ABSTRACT
This study considers social media’s gendered affordances for mobile women workers located in the Arabian Gulf. The two-step methods of feminist digital ethnography include a social media audit of the video- and image-sharing apps Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok and then develops further insights via focus group discussions. The findings reveal big tech companies, like Meta (Facebook and Instagram), turning a blind eye to the dubious legality of sites and pages promoting migrant women’s services in racialized and gendered terms. However, conversations with women workers also revealed high degrees of self-reflexivity, media literacy, and use of social media’s affordances to protect their privacy.
