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Engadget
URL: https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/11/fos ... x-workers/
Category: Politics
Published: April 11, 2018
Description: Under the cover of trafficking, sex workers are being silenced.
The US' latest attempt to silence sex workers and people working in the adult-entertainment industry has been a huge success. Just weeks after FOSTA-SESTA was passed, the bill has begun to chill free speech across the internet. A number of websites have had to either shut down or actively distance themselves from the notion that they support sex work. And the problem is only going to get worse as time goes on. If you're unfamiliar, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act were two bills welded together on Capitol Hill. The legislation passed the House on March 21st and was signed into law by President Donald Trump today. Its job is to neuter the safe-harbor provisions contained in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996 with regards to sex. Historically, if you owned a platform, then you weren't responsible for the behavior of your users. An ISP couldn't be held liable if one of its customers sent threatening messages to someone else, because it would be too onerous to police. Subsequent case law enshrined its principles, with courts finding that companies like Google and Backpage.com were not liable for the actions of its users. Intentionally or not, the bill makes no distinction between human trafficking and legitimate, consensual sex work. As such, FOSTA-SESTA essentially makes platform holders liable for talk about sex on their platforms. As my colleague Violet Blue wrote, "Lawmakers did not fact-check the bill's claims, research the religious neocons behind it, nor did they listen to constituents." That's not to mention that FOSTA-SESTA contravenes the First Amendment's protection of free speech. The fallout has been dramatic, with the website Survivors Against SESTA documenting the litany of changes that have taken place. This includes the closure of sex-work directories like CityVibe and NightShift as well as the personals sections of websites like Craigslist. FetLife's kink-friendly social network is currently consulting with its users to determine its future plans. The FBI's seizure of Backpage.com has, again, helped blunt a useful avenue for sex workers to find work. It's not just the realm of adults-only websites and platforms that are now having to crack down on discussions of sex. Microsoft and Google have moved to alter their terms of service to prohibit offensive or inappropriate content and language. Not even private discussions are safe, with Microsoft reportedly claiming the right to examine your content to investigate complaints. More troubling is the fact that according to Motherboard, Google is purging adult content from private Drive accounts. Performers who sell clips of explicit material to users have lost videos and received complaints from customers. Even videos with relatively anodyne names have been wiped or left in place but made unable to play, a troubling infringement of personal rights. Even before the legislation was passed, however, the technology industry had begun to wage a war on sex workers. Last year, Patreon flip-flopped on moves to prohibit sex workers from earning money through the site. That wound up potentially harming a number of sex workers who were economically vulnerable and relied on the site for income. Similarly, Nook, Barnes & Noble's e-book publishing platform, began terminating the accounts of erotica writers without warning last summer. A common thread with many of these moves is to strip an often-marginalized group of its ability to make money. Twitter, meanwhile, stands accused of shadowbanning users who are engaged in sex work or the wider adult-entertainment industry. The practice essentially restricts people's messages and profile from being surfaced beyond their own network -- for instance, making sure their tweets cannot be seen in hashtags and preventing new people from discovering their account. Twitter vehemently denies engaging in the practice, and there is no concrete evidence that it does so. There is clearly something going on, however, as various adult performers have found their accounts censored. One of the more high-profile adult performers to believe that they have been shadowbanned is Stormy Daniels. On April 6th, she tweeted that it was now impossible to find her account even when searching for her username. There are tools, such as Nice Brains' Shadowban Checker, that purport to determine if an account has been shadowbanned. But even if Twitter isn't shadowbanning users, it is still doing its part to silence women within the sex industry. Accounts can either be marked by the users themselves or moderators as containing "sensitive content." Like the effects of a shadowban, these accounts won't appear in hashtags or searches, even if you look for their specific username. This sensitive-content filter is also activated by default, thereby erasing and silencing these individuals without having to give them an official ban. Some sex workers are attempting to protect themselves against the bill by building platforms beyond the reach of American authorities. One such outfit is Red Umbrella Hosting, an Iceland-based web hosting service founded by Melissa Mariposa. The company was founded in response to FOSTA-SESTA and offers judgment-free, anonymous and sex-worker-friendly hosting. Then there is Switter (Sex Work Twitter), a Mastodon service created by Assembly Four -- a collective of sex workers and technologists based in Australia. Switter was similarly launched in response to FOSTA-SESTA and Twitter's alleged shadowbanning practices. In a few short weeks, it has already acquired nearly 23,000 followers and is likely to become even more prominent in the future. And then there is Share Our Shit Saturdays, a project whereby sex workers, content creators and activists can provide signal boosts to others. The current efforts of sex workers to build alternative platforms are a good first step but not the end-all. While their ability to find work and receive payment remains in the hands of third parties, sex workers will always be vulnerable. A simple policy change at Patreon was enough to risk the livelihoods of thousands of individuals engaged in sex work. That's not to mention the uncertainties inherent in a shifting, increasingly right-wing political landscape where crackdowns can happen on a whim. Perhaps the sex-work community will need to build its own social media, advertising and payment platforms in order to truly control its own destiny.
Congress just legalized sex censorship: What to know
Engadget
URL: https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/30/con ... t-to-know/
Category: Politics
Published: March 30, 2018
Description: "Sex work" is not another word for trafficking.
