If we work together we can get the criminal
traffickers off our streets and off of
the internet.
On April 11th President
Trump signed a piece of legislation
based off of a pair of bills.
One started in the Senate known as SESTA or
the "Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act."
The other started in the House called FOSTA or the
"Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act."
Who's gonna oppose something called the stop
enabling sex traffickers act, right? I
mean there's you're not gonna make
friends with that.
Both bills sailed through Congress, but critics of the law
claim it will end up hurting the people
it's supposed to protect.
FOSTA and SESTA are like an enormous
bully coming into our living room.
And not only that, it could end up changing
the Internet as we know it.
Since 1996, websites have enjoyed a protection built
into a communications law known as
section 230.
It basically says that
websites can't be held liable for the
content posted by users on the site.
FOSTA, which ended up being the final
name of the law, creates an exception to
section 230 which would make websites
responsible for knowingly facilitating
prostitution or sex trafficking on their
site.
To understand why critics see this
as a problem think of it like a phone
call.
If you plan something illegal
during a phone call, your phone carrier
isn't held responsible for what you said
during that call.
They're just the
service you used.
This is sort of how the
internet worked up until now, but under
FOSTA phone carriers might start to
monitor your phone calls to ensure
nothing illegal was going through,
to protect themselves from liability.
Of course, monitoring all of these phone
calls is expensive and illegal messages
might slip through anyway.
So, phone carriers
might block certain numbers or
do away with the phones altogether.
Monitoring and censoring would satisfy
part of FOSTA. It would ensure that the
site isn't facilitating prostitution or
sex trafficking.
Another option though is
to stop monitoring altogether.
That way a website could claim that they didn't
know about the illegal content on their
site.
These outcomes aren't theoretical.
Websites are already reacting this way
to FOSTA.
Ever since it passed the Senate
that's when website started freaking out
about their terms of services and that's
when we saw Craigslist personals get
shut down and Backpage get shut down.
Which I think on its own makes the
point that this is really chilling.
Quite a bit of material that's well outside
the range of what theoretically this law addresses
FOSTA was particularly aimed
at Backpage.com, a website that has long
been known for its sex worker
advertisements.
The thing is though FOSTA's stated
purpose is to crack down on sex
trafficking - it's right there in the
title, but it's sex workers that are
feeling the burden.
The main difference
between sex trafficking and sex work is
that sex trafficking is the
non-consensual, often underage,
trafficking of human beings and sex work
is the consensual arrangement between
two adult-aged people to exchange money
for sexual services, whether those are
fantasy services or overtly sexual
services.
This covers a wide range of
work, it's not just prostitutes and
escorts who are sex workers. Strippers are
sex workers, full-body sensual masseuses
are sex workers, cam models, live webcam
models are sex workers, porn performers are
sex workers, etc. etc.
In fact one of the things that FOSTA does, is make sex workers
more vulnerable to traffickers
and we're seeing this, where you're a sex
worker you used to have an ad up on
Backpage now you don't have a Backpage ad,
you're trying to figure out how to
find your clients and you start getting
calls from people that are like "hey I
know you can't advertise anymore I can
help you get clients, give me a call."
Which is pimping, right?
Critics of FOSTA say that the law will
push sex trafficking and sex work back
underground, offline where authorities
will have a much harder time tracking
sex trafficking and getting victims to
help they need.
We can't screen our clients as easily, we
can't engage in the kinds of activities
that help keep us safe, we can't find
each other online as easily, we can't
share safety information online as
easily.
Senator Portman, the congressman
who co-sponsored the legislation that
became FOSTA claims that, with this law
authorities and victims of sex
trafficking can go after websites like
Backpage.com.
Ironically though, Backpage.com was
seized by law enforcement before FOSTA
was signed into law, which calls into
question how necessary FOSTA was in the
first place.
Critics also worry that the law is so
vague that its consequences could be
even more far-reaching.
We're gonna see a
lot of self-censorship on the Internet,
we're gonna see not just sexual content
necessarily getting censored, but
definitely adult content. How does Google
know who's a sex worker and who's just
like someone in love with someone very
far away?
You know what I mean?
It's just that sex workers are the
frontline of that.
