What the FOSTA/SESTA anti-sex trafficking bill means for sex workers
teenvogue.com
teenvogue.com
You can keep up with this issue on Twitter by following the #FuckSESTA tag.
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SESTA passed Congress a week ago. It still hasn't been signed into law, yet in the past week all of the following have already happened:
* Reddit banned most subreddits dedicated to sales. In addition to preventing sex workers from promoting their content, this also banned subreddits dedicated to guns, drugs, and even homebrewing beer.
* Craigslist completely removed their personals section. In addition to preventing sex workers from having a platform to screen potential clients, this means that there is no more meeting people for dating or casual sex via Craigslist. The much-loved "Missed Connections" board was also briefly taken down, before being migrated elsewhere.
* Google Drive banned the sharing of porn, shutting down one of the easiest outlets for performers to send direct-sales and to share edits of content with each other. Many performers lost their entire life's work as Google has banned performers from saving their own content once it gets flagged.
* Consensual Sex Work advertising sites CityVibe and Nightshift have shut down completely.
* Microsoft has banned all "inappropriate" or "offensive" content from its platforms. They claim they reserve the right to view everyone's Skype calls to determine whether any violations occur, which is a huge privacy violation. In addition to preventing cam performers from doing private shows and full service sex workers from screening clients, this also prevents long distance couples from being intimate with each other over camera. These rules also apply to XBox and Office, so one can conceivably be banned for writing erotica on Microsoft Word.
SESTA isn't even law yet and it has already destroyed internet freedom. This bill impacts everyone and will completely change how humans are "allowed" to interact with each other. Yet because the bill is explicitly designed to target sex workers, none of the people who would otherwise be up in arms are saying anything. The hatred of sex workers will destroy us all unless we all stand up and fight.
When the established, deep-pocketed players start making these kinds of decisions out of fear of prosecution, how is this going to effect the small/new players? New communities won't be able to effectively monitor and filter their content, and won't have the resources to defend themselves in court. At best "that stuff" will move to sketchy and ephemeral locations similar to file sharing "pirate" sties. At worse your web 3.0 will consist of nothing but "PG, corporate sanctioned mass market internet".
However the downside of this faith technology and markets is that many people who don't have the capital/know-how to stay ahead of that are going to get crushed under the legal steamroller in the meantime, and police and prosecutors have a habit fo going after easy targets and relying on popular prejudice to get away with it. Nobody in the sex work community is in favor of human trafficking, and it's a real thing that should definitely be curtailed. But curtailing organized crime takes a lot of diligent effort, so what often happens is that legislators broaden the definition of crime and then law enforcement sweeps up marginalized people to make quotas that support budget requests.
My SW friends tell this has been a perennial problem and also have harsh words for the 'nonprofit industrial complex' which vacuums up a lot of grant money but requires a steady supply of victims to assist in order to maintain their cash flow. Naturally that sector lobbies government, and so do sex workers, but since sex workers often find themselves in a legal grey area to start with any sort of political organizing on their part actually exposes them to greater liability.
The new communities are subject to the same law.
The problem is that the economics of complying with this are entirely impractical. The only choices are to go bankrupt trying to comply, shut down the service preemptively, or not comply. The big services know that so they're shutting down.
The question is how aggressive prosecutors will be about enforcement.
If they're lax then communities will proliferate but they'll all be subject to destruction at any time because they're breaking the law. So everyone is living in the dystopian Soviet hell where there is no rule of law, there are only the whims of government bureaucrats, and all the chilling effects and self-censorship that comes with it. And entire communities will periodically be wiped out essentially at random.
Whereas if enforcement is vigorous then the communities will exist because they'll get better at evading law enforcement by improving security, hosting in other countries, etc. You end up driving evolution to a level of lawlessness that nobody wants -- open murder markets etc.
There is no scenario where this can end well, other than repeal.
You really really need to read the backpage documents, because that company knew children were being kidnapped, drugged, raped, and sold for sex, and backpage didn't turn a blind eye, backpage actively helped the traffickers and actively hindered the victims.
People tried saying "please stop running ads that sell drugged kidnapped children available to be raped for money", and backpage ignored them.
> It actually makes the problem far worse and shows that DC doesn't understand the value of the internet to law enforcement.
This is the line backpage used. But if you read the documents backpage would edit the ads before running them, and so law enforcement was unable to use the ads to trace criminal gangs.
