More People Realizing That SESTA Will Do A Lot More Harm Than Good

from the it's-a-problem dept

At this point, it seems fairly clear that Congress simply does not care that SESTA is going to do an awful lot of harm for almost no benefit at all, and is rushing towards a Senate vote. But more and more people outside of Congress are recognizing the problems that it will cause. While all of the supporters of the bill are insisting they're doing it to "protect" victims of sex trafficking, as we've explained SESTA will almost certainly make their lives worse -- putting them at much more risk while doing little to nothing to stop actual trafficking. The Daily Dot has a good article talking to advocates for victims of sex trafficking and sex workers, talking about the damage SESTA will cause:

In her 40 years of involvement with the industry—formerly as a trafficking victim, a consensual sex worker, and currently as an advocate and outreach provider—DiAngelo has seen many similar efforts by the government and law enforcement to crack down on the establishments and platforms sex workers use to secure clients. Every time, she explains, the end result is the same.

“When you take away a worker’s available options, they have to drop down to the next-best available option. Nobody thinks about that,” DiAngelo says. “But we don’t disappear because they get rid of our work. Our food disappears, our security, our housing … our safety, that disappears, but we don’t and our need for services definitely doesn’t disappear.” Those things, she says, only grow.

Finding work from an ad posted on the internet means there’s a documented trail linking a sex worker and the client; it means the sex worker has the time to do due diligence, checking in with the client’s references and consulting a community of peers to determine whether or not this person is safe. When those sites shut down, as they periodically do, sex workers look elsewhere for clients—most often, on the street.

And that leads to much more dangerous situations:

Fearful of arrest, sex workers move off main streets and into areas where they’re more difficult to spot. Under pressure to make money, they have less time to assess the situation at hand, leaving them vulnerable to violent predators and, indeed, traffickers with a penchant for exploiting people in desperate situations. When sites like RedBook and Backpage shut down, “the life of the trafficker does not change at all,” DiAngelo says. “They still have their product, which is the victim.”

So again, it's unclear why people think that attacking the platforms (and not the actual traffickers) will help the victims at all.

Meanwhile, following the lead of the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times has released an editorial detailing what a disaster SESTA is and how much harm it will do:

The internet has been a tremendous force for good in the world, creating untold opportunities to connect, communicate, learn, create and make a living. But many of the properties of the net that make good things possible also enable less desirable pursuits, and even evil ones, on a vast scale. Congress is now focused on one of the worst of those pursuits: sex trafficking. It's taking particular aim at websites like Backpage.com that run ads for prostitutes, some of whom have been shown to be underage or adults who are effectively enslaved. But in their efforts to give prosecutors and victims more power in court, lawmakers are poised to weaken a legal protection that has helped produce much of what's good about the net.

The LA Times piece, as did the WSJ piece, also notes that Backpage -- the site that backers of the bill admitted they're targeting, despite the fact that it has already shut down its adult ads section -- still faces two big legal challenges that will show the site is not immune under CDA 230:

The irony is that, as a Senate investigation last year contended, Backpage may not be entitled to immunity under Section 230. It's now facing a Justice Department investigation and a renewed lawsuit by trafficking victims in Boston. If Congress simply cannot wait to see how those cases turn out, there is a middle ground — it could give state attorneys general clearer authority to go after websites that violate federal sex trafficking laws. But if it insists on carving out a bigger hole in Section 230 to battle sex trafficking, it's only a matter of time before it comes under pressure to address another evil, and then another, and then another. And before you know it, there will be nothing left of Section 230.

It really is a big question that no one in Congress seems to want to answer. Why can't Congress wait to see if either the DOJ or the court in Boston can get to Backpage -- because if they can, then there's really no argument for SESTA at all (and, as noted in the first half of this post, it's not clear what the argument is for SESTA anyway). However, in talking to people on the Hill, it appears the general opinion of our lawmakers is that they don't really care if the bill doesn't do anything good. They really want to claim they've "done something" and "going after sex trafficking" (even if it will actually make the problem worse) leads to good headlines. Also, the impression I've gotten is they're sick of people arguing about how bad this bill will be, so they want to pass it just to get it off their plates -- which seems like a bad way to make laws to me. But what do I know?

