Poll of the Day > Congress has Made America Puritan Again

(+) Yeah! (+)

The only thing stopping this from becoming law is a veto from Trump and flipping 21 senators' votes

O_O

https://stopsesta.org/
https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/30/congress-just-legalized-sex-censorship-what-to-know/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_Act#Criticism

We all rely on online communities to work, socialize, and learn. From the largest social media sites to the smallest message board, online platforms are central to our right to assemble and speak out. SESTA and FOSTA would put all of us at risk of being shut out of those spaces.

The authors of these bills in Congress say theyre designed to fight sex trafficking, but the bills wouldnt punish traffickers. They would threaten legitimate online speech.

Online platforms are enabled by a law referred to as Section 230. Section 230 protects online platforms from liability for some types of speech by their users. Without Section 230, social media would not exist in its current form, and neither would the plethora of nonprofit and community-based online groups that serve as crucial outlets for free expression and knowledge sharing.

If Congress undermines these important protections by passing SESTA/FOSTA, many online platforms will be forced to place strong restrictions on their users speech, silencing a lot of marginalized voices in the process.

The Senate has passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or SESTA, and tacked-on FOSTA (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act), by a vote of 972. Lawmakers did not fact-check the bill's claims, research the religious neocons behind it, nor did they listen to constituents. Significant organizations, including the Department of Justice, ACLU, EFF, and more had assembled to object to the bill both publicly and in letters to elected officials. In the process, law professors and anti-trafficking groups, along with sex work organizations, unearthed the bill's many alarming legal, constitutional, and human rights disqualifications.

It's dubbed the "anti-trafficking" bill for the internet, but it's really an anti-sex sledgehammer. The bill removes protection for websites under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and makes sites and services liable for hosting what it very, very loosely defines as sex trafficking and "prostitution" content. FOSTA-SESTA puts into law that sex work and sex trafficking are the same thing, and makes discussion and advertising part of the crime.

Websites are removing content and communities wholesale, the result of FOSTA-SESTA making safer working conditions more difficult by criminalizing digital conversations about sex work, screening tools and discussions about how to be safe doing it.

By way of its ambiguity, FOSTA-SESTA has begun the largest wave of censorship the open internet may ever see.

Damn...oh well, I guess the streetwalkers are back in service!

Everyone always fears the "could" and never factors in the "probably just" with a lot of acts... Remember the Patriot Act?... The real thing that fucked over America was the federal reserve. The whole place has been on borrowed time since that.
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Hours after the announcement, everything from the mere discussion of sex work to client screening and safe advertising networks began getting systematically erased from the open internet. Thousands if not hundreds of thousands of women, LGBTQ people, gay men, immigrants, and a significant number of people of color lost their income. Pushed out of safe online spaces and toward street corners. So were any and all victims of sex trafficking that law enforcement might've been able to find on the open internet.

I love how hard they're trying to glorify prostitution simply because the Trump administration has taken a stand against it >_>

Not for nothing, it *does* help to curb at least some trafficking even if it also hurts freelancers as well. Otherwise we, as a society, have decided to ban prostitution so it's only right to actually try to enforce that law. However, even if prostitution was legal, we'd still crack down on those kinds of shadier places (which would also be hurt by legal, regulated prostitution cutting into their business)
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