EDIT: the part that i find immoral is the slavery and trafficking. i have zero problem with genuinely consensual sex work.
1) The people who wrote this had no idea what they were biting off because our legislators and courts seem to continue to fail at understanding technology before they seek to regulate it. They thought this did some narrow thing and just ran with it while failing to understand the implications.
2) They are so focused on 'protecting the children' that they knew and didn't care.
I'm honestly torn on which is worse.
That being said, I am somewhat shocked that the major tech companies are interpreting this so broadly already.
I have followed this particular issue for a good few years now and I can assure that people have been pointing out the negative side effects at length and in detail for a good longtime, but the political math simply doesn't favor the rational argument.
You know how crap political advertising is, so imagine your representative or senator voted against this because it was a poorly crafted piece of legislation. Next election season it'll be 'Senator Doe voted to protect child pornographers and human traffickers! Who does Senator Doe REALLY work for??! WHAAARRRGARBLLLLL!'
Expect more of this. Politics is increasingly not about good policy, it's about emotion and procedural tricks. No matter how well-intentioned, every politician worries about how their voting decisions can be (mis)represented at election time when voters are bombarded with bullshit claims that most have neither the will nor the time to properly evaluate.
This bill impacts everyone and will completely change how humans are "allowed" to interact with each other.
If you look at the available technology, it's perfectly possible to set up your own end-to-end encrypted communication channels, peer-to-peer style. SIP and other standardised protocols allow realtime video and audio communication between any two hosts on the Internet without involving a centralised service.
The problem seems to be that the majority of humans are fundamentally afraid of learning about and setting up such systems themselves, so they naturally gravitate toward "easy" centralised proprietary systems like Skype --- and companies are all too eager to advertise the simplicity of their solutions to further drive users toward them.
As someone who's communicated with friends using "a pair of netcats", and later SIP videocalls, I disagree that it's all that hard to set such things up; certainly there's a learning curve, but when the alternative to learning something slightly more difficult yet you fully control is something simple on the surface but controlled by the whims of governments and corporations, the choice is clear to me. "If you want things done right you have to do it yourself."
Yet because the bill is explicitly designed to target sex workers, none of the people who would otherwise be up in arms are saying anything. The hatred of sex workers will destroy us all unless we all stand up and fight.
To reappropriate an old saying, "First they came for the prostitutes, and I did not speak out because I was not a prostitute..."
You're right about individuals in general who want to set up secure communications, but I think you're overlooking the contexts in which they want to do so.
Most people rationally choose to buy phones rather than building their own too. I can set that sort of stuff up, and I have, but you know what? It's a pain in the ass keeping up with technological obsolescence year after year, and it's not all that easy to just pick up this stuff from scratch. Like people in any other line of work, sex workers would rather focus on being good at their core business of providing fantasy entertainment than invest too much time in developing secondary technical skills. This is especially important given that most of them are self-employed.
The other issue to bear in mind here is that they have to connect with customers somehow, and advertising is a real problem. They still need some way to reach potential clients and an easy way for clients to connect with and pay for whatever services it is they desire.
By that same argument sex workers should also not be too concerned about learning how to drive, cook, or whatever else they need to do in their lives... the extremes of desire to specialise is what leads to centralisation.
When I was still in school, we learned about how to write (physical) letters and use addresses, phone numbers, and other such things that would be considered general knowledge today. Perhaps that should now include IPs and hostnames.
It's a pain in the ass keeping up with technological obsolescence year after year, and it's not all that easy to just pick up this stuff from scratch.
This "technological obolescence" is partly because currently the power to force such change is held by a tiny fraction of the population, and everyone else is clueless so can't do anything but follow along. If the balance of power changes, that will as well.
I just wanted to correct that when most Skype users gravitated towards it, Skype was mostly a decentralized P2P system.
Microsoft silently turned it around.
Because SESTA only gives the big players an excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway--get rid of a bunch of groups that are likely to bite them in the ass with big advertisers at some point.
The real tell is the fact that none of these players have gone after SESTA in a First Amendment challenge. That means that they have done the financial calculation and banning the groups comes up positive in their mind.
There is no clear demarcation between sex work and non commercial sex. Dating frequently involves a man spending money on a woman in hopes of getting laid. Sexual relationships almost never occur in isolation from material aspects of our lives.
As one example, heterosexual sex can lead to babies. So we routinely try to parse "Can this guy support a child if the union results in one?"
