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- The DC Circuit Court last week upheld a controversial anti-sex-trafficking law called FOSTA.
- Consensual sex workers and advocates say the law, an addition to Section 230, makes them less safe.
- Without the ability to advertise and screen clients online, some workers accept more dangerous work.
In the five years since its passage, sex workers and advocates have argued the 2018 Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act has made them less safe by forcing consensual sex workers to work the streets and breaking apart digital networks that workers used to keep each other safe.
Despite their complaints and reports of increased assaults correlating to the law's passage, DC Circuit Court last week upheld the controversial anti-sex-trafficking bill that critics say erodes First Amendment rights and endangers the very people it aims to protect.
According to Rebecca Cleary, a staff attorney at Decriminalize Sex Work, since FOSTA's passage, consensual adult sex workers and their supporters have been driven offline, forced to conduct business face-to-face, in more dangerous circumstances and without the benefit of being able to screen potential clients before accepting a job.
"There was a lot of self-reporting where people said, 'I've gone back to do street-based work. I was doing online work in the past and this feels more dangerous' or 'I've experienced assault' since it happened," Cleary told Insider. "And so that was the biggest impact, and then it's even kind of spread out into other ways."
After FOSTA was passed, sex workers, advocates, and some anti-trafficking groups predicted this outcome, warning lawmakers that the overbroad law would lead to a chilling effect and reduced resources for consensual sex workers and trafficking victims. As the bill has been upheld in appeals court, the only way to overturn it is through a Supreme Court decision — if the bill ever makes it that far.
What is FOSTA?
FOSTA was passed as an amendment to the Communications Decency Act, or Section 230, which is known as the bill that created the Internet, as it prevents internet service providers like Twitter or Instagram from being held legally liable for the content posted on their websites.
The anti-trafficking bill took aim at online content posted with intentions to "promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person," removing protections for digital providers, who could suddenly be charged with federal sex trafficking crimes if such content was hosted on their website.
The bill regulates "certain kinds of communications that service providers could now be held liable for that are related to trafficking, but also uses the word prostitution," Cleary told Insider. "And so essentially, now, service providers could be held civilly or criminally liable in state or federal jurisdictions if they're found to have been hosting this kind of content — that would fall under these trafficking laws, federally."
The law's passage led to the closure of adult-oriented sites like Backpage and the Craigslist personal ads section, as the online hosts removed questionable content, which often included advertising consensual sexual services, including illegal prostitution, to avoid running afoul of the new law.
The impact on sex workers
Decriminalize Sex Work argues that FOSTA and its sister-bill SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, which was passed at the same time, "has inadvertently encouraged the abuse it sought to eradicate, as often happens when labor regulations are passed without consulting workers on how to best combat exploitation. If this law has had an effect on rates of trafficking in the United States, it has evidently only increased the risks sex workers and trafficking survivors face."
While little research exists that quantifies the increase in violence against sex workers since FOSTA's passing, a 2017 study by researchers at Baylor University and West Virginia University, "Craigslist's Effect on Violence Against Women," found that homicide against women fell between 10 and 17 percent in some states after Craigslist launched its erotic advertising section in the early 2000s, supporting the idea among advocates that sex workers who find and screen clients online are safer than those who don't.
Under the new law, Cleary said, online posts between sex workers who warn each other about dangerous clients or attempts to arrange transportation or security for a consensual encounter could be seen as evidence of "promoting or facilitating" prostitution, leading to a chilling effect as workers censored themselves to avoid being charged with trafficking crimes.
"We can't screen clients like we used to, which is what was keeping us safe," Lexi, an escort from Florida, said in an interview with HuffPost. "This bill is killing us."
Law enforcement, too, has had complaints, arguing the removal of Backpage and Craigslist makes it more difficult to identify victims and perpetrators of trafficking, Filter Mag reported.
Despite its negative impacts, the law is rarely used in prosecutions against traffickers. In the first three years after the bill's passage, just one case had been brought against a perpetrator of trafficking under FOSTA, according to a 2021 Government Accountability Office report on the efficacy of the law.
Though trafficking prosecutions have been limited since FOSTA passed, industry blog TechDirt reported multiple sites have been hit with frivolous suits under the law, creating a troubling framework for future legislation that could erode everyone's First Amendment rights by further rolling back Section 230 protections under the guise of protecting people from being exploited.
"As Bardot Smith has said, 'Sex workers are often the canaries in the coal mine,'" Kendra Albert, the cyberlaw clinic instructor at Harvard Law School, told WHYY. "The things that happen to them first are what's going to happen to everyone else next."
from Business Insider https://ift.tt/iYHSkv4
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