Meta Is Deleting Queer and Sex Worker Accounts, and Our Communities Are Being Erased With Them
By the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP)
More than 45 queer and sex worker accounts have been removed across the UK, the Netherlands, and other countries in a coordinated wave of digital erasure. Meta is shutting down sex worker accounts, and the interconnected networks we belong to including queer collectives, Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights organisations, and abortion access groups are being closed too. The digital spaces our communities built and depend on for organising, income, care, and safety are being systematically erased.
This is not random. It is part of a coordinated political effort to silence communities that challenge conservative and anti rights agendas, reflecting a broader pattern of suppression shaped by rising authoritarianism and intensifying backlash against queer, feminist, and sexual health movements. It is also driven by commercial incentives. Platforms prioritise minimising legal risk and protecting corporate interests, not the safety, autonomy, or rights of marginalised communities.
US laws such as FOSTA SESTA have reshaped global moderation standards, influencing how platforms operate across Europe and the UK. Legislation such as the UK Online Safety Act and the EU Digital Services Act is now being used in practice, if not in intent, to justify aggressive and sweeping moderation of content tied to marginalised communities, even when it falls within platform guidelines. Accounts disappear with no explanation, no transparency, and no meaningful path to appeal. Meanwhile, mainstream, monetised, brand aligned imagery is treated differently, reinforcing unequal standards of visibility, safety, and profit across digital platforms.
The Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking Narrative and How Sex Work Is Being Reframed
Sex worker accounts are being removed under Meta’s sexual exploitation and trafficking guidelines. These policies are applied so broadly that a wide range of sex worker content from community information to creative, cultural, or work related posts is treated as a potential violation.
This sits alongside political efforts to redefine sex work as sexual exploitation in proposed legislation, in advocacy discourse, and in media narratives, in order to build public support for expanding criminalisation, surveillance, and policing. This reframing casts sex workers as victims by default and redefines the people we work with including friends, colleagues, partners, and support networks as potential exploiters.
Under this logic, support, collaboration, harm reduction, and safety practices are misclassified as facilitation, promotion, or control. This opens the door to expanded criminalisation, data collection, and state monitoring.
People enter sex work for many reasons including poverty, racism, sexism, lack of labour protections, restrictive migration systems, and exclusion from mainstream employment. These structural conditions are erased because addressing them would require dismantling inequality rather than increasing punishment.
By collapsing a wide range of lived realities into a single category of exploitation, governments justify more policing and more so called anti trafficking interventions that in reality increase surveillance and risk. These measures fall hardest on those who already face discrimination, criminalisation, and limited legal or economic protection.
When platforms anchor their guidelines to this framing, sex workers’ content is treated as suspect by default. Our lives and communities become easier to remove under the language of protection and safety, while the root causes of harm remain untouched.
The Impact on Sex Workers and Our Communities
Loss of collective safety systems
Because criminalisation and stigma cut sex workers off from formal systems of support, community networks are often the primary source of safety information and mutual care. Losing these spaces increases exposure to harm and pushes people into deeper isolation and more dangerous working conditions.
Loss of visibility required for survival and income
For many sex workers, online visibility is essential to working independently and on safer terms. Account removals and shadowbans directly cut off income. This forces people into riskier conditions including unsafe in person work, dependency on exploitative intermediaries, or unsafe clients.
Destruction of community infrastructure
When organisational accounts are removed, personal accounts connected to them are often flagged and restricted as well. This domino effect dismantles years of community building and movement organising. Spaces used to report violence, share resources, respond to political attacks, counter misinformation, and fight for decriminalisation are destroyed.
This is not simply a content issue. It is the dismantling of entire safety and political ecosystems.
Loss of digital history and erasure of labour
Years of content, relationships, creative projects, messages, contacts, and documentation vanish instantly. People are forced to self censor, avoid sharing safety information, or withdraw completely from online spaces. This weakens movements and allows harmful narratives that conflate sex work with trafficking and violence to dominate the public record.
Forced data sharing through appeals and verification processes
Accounts are removed without warning. Appeals require government identification that was not required to create an account in the first place. There is no transparency about how this information is stored or used.
For sex workers in hostile legal environments, being forced to provide legal identification is deeply dangerous. It can result in outing, discrimination, investigation, loss of housing or employment, immigration consequences, and increased police attention.
Algorithmic censorship of essential language
Because automated systems flag certain words without understanding context, people are forced to disguise terms related to violence, abuse, mental health, sex work, and survival. Words are replaced with coded language such as r a p e, SA, unalive, DV, or corn.
This makes it harder for people to share and find accurate information about rape, domestic violence, suicide, or harm reduction. People seeking support may not recognise the coded terms and vital information becomes hidden or inaccessible.
Erased from the data that shapes public understanding
Platform removals do not only silence individuals. They erase sex workers and queer communities from the very data that journalists, researchers, governments, and institutions use to determine what matters.
When our lives are not present in the data, we do not exist in the evidence that drives funding, healthcare, policy, protection, or legal reform. Information about safety, exploitation, violence, and harm is produced without us, and often against us.
This absence is political. It shapes whose lives are considered real, whose suffering is acknowledged, and whose rights are seen as worth protecting.
Censorship Does Not Protect Us. Decriminalisation Does.
Other groups also experience harm online, but criminalisation means sex workers have fewer protections and fewer avenues for justice. Decriminalisation would remove many of the structural conditions that drive harm and give sex workers the same access to labour rights, legal protection, collective organising, and accountability.
Deleting our accounts does not make us safer. It removes the few protections we have created for ourselves.
How To Help
Report removals and restrictions
If your account or a community account has been removed or restricted, document what happened. Take screenshots, note dates, and record what content was removed. Make clear that the content did not violate platform guidelines. Submit incidents to Repro Uncensored so patterns can be tracked and challenged. Tag Meta.
Support sex worker-led groups
Follow, share, and financially support organisations and collectives led by sex workers. Protect their visibility. Defend their right to exist online and offline.
Advocate for decriminalisation
Support campaigns for full decriminalisation. Contact representatives, sign campaigns, and amplify sex worker-led statements that challenge harmful legislation and policy.
Stand with connected movements
Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights groups, queer communities, migrant justice movements, and digital rights defenders are also being targeted. Support and amplify their work. Our struggles are connected, and so must be our resistance.
REPORT AN INCIDENT: If you or your organisation suspect your account is being censored, report it here.