That's a moral question where creating a child and being unable to provide for it is irresponsible. So there is no means whatsoever to completely separate money and sexual morality. The relationship between the two is complicated, but it doesn't work to try to pretend you can simply and conveniently separate sex and material stuff.
The fact that there is no clear cut demarcation point between non commercial sex and commercial sex is why Craigslist pulled all its personal sections in reaction to this. So, logically, this potentially endangers all dating sites and hookup apps.
One possible path of progression: With no spaces left devoted to the needs of sex workers, dating sites and hookup apps could become a means of solicitation and then all activities on such sites would become suspect and no one could even ask who is paying for coffee when they meet.
I am not very familiar with this legislation, but "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" doesn't begin to capture the kinds of negative consequences we are already seeing in reaction to this. This is apparently so deeply anti sex that it isn't remotely limited to being anti commercial sex.
I find myself baffled at the capacity of the human race to superficially pretend we are doing something good and moral while just being sexually hung up and apparently wanting to hatefully punish people for having any sexual impetus at all.
This is my second attempt to try to express some of this. I would appreciate it if folks don't scream at me about how sex in their marriage is not an act of prostitution. It's a pointless derail of the conversation that just makes me feel "Me thinks thou doth protest too much." It would be nice if people would stick to the topic of consequences of these laws instead of acting like I have said "You, yes you, are just buying sex from your wife and she clearly does not love you." I said no such thing.
I realize that my comment isn't very substantive, and I'm pretty low-karma, but I think you're generally a thoughtful commenter from what I've seen, and I think more people need to read what you've said and mull it over and at least do the thought exercise of seeing how they might agree with you, even if they determine that they ultimately do not agree with you.
Please, let's legalize and regulate prostitution.
For the record, I an not for legalization and regulation. I think if I want to service a guy for a few bucks, the only thing the government should concern itself with is me reporting that as earned income on my taxes.
Here is a recent comment by me trying to clarify my understanding of the difference between legalization and decriminalization, which is something poorly understood and is a topic with lots of contradictory information:
i think i need to run some errands and do some work instead of scouting bandcamp and reading HN, but i hope to read your time link and mull that stuff over later this afternoon/evening. thanks for the opinion/info, even if i don't have a reply while anyone's still reading this thread (though i'll try to reply regardless if i think i have something worthwhile to say, if only to get it out for myself).
i would say that even if i stay thinking that regulation is the right thing in principle, i'd hope that it'd not be so draconian as to impinge on small independent operators (a la the blind eye turned to homebrewing and your average poker game).
without further reading/consideration, i'd still think that a business composed of multiple people involved in prostitution, or a business space specifically devoted to it, might be things subject to regulation? or maybe not even that, i dunno. i'm a big believer in civil liberties and personal freedom, but i'm also not much for libertarianism (because it doesn't seem like it always does a good job of maximizing freedom for most people when you take into account how people behave in groups).
This is the government exploiting fear to increase its control over the population. The premise is nothing new but the ways in which they're doing it are.
There is no demarcation that is easily observable by Craigslist or other dating sites. You're right, it is offensive to most people to say that the distinction between transactional and reciprocal relationships is immaterial or nonexistent. They are, in my opinion, right to be offended.
I have nothing to add other than to say that's completely, unambiguously true about 95% of the time.
I am staunchly against sex work of all stripes. It's degrading, it frequently brings out the ugliest sides of humanity. Sexual motive is among the first considerations in a murder, and the 'profession' attracts crime regardless of legality. Sex work is actively deleterious to the human condition. Standing in opposition to sex work is, in fact, standing in favor of safe and positive sex.
While I agree that the law should, in general, stay out of the bedroom, money IS a matter of, indeed, a direct appendage of law. By bringing cash into sex, you have invited the law in, and saying that a commercial act so tied to health and public safety should be unregulated is preposterous. Would you disband the FDA because they won't let Joe Entrepreneur start a pufferfish sashimi shop with no regulation or certification?
Edit, copied from below to support the first paragraph:
Studies I've seen cite 20% of married men have committed at least one act of infidelity, and that the current percentage is almost twice what it was in the seventies. That seems to me like the vast majority of couples get along just fine in a monogamous relationship, and that culture has more to do with infidelity than primal need.
I think you're getting a little ahead of yourself, defining humanity's sexual needs.
This suggests that the more powerful and wealthy a journalistic outlet gets, the less interested it is in actual journalism.
This is how it begins, with the fringe. It only balloons out further from there.