Conference Agenda

Social media platforms have great potential to educate young people and adults alike about sexuality, to create nurturing spaces of connection for marginalised communities across the globe, and to express oneself safely. However, this potential is always constrained by platform governance, or the processes of content moderation enacted by platforms and (state) regulation of platform companies (Gorwa, 2019), who are moved by economic and political interests to curtail or promote specific forms of expression (Stardust, 2024). This has greatly affected content surrounding sex work, sexuality, LGBTQIA+ and sexual expression, content by BIPOC users and activists (Haimson et al., 2021). Through the entanglement of rules, relations and resistance, our panel explores how users marginalised by platform governance communicate, express themselves, learn and work.

Paper 1 focuses on rules through an analysis of policies governing sexuality education and gender expression on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Douyin and VK.com. It finds that despite efforts to improve governance, the seven platforms examined create a damaging digital narrative through their policies, portraying anything surrounding sexuality, sexual health, pleasure, and even consent as harmful. This way, the opportunities platforms provide to break down barriers and reach people in family, economic or geographic situations who may not be able to access sexuality education information (Monea, 2022) do not manifest.

Paper 2 explores relations in the context of queer TikTok in the Philippines, through the use of case studies from specific influencers and content analyses of their videos. The app, the third most used in the country (Kemp, 2024), allows queer content creators to broker local registers of queerness, which roughly defines identities and lived experiences on TikTok. The authors find evidence of TikTokers resisting and reclaiming the derogatory terms used to define queerness, and of deployments of parasociality to commune with their audiences.

Also rooted in the Filipino context, Paper 3 centres on resistance, examining how digital media enable, disrupt, and constrain queer sex work in Manila, shaping various labor practices. It explores the impact of platform adoption on sex work and how digital media sustain, regulate, and make sex workers invisible, revealing the precarious nature of queer male sex work in Manila’s digital landscape. The author’s work shows that sex workers rely on a fragmented network of apps, requiring constant adaptation to avoid deplatforming, financial tracking, and algorithmic erasure.

Paper 4 interrogates the suppression and platform governance of Black users to explore how they exercise agency through platform affordances to resist such practices. Through the case study of #BlackGirlPilates, this paper examines the utility of racialized hashtags in circumventing mainstream (i.e. white) perspectives, cultivating a community for us, by us in which the experience of Black women are centralized. The #BlackGirlPilates community takes on cultural significance as an agentic and resistive praxis. The authors’ demonstrate the importance of attending to cultural resistance, in-group identity-based social support, and reparative digital self-narration.

Paper 5 examines the digital sense-making and resistant practices of Los Angeles-based queer sexual content creators as they navigate sexual content moderation and platform governance issues. It explores how post, account, and community level moderation are intertwined as they co-produce a structurally hostile sanitized social media environment that further marginalizes explicit queer sexual cultural production. The author contends that queer sexual content creators engage in digital promotional work in response to the relationally stigmatized social conditions that are constitutive of sexual content moderation processes.

In blending rules, relations and resistance, our panel highlights the labour performed by users fighting to harness platforms’ opportunities. In critiquing policies and enforcement through our case studies, we conclude with the importance of resistance and peer support.