Sex Workers Turn To Facebook To Recruit Customers

Wired recently published the results of a multi-year study, that examined the increasingly prominent role of social networking and mobile technologies in the lives of New York sex workers.

The study, conducted by Columbia sociology professor Sudhir Venkatesh and titled "How Tech Tools Transformed New York's Sex Trade," examined 290 women for at least twelve months. All these women worked in Manhattan while in contact with Venkatesh.

Of the participants, 83 percent said they maintain Facebook pages for recruiting customers, compared to the 61 percent that said they had advertised on Craigslist. The study also found that Facebook has become increasingly popular among sex workers since it launched in 2004. Wired reports that by 2008, sex workers received 25 percent of their regular clients through the social network.

As Facebook's prominence rose, the role of more traditional client pools--such as escort agencies, strip clubs, bars, hotels and clubs--diminished slightly. Furthermore, Craigslist, which supplied sex workers with 9 percent of their clients in 2003, had become 6 percent less reliable by 2008, Venkatesh reports in the study.

Facebook's relative popularity among sex workers may be partially attributable to the site's somewhat vague user policy. "Currently, Facebook's terms of use do not explicitly ban the solicitation of sex, though there is a blanket ban on unlawful activity, and prostitution is currently illegal in every U.S. state except Nevada," Geekosystem notes. By contrast, Craigslist has attempted to take a firmer stance against prostitution and, in 2010, dropped its adult services section.

Venkatesh's study also found that many sex workers preferred to carry more than one cell phone. Among those who chose smartphones, 19 percent preferred to use an iPhone. Far more popular are BlackBerry devices, which were the smartphone of choice 70 percent of the women participating in the study. "To clients," writes Venkatesh, "this symbol of professional life [the BlackBerry] suggests the worker is drug- and disease-free."

Visit Wired to see the rest of this study, which outlines how technology has lead to the "professionalization" of sex work.

Comments

[xbronxchic]

12:29 PM on 02/13/2011

I'm mad! Why hasn't anyone hit on me on FB??? Hey, I have nice hair and I smell good, men, where are ya???? :)

[SammiDe]

01:29 PM on 02/11/2011

Hell, this isn't NEW NEWS this is WHAT people have been using Myspace for years now for, I even KNOW A COUPLE girls who do it! (-Nasty)

[Knowledgeseeker]

10:17 PM on 02/10/2011

oh well !

[uniquindividual]

08:23 AM on 02/10/2011

And this is news because?

[S Pesticide]

04:18 AM on 02/10/2011

OMG! There's sex on the internet? Shocking! Give me a break! Everyone is hooking up on Facebook

[bkerensa]

02:09 AM on 02/10/2011

Damn is that why that russian lady tried to add me on FB and said she wanted to "work out with me" damn I should have accept her request.

[glassblower]

01:41 AM on 02/10/2011

Re: Prostitution. Legalize it. Regulate it (health and licenses). Tax it. Get rid of the need for pimps. Once those things are done, take the police who are currently wasting their time chasing down consenting adults and FOCUS them specifically on child trafficking and the underage sex trade. It would be a much better use of their time and energy.

[ninetailedfox]

08:11 AM on 02/10/2011

I agree. Pagans dont have a problem with sex. Christians do.

[insaneredneck]

12:18 AM on 02/14/2011

What are you,some kind of trouble maker,suggesting a logical and sane solution to the situation we are in over consenting adults paying for, or being paid for, having sex.The religiously insane will never tolerated adults being able to live their lives the way they want.Everyone must be forced to accept what they think of how some imaginary sky daddy wants you to live your life,you have no say in it,after all, what do you know about your life and how it should be lived.

[OrchidBlack]

12:44 AM on 02/10/2011

I miss when Facebook was just for the higher learning community.

[StansDad]

05:51 PM on 02/10/2011

the suckerberg strategy worked

[any mouse]

10:36 PM on 02/09/2011

The sex business has been THE PRIMARY driver for lots of different communication technology for thousands of years from cave drawings to all the stuff we have today. Many of the web commerce tools now used by Walmart, borders, etc. were developed by the porn industry. Sex really does drive the world.

BTW - One of the consequences of Craigslist closing their "adult services" section is now the sex workers are overrunning all the other parts of CL, just as the CL team predicted. As far as the underage sex stuff, it has just migrated to underground sites focused on underage sex. These sites are based outside the US so US law agencies have no way to work with them. So basically the sex trade moved form CL which was willing to work with law enforcement to sites that will never.

It is long past time we faced reality and legalized and regulated sex trade everywhere in the US, instead of wasting huge amounts of money trying to prevent something that can NOT be prevented.

[NostradamnIsuck]

09:25 PM on 02/09/2011

Why would anyone be even remotely surprised at this?
Two words "consenting adults" follow that and I'm good.

[Danek Greori]

08:22 PM on 02/09/2011

What's the harm? No, really, what exactly is the harm? Most of my single friends find their sexual partners through FaceBook now anyways; In fact studies have shown that increasingly more people are finding sexual partners through FaceBook. So why shouldn't prostitutes be able to do the same?

[OrchidBlack]

12:46 AM on 02/10/2011

Prostitution is illegal for one and so is solicitation. Are you serious!

[Danek Greori]

03:53 AM on 02/10/2011

People find sex for FREE on FaceBook! What is the big deal if they find sex for a price on FaceBook too?

[ScallywagNYC]

06:17 PM on 02/09/2011

Isn’t it strange, that social media allows illicit sexual encounters to become progressively more discrete even as it filters them through what has become media’s main stream?

http://scallywagandvagabond.com/2011/02/new-york-prostitutes-take-to-facebooking/

[bwright85]

06:11 PM on 02/09/2011

I've been getting those kinds of request for forever now...this isn't new. Although when I was a broke college student, I seriously contemplated it! LOL

[NukeDaFridge]

05:44 PM on 02/09/2011

I see a new Blackberry Ad coming...Forget the [annoying as hell] BBM service, Blackberry is ranked #1 amongst prostitut.es! What better way to show you're a professional?!

[chachiu]

02:37 PM on 02/09/2011

OK. Time to over react. Let's ban facebook and smartphones.

[ejhickey]

09:40 PM on 02/09/2011

no need to overreact. Law enforcement agencies all over the country just need to hire 100,000 new employees whose full job is to be on Facebook and check for this activity . Of course they will all need smart phones and Facebook accounts and then there will be the extra employees necessary to set up sting operations. So NO, we do NOt have to overreact by banning Facebook and smartphones. We need to overreact by hiring hundreds of thousands of people to check on whether some people are charging for sex.

[SammiDe]

05:34 PM on 02/11/2011

He was clearly joking.

[SammiDe]

05:33 PM on 02/11/2011

OMFG My MOTHER has a SMART PHONE! She MUST BE A 61 SEX WORKER! O NOEZ!! We need to do something QUICKLY! LMAO!