Filed Under: cda 230, intermediary liability, sesta, sex trafficking, sex workers

Study On Craigslist Shutting 'Erotic Services' Shows SESTA May Hurt Those It Purports To Help

from the good-intentions-do-not-make-good-policy dept

The last two posts I wrote about SESTA discussed how, if it passes, it will result in collateral damage to the important speech interests Section 230 is intended to protect. This post discusses how it will also result in collateral damage to the important interests that SESTA itself is intended to protect: those of vulnerable sex workers.

Concerns about how SESTA would affect them are not new: several anti-trafficking advocacy groups and experts have already spoken out about how SESTA, far from ameliorating the risk of sexual exploitation, will only exacerbate the risk of it in no small part because it disables one of the best tools for fighting it: the Internet platforms themselves:

[Using the vilified Backpage as an example, in as much as] Backpage acts as a channel for traffickers, it also acts as a point of connection between victims and law enforcement, family, good samaritans, and NGOs. Countless news reports and court documents bear out this connection. A quick perusal of news stories shows that last month, a mother found and recovered her daughter thanks to information in an ad on Backpage; a brother found his sister the same way; and a family alerted police to a missing girl on Backpage, leading to her recovery. As I have written elsewhere, NGOs routinely comb the website to find victims. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times famously “pulled out [his] laptop, opened up Backpage and quickly found seminude advertisements for [a victim], who turned out to be in a hotel room with an armed pimp,” all from the victim’s family’s living room. He emailed the link to law enforcement, which staged a raid and recovered the victim.

And now there is yet more data confirming what these experts have been saying: when there have been platforms available to host content for erotic services, it has decreased the risk of harm to sex workers.

The September 2017 study, authored by West Virginia University and Baylor University economics and information systems experts, analyzes rates of female homicides in various cities before and after Craigslist opened an erotic services section on its website. The authors found a shocking 17 percent decrease in homicides with female victims after Craigslist erotic services were introduced.

The reasons for these numbers aren't entirely clear, but there does seem to be a direct correlation in the safety to sex workers when, thanks to the availability of online platforms, they can "move indoors."

Once sex workers move indoors, they are much safer for a number of reasons, Cunningham said. When you’re indoors, “you can screen your clients more efficiently. When you’re soliciting a client on the street, there is no real screening opportunity. The sex worker just has to make the split second decision. She relies on very limited and complete information about the client’s identity and purposes. Whereas when a sex worker solicits indoors through digital means, she has Google, she has a lot of correspondence, she can ask a lot of questions. It’s not perfect screening, but it’s better.”

The push for SESTA seems to be predicated on the unrealistic notion that all we need to do to end sex trafficking is end the ability of sex services to use online platforms. But evidence suggests that removing the "indoor" option that the Internet affords doesn't actually end sex work; it simply moves it to the outdoors, where it is vastly less safe.

In 2014, Monroe was a trafficking victim in California. She found her clients by advertising on SFRedbook, the free online erotic services website. One day, she logged into the site and discovered that federal authorities had taken it down. Law enforcement hoped that closing the site would reduce trafficking, but it didn’t help Monroe. When she told her pimp SFRedbook was gone, he shrugged. Then he told her that she would just have to work outdoors from then on.

“When they closed down Redbook, they pushed me to the street,” Monroe told ThinkProgress. “We had a set limit we had to make a day, which was more people, cheaper dates, and if you didn’t bring that home, it was ugly.” Monroe, who asked that her last name be withheld for privacy reasons, had been working through Redbook in hotel rooms almost without incident, but working outdoors was much less safe.

