SAN FRANCISCO — Electronic Frontier Foundation today released a new episode of its podcast “How to Fix the Internet,” titled “Safer Sex Work Makes a Safer Internet” and devoted to sex worker rights online.
Hosted by EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley, the episode features public interest technology lawyer Kendra Albert and sex worker, activist and researcher Danielle Blunt, co-founder of the Hacking//Hustling collective.
“Though the effects of stigmatization and criminalization run deep, the sex worker community exemplifies how technology can help people reduce harm, share support, and offer experienced analysis to protect each other,” writes Josh Richman in an intro to the episode.
Albert and Blunt, he continues, provide testimony on how “this marginalized group’s experience can be a valuable model for protecting all of our free speech rights, and that holding online platforms legally responsible for user speech can lead to censorship that hurts us all.”
Topics covered during the episode include “the failures of FOSTA-SESTA, the need for encryption to create a safe internet, and how to create cross-movement relationships with other activists for bodily autonomy so that all internet users can continue to build online communities that keep them safe and free.”
The Mission of the Hacking//Hustling Collective
In the episode, Blunt speaks about the origins and mission of the Hacking//Hustling collective, which she says started “in response to tech’s silence around FOSTA-SESTA.”
“I was at a community organizing meeting following the FBI seizure of Backpage, sitting with Melissa Gira Grant and talking about how silent the large majority of tech was about FOSTA-SESTA when we knew that this bill was going to impact so many more people beyond the sex working community,” Blunt explains. “And not only the silence, but the support from a lot of tech for this package of bills.”
Blunt and Gira Grant then put together a presentation on “Erasing the Internet by Erasing Sex Workers.” The work made them realize “how necessary this conversation was to have in more tech and academic spaces where it just wasn’t being talked about.” They then held a two-day conference of panels featuring sex workers, and invited both the sex worker community and the tech community to come and listen.
Blunt notes, “And it felt really important to have community-driven trainings for folks to strengthen their digital-security posture as well as to give folks something tangible that they could do. Also to help unpack both the nitty-gritty of this new law and ways to keep each other safe, as well as a way to build community and have folks able to meet each other in person, so that they could develop those relationships offline when everything online was so threatened.”
Blunt describes Hacking//Hustling’s current work building cross-movement relationships with the abortion access movement and other allies, in order to create mutual support among all those who are fighting for bodily autonomy and being criminalized.
“I think that this is a really important moment for cross-movement organizing and to build those relationships and to lean into the expertise of folks who have been living under criminalization and in heavily policed bodies and communities for so long,” Blunt adds.
To listen to “Safer Sex Work Makes a Safer Internet,” visit the EFF podcast website.
For more information on the Hacking//Hustling collective, visit their website.