The Free Speech Coalition (FSC) is the trade association of the adult entertainment industry. The FSC is based in USA but involved in issues that concern sex workers worldwide.

FSC's stated mission is to protect the rights and freedoms of the adult industry. Their vision  is of a world in which body sovereignty is recognized, sexual expression is destigmatized, and sex work is decriminalized.

Mike Stabile is a journalist and documentary filmmaker who has written about and advocated for sex workers and sexual speech for over a decade. His work has been published in a wide range of publications, including the Daily Beast, Salon, Buzzfeed, Playboy and the New York Times. He has handled communications for the Free Speech Coalition since 2013.

Mike has kindly agreed to respond to some interview questions regarding the FSC, issues concerning the adult industry and specifically in person providers and how we, as sex workers, can work to protect our own rights and freedoms in the face of often discriminatory policy.

Here is the interview =

Hi Mike,

Thank you very much for agreeing to this interview.

I can't commend FSC enough for all you've done for the adult industry throughout your 30 year history. What would you rate as FSC's greatest success to date, and why?

I think the development of the testing system — now its own organization, PASS — was a really important milestone, historically. Not only has it protected tens of thousands of performers over the years, it also helps us fight the notion that the industry is only interested in profit.

Over the years, we've stopped and blocked a lot of terrible legislation — laws that would have allowed police to arrest legal-age performers for looking too young, laws that allowed the government to raid adult businesses without a warrant, laws that would have allowed citizens to sue performers for not using condoms. But the fights we're facing right now, over age-verification, may be our biggest yet. Despite the stated good intentions, these are old school censorship laws meant to hobble sex workers and sexual speech.

What do you wish more sex workers knew about FSC and the goals you are trying to achieve?

I wish more sex workers understood that we can fight and win. I think a lot of people in the sex industry are resigned to bad laws, to unstable banking, to stigma and discrimination. The most important thing that we can do as an organization is show them the history — the battles that we've won, the progress that we're making — and get them energized for the fight.

What would you say is the most urgent goal that needs to be achieved for the adult industry worldwide before all others?

I think that financial discrimination is possibly the biggest issue for the adult industry as a whole. It's hard to survive when you're constantly losing banking, when you can't take payments, when you're forced to hand over a percentage of your income to intermediaries. If you can't build a business, if you can't build equity, if you can't access credit, you're always going to be scrambling. And it affects everyone. Of course, for those working in criminalized sectors, decriminalization is likely going to be an even higher priority.

I was pleased to see back in August that the Australian Government decided not to go for age verification. Of course I support keeping children safe online but there are much better ways to do this (eg content filtering software) than heavy handed age gating in a way detrimental to everyone's privacy and security. Especially sex workers where we, and our clients, value discretion highly. I tried my best to help stop the “Online Safety Bill” from happening here in UK via promoting a petition to parliament on my socials, blogs, whatsapp broadcasts and via the sexworkers and sexworkersonly subreddits where I'm a moderator but sadly the bill was passed. It could be a big threat to encryption and many resources we use as sex workers could change drastically in nature or be lost altogether under the new laws. How bad do you think the Online Safety Bill will be for sex workers in UK and what would you recommend that our priorities should be once the laws come into effect?

We have to see how implementation happens, so all eyes really need to be on Ofcom right now. We need to make sure we have a seat at that table. Politicians love to pass laws like this — as they did in Australia — only to have regulators discover that there are significant practical considerations that the legislators didn't account for. I suspect there will be court challenges over the OSB, likely from Big Tech platforms and civil rights groups. And hopefully they'll have success in blunting it. But in the short term, we need to work with the agencies who are enforcing it to highlight the issues its causing for sex workers as well as platforms.

Sexworkersear.ch is a search engine indexing the personal websites of independent, in-person providers. For example escorts, Pro Dommes, Professional submissives and sensual masseuses. FSC's vision of “a world in which body sovereignty is recognized, sexual expression is destigmatized, and sex work is decriminalized” is our dream too! Which specific projects are happening at FSC that are most relevant to in person providers and how can we help?

More than anything, we need to hear your stories. I can't tell you how powerful it is to go to a regulator or legislator with actual stories of discrimination. You can talk all day long about theoretical problems and the principles, but being able to share real-life stories — of success, of discrimination, of censorship — really crystallizes the issue. It also helps us understand and map the problem.

Thank you again for your time and for all your efforts in protecting the rights and freedoms of businesses and individuals in the adult industry.

Regards,

Oz

 

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