“I got raped and robbed a couple of times,” she said. “You’re in people’s cars, which means nobody can hear you if you get robbed or beaten up.”

A recurrent theme here on Techdirt is that, as with any technology policy, no matter how well-intentioned it is, whether or not it is a good policy depends on its unintended consequences. Not only do we need to worry about how a policy affects other worthwhile interests, but it also needs to consider how it affects the interest it seeks to vindicate. And in this case SESTA stands to harm the very people it ostensibly seeks to help.

Does that mean Congress should do nothing to address sex trafficking? Of course not, and it is considering many more options that more directly address the serious harms that arise from sex trafficking. Even Section 230 as it currently exists does not prevent the government from going after platforms if they directly aid it. But all too often regulators like to take shortcuts and target platforms simply because bad people may be using them in bad ways. It's a temptation that needs to be resisted for many reasons, but not the least of which is that doing so may enable bad people to behave even worse.

Filed Under: erotic services, safety, sesta, sex workers
Companies: craigslist

Feds Ignore First Amendment, Supreme Court Precedent In Seizing Domain Of Social Network For Sex Workers

from the based-on-what? dept

The disturbing trend of the federal government seizing domain names without regard to the First Amendment continues. The FBI, along with the IRS, apparently seized a number of websites associated with MyRedbook.com, and arrested the operator of the site. The FBI notes that the site, which was a social network and resource for sex workers, included advertising that "facilitated prostitution." It also accused the site of money laundering.

However, as the EFF is noting beyond the question of whether or not the FBI should even be in the business of targeting sex workers, there are serious First Amendment questions around such a seizure of a website:

MyRedBook and its companion sites served a large and diverse community of sex workers. The sites functioned as social media platforms, with discussion boards for users in topics from politics to financial tips. It also served as a resource guide with information ranging from explanations of the law as it pertains to sex work to health information. For archived versions of the forums sex workers no longer have access to, click here.

These sites were essential tools for First Amendment protected speech and association—especially important for a community that values its privacy for a variety of legitimate reasons. This platform has been pulled out from under the feet of this community.

As we've discussed many times in the past with regards to the government's seizure of websites, these appear to be classic cases of prior restraint -- the effective equivalent of the government rushing in and smashing the printing presses for a publication. In Ft. Wayne Books. v. Indiana, the Supreme Court is quite clear that the government can't just go in and seize protected speech based on related illegal activity, especially without first holding an adversarial hearing to explore the First Amendment implications. The court noted:

...our cases firmly hold that mere probable cause to believe a legal violation has transpired is not adequate to remove books or films from circulation.

The court is quite clear that the only purpose for which seizure is appropriate in such circumstances is to procure a single copy for the sake of evidence, but not to remove protected speech entirely from circulation. While that case was about RICO claims of racketeering, and this case is about money laundering and prostitution, the same principles should and do apply:

At least where the RICO violation claimed is a pattern of racketeering that can be established only by rebutting the presumption that expressive materials are protected by the First Amendment, ... that presumption is not rebutted until the claimed justification for seizing books or other publications is properly established in an adversary proceeding. Here, literally thousands of books and films were carried away and taken out of circulation by the pretrial order.... Yet it remained to be proved whether the seizure was actually warranted under the Indiana CRRA and RICO statutes. If we are to maintain the regard for First Amendment values expressed in our prior decisions dealing with interrupting the flow of expressive materials, the judgment of the Indiana Court must be reversed.

I can't see any legitimate way that the DOJ/FBI can defend this seizure under such a standard. It clearly took down significant aspects of protected speech based merely on the assertion of related criminal activity, without any sort of adversarial hearing. The First Amendment, and the specific statements of the Supreme Court in this case, clearly forbid such actions.

Filed Under: domain seizures, fbi, first amendment, free speech, irs, money laundering, prostitution, sex workers, social network, supreme court
Companies: myredbook