LOS ANGELES—This week marks the third anniversary of the FOSTA/SESTA law, which was signed by Donald Trump on April 11, 2018. The law, passed overwhelmingly in both houses of Congress, was supposedly designed to curb online sex trafficking, by holding internet platforms legally responsible for activity on their sites that could be seen as promoting sex trafficking.
But research has shown that the main effect of the law has not been to reduce sex trafficking crimes, but to increase the danger experienced by sex workers on their jobs. With online advertising of sexual services now much harder to come by due to the law, sex workers who already experience considerable economic uncertainty have also faced increased levels of financial distress.
On the third anniversary of the bill becoming law, one congressional rep, Rho Khanna of California, called to repeal the law.
“Three years ago today, FOSTA-SESTA was signed into law,” Khanna wrote on his Twitter account. “While it was intended to curb sex trafficking, the bill has had devastating consequences for sex workers, who have been pushed off of online platforms and into far more unsafe conditions. We must repeal FOSTA SESTA.”
Khanna was one of only 11 Democrats in the House, and one of only 25 House reps in total, to vote against the bill when it passed on February 27, 2018, by a 388-25 margin, with 17 House members not voting at all. In December of 2019, Khanna along with fellow California Democrat Barbara Lee — and in the Senate, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — introduced the “Safe Sex Workers Study Act,” which would have funded the first nationwide, U.S. government study of how FOSTA/SESTA affected the safety and lives of sex workers.
But the bill languished in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and remained stuck in that committee’s subcommittee on health, never receiving a full debate or vote on the House floor.
The FOSTA/SESTA law has had an even broader affect than the damage it has done to sex workers. All types of online sexually-oriented material took a hit from the law and the hostile environment toward adult content that surrounded it. The social media site Tumblr, previously a haven for a wide range of sexual discussion and imagery, banned adult content altogether.
And as AVN reported, creators of LGBTQ erotic online comic books and comic strips say that the law has produced a “chilling effect” on their work. Those comics creators said that their work was targeted by platforms for removal if they contain references to sex work, or any sort if LGBTQ content at all.
In addition to its harmful effects on sex workers and sexual speech in general, FOSTA/SESTA was the first in what has become of flood of congressional attacks on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — the 1996 law that protects online free speech by freeing platforms from liability for posts made by users.
That way, online sites can allow a wide range of content and topics to be published, without the overwhelming burden of monitoring every individual post. But under FOSTA/SESTA, sites lose that protection, at least for posts that can be broadly interpreted as promoting “sex trafficking” — leading many sites to simply ban or restrict sexual material altogether.
Photo by SG ZA / Wikimedia Commons
