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.