“User Not Found”: A Digital Black Feminist Autoethnography of Black Sex Worker Tactics Against Enforced Invisibility

This autoethnographic article examines how Black sex workers navigated the shutdown of Backpage, a classifieds site where many sex workers found clients, and SESTA/FOSTA, anti-trafficking legislation that intensified the precarity of digital sex work. Drawing on Clark’s experiences as a Black sex worker and organizer and Bush’s engagement with Black feminist theory, digital Black feminism, and misogynoiristic whorephobia, we trace how shadowbanning and deplatforming disproportionately affect Black sex workers’ safety. Our two voices work together to demonstrate how Black sex workers build community, navigate safety, and develop digital tactics such as algospeak to remain visible on social media platforms like Instagram. We argue that, read through digital Black feminism, Black sex workers’ digital practices function as recovery work by asserting agency, sustaining community, and challenging dominant discourses about sex work, visibility, and respectability that reproduce misogynoiristic whorephobia. In doing so, this article positions coauthored autoethnography as a Black feminist method of recovery work and Black sex workers’ labor as central to understanding contemporary digital sex work, safety, and resistance.