One week ago, the worst possible legislation curtailing free speech online passed and sex censorship bill FOSTA-SESTA is on its way to be signed into law by Trump. 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. 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 97–2. 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. Its blurry interpretation of sex and commerce, as well as the bill's illogical, incorrect conflation of sex trafficking and sex work is straight out of a bad movie. If only the politicians who voted this Morality in Media (NCOSE) mess into law had fact-checked it with Freedom Network USA, "the largest coalition of experts and advocates providing direct services to to survivors of human trafficking in the U.S." Freedom Network unequivocally states that protecting the rights of sex workers, and not conflating them with trafficking victims, is critical to the prevention of trafficking. They also have the data to back up the fact that "more people are trafficked into labor sectors than into commercial sex." It's already an unmitigated disaster for free speech in America. Which was, of course, predicted. The Technology and Marketing Law Blog wrote that there's no mistaking that FOSTA-SESTA violates the First Amendment; it plainly stated that "this statute implicates constitutionally protected speech." It's unconstitutional, but the damage is already being done. Despite the fact that FOSTA-SESTA isn't even law yet -- it could take anywhere from 90 days to until 2019 to take effect -- online companies, always dangerously prudish with their algorithms, or hypocritical with their free speech rhetoric, appear to be in a rush to proverbially herd sex workers (and all us people who talk about sex for a living) out of the airlock into places where no one can hear us scream.
Safety resources disappear overnight
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. Craigslist removed its entire Personals section. All these amazing moments can never happen again. As some may recall, Craigslist already voluntary closed its Erotic Services section in 2010 under pressure from conservative groups. This is despite a study from Baylor and West Virginia Universities, which found that Craigslist's erotic services page directly reduced female homicides in the US by 17 percent, "principally because sex workers were able to use the free advertising service to move into safer indoor environments and screen clients more carefully." Request for comment to Craigslist and our queries asking why Personals was removed ahead of the bill's signing were not responded to by time of publication. Within days, Reddit removed entire communities. Notably, its r/escorts and r/sugardaddy subreddits. We asked Reddit for comment about its pre-emptive removal of those subreddits, and how that lines up with the company's controversial philosophies regarding freedom of speech, but did not receive a response by press time. Right now, sites and safety resources are falling like dominoes. In short order, sex work networks NightShift, CityVibe, and furry personals site Pounced shut down entirely. Sites that facilitated safety in sex work including The Erotic Review, VeryfyHim, Hung Angels, YourDominatrix, and Yellow Pages shut down their discussion boards, advertising boards, and community forums. Other sites, like MyFreeCams, have changed their policies to ban any talk about transactions of any kind. FOSTA-SESTA's timing puts a dark spin on recent Terms enforcement by Google Drive and changes with Microsoft products. On the Survivors Against Sesta shutdown list of services, growing every day, Google Drive is listed as "deleting explicit content and/or locking out users." Google declined to comment on the record, but Engadget was assured via email from a source with knowledge of the situation that the enforcement wave on Drive has nothing to do with FOSTA-SESTA. Similarly, Microsoft released a Terms update this week that got the company put on the FOSTA-SESTA censorship list as well. A spokesperson for Microsoft told Engadget in an email that the changes are not related to FOSTA. Further, the spokesperson told us, "The recent changes to the Microsoft Service Agreement's Code of Conduct provide transparency on how we respond to customer reports of inappropriate public content."
Human canaries in the free speech coal mine
The hashtag #LetUsSurvive is a current rallying point on Twitter, directing attention to the sex work community's determination to get out of this insidious wave of conservative anti-sex silencing alive. To that end, sex work websites feature guides to self-censoring, the kind of thing you'd expect belongs more in Weimar-era Berlin than coming out of modern-day San Francisco. Sex workers are right to be scared. They're facing all this sudden and casually disastrous censorship as a threat to their safety and livelihoods, and are well aware that few are willing or brave enough to fight for their free speech and human rights. Even sex writers such as myself know this; any of us who've tried to make a living off anything relating to sex online has a list of products, services, banks and payment processors, social networks, companies, and business tools that everyone else takes for granted — that we are expressly prohibited from using. It has been a speech issue for a long time, one most people have turned away from as Instagram censors more nipples, as PayPal freezes and shutters the accounts of sex bloggers and book authors, Tumblr deep-sixes erotic artists, and more. Hateful gamers? No problem. Death threats toward women? Here's a form to fill out. MAGA racists terrorizing women and people of color off the platform? Gotta hear both sides. But expose a nipple in artwork, discuss non-reproductive sex ed, or talk about making sex work safer by screening clients? Now that's a misguided business plan guaranteed to create lasting cultural harm. Let's definitely keep Peter Thiel on the board. If you thought all that was bad enough, just you wait. FOSTA-SESTA is making us disappear before your very eyes — and it will affect you, too. Under FOSTA-SESTA, we'd most likely have no Stormy Daniels. That Stormy Daniels is making headlines while the absolute worst is happening to sex workers online is not lost on anyone. "In a titillating cross-section of lawmaking and scandal," wrote sex worker Morgan Claire-Sirene, "we have on one side Stormy Daniels suing 45 for unlawful payoffs and calling him to account publicly for his associates' threats against her, and on the other side, legislation that has already silenced common sex workers, with the overlaying intersections of race and class; good whores and bad whores; victims and perpetrators; and misinformation all around." Daniels is a perfect lens with which to view the exact way FOSTA-SESTA harms one of America's largest at-risk populations. Writer Ben Udashen points out, "The level of sex worker whose lives will be harmed by SESTA are not at the same level of fame and notoriety as Stormy Daniels"
"Daniels won't be caught up in a sting sending her to jail because she had to work as a streetwalker to help pay her rent and feed her children. Daniels won't have to carry a weapon to defend herself when she meets with a new client. "Most importantly, Daniels's children won't be woken up to the news that their mother didn't come home last night because she was murdered by a serial killer, a class of criminal who have always targeted sex workers from Jack the Ripper to the Green River Killer. Poor and working class sex workers, regardless of gender identity, will pay that price."
And for a short moment in history, the advent of the open internet reduced that horrible cost.
