WASHINGTON, D.C.—As both Republicans and Democrats prepare to legislate new rollbacks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—the 1996 law that protects freedom of expression on the internet—a congressional rep from Silicon Valley, Ro Khanna, says he plans to bring a new constituency into the debate: sex workers.
“There’s no politician who gains political currency for standing up for the voices of sex workers. They’re not a voting bloc. They’re not a donor bloc. Lobbyists don’t represent them on Capitol Hill,” Khanna told the political site Roll Call. “And they were just totally shut out. They were simply invisible.”
Khanna was one of only 25 House members to vote against the 2018 FOSTA/SESTA bill, which supposedly was designed to curb online sex trafficking, but instead created new hazards for sex workers. According to one recent study, one of every three sex workers reported facing increased violence in the course of their work since passage of the law. The study also found an increase in economic instability for sex workers—even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic—due to FOSTA/SESTA restrictions.
At the core of FOSTA/SESTA was a significant weakening of Section 230. The 25-year-old law shields online platforms from legal liability for user-generated content, allowing an almost unlimited range of online expression. But FOSTA/SESTA stripped that protection in cases of “sex trafficking,” a term that the law defined so broadly that almost any sexually frank or explicit content could be deemed to promote “sex trafficking.”
Khanna has authored a bill to fund a congressional study of FOSTA/SESTA’s effects on sex workers, which if passed is seen as the first step to repeal of the law. In the Senate, Khanna’s bill has won the backing of Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren, and Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders.
“The opinion has shifted,” Khanna told Roll Call. “People have now heard stories of sex workers being abused and having to go on the streets and harassed. There’s a recognition of the harm that has been caused, but there was not that awareness when this was rushed to a vote.”
The latest attempt to roll back Section 230 comes from Senate Democrats in the form of the Safe TECH Act, which would effectively remove the law’s protection from any site that takes in money in order to post content. Khanna says that he wants sex workers to have a voice in the debate over that bill, or any other potential partial or full repeal of Section 230.
“Could you craft reforms to Section 230 that I could get behind? Yes,” he told Roll Call. But we have to be thoughtful and understand that we may not be able to anticipate all the consequences.”
Kate D’Adamo, a sex worker rights advocate with the group Reframe Health and Justice, told the site that sex workers are simply outgunned by the forces both inside and outside of Congress that are aiming to “criminalize the sex industry out of existence.”
“If we don’t understand the impact of regulating digital space, then we really can’t make good policy,” D’Adamo told Roll Call. “And we can’t just silo out the sex industry as the canary in the coal mine, because at the end of the day, we’re going to end up disproportionately harming other marginalized people.”
Photo By Web Summit / Wikimedia Commons
