Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Jan 7, 2022
Date Accepted: Jun 16, 2022
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jun 29, 2022
Sex workers’ lived experiences with COVID-19 on social media: A content analysis of Twitter posts
ABSTRACT
Background:
The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to various inequalities in global societies, highlighting discrepancies in terms of safety, accessibility, and overall health. In particular, sex workers are disproportionately at-risk due to the nature of their work and the social stigma that comes alongside it. Thus, this study examines how public social media can be used as a tool of professional and personal expression by sex workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Objective:
This study aims to explore an under-research topic by focusing on sex workers’ experiences with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on the social media platform Twitter. In particular, this study aimed to find the main issues that sex workers discuss on social media in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods:
A literature review followed by a qualitative analysis of 1,458 (re)tweets from 22 sex worker Twitter accounts was employed for this study. The tweets were qualitatively coded by theme through the use of intercoder reliability. Empirical, experimental, and observational studies were included in this review to provide context and support for our findings.
Results:
Six major categories were identified as a result of the qualitative analysis employed for this study: concerns (37.1%); solicitation (23%); herd mentality (15.8%); humour (13%); blame (10%); and other (0.8%). The concerns category was the most prominent category, which could be due to its multifaceted nature of including individual concerns, health issues, concerns for essential workers and businesses, as well as concerns about inequalities, or intersectionality. When using gender as a control factor, the majority of the results were not noteworthy, save for the “blame” category, in which sexual and gender minorities (SGMs) were more likely to post content in the “blame” category.
Conclusions:
Though there has been an increase in literature relating to the experiences of sex workers, this article recommends that future studies could benefit from further examining the five major categories deriving from this study through mixed methods research. Examining this phenomenon could recognize the challenges unique to this working community during the COVID-19 pandemic and potentially reduce the widespread stigma associated with sex work in general. Clinical Trial: NA
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