Between Opportunities, Anti-Trafficking, and Techno-Solutionist Pushes: The Use of Online Ads for the Sale of Sexual Services

Given the crucial role that advertising platforms have been playing in the professional lives of sex workers since the 2010s, especially of those who work indoors, it is unsurprising that the supposed link between human trafficking and online advertising is emerging as an area of particular public and policy concern, an interest that is also reflected by the growing body of literature on “technology-facilitated trafficking”. To tackle these concerns, computer and social scientists have begun analyzing online ads related to the sale of sexual services in an attempt to single out potential human trafficking patterns and indicators. But is it really possible to do so? Through an overview of the world of online classified ads and, in particular, of what it means for sex workers to advertise their services online, both in terms of monetary costs and power dynamics with the hosting websites, and a critical review of the literature on trafficking indicators, this presentation will show that the idea that a complex social phenomenon such as trafficking could be solved, through the simple application of technology and algorithms is a clear example of technosolutionism, relying, just like the majority of trafficking indicators, on a false equivalence between sex work and trafficking and on simplistic (and incorrect) assumptions about sex work and sex workers’ lives.