As Expected, Those Who Pushed For FOSTA Are Now Looking To Kill Off Porn

Legal Issues

from the the-morality-police dept

A few years back, when the campaign to use FOSTA (then called SESTA) as a way to chip away at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act by creating a misleading moral panic around “sex trafficking” was in full swing, we pointed out that it was really a precursor to trying to outlaw all pornography. I highlighted how a key group pushing for FOSTA, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), didn’t even bother to hide that its real target was outlawing all pornography. NCOSE, as we pointed out, started life as “Morality in Media” and only changed its name later when it realized that everyone was ignoring them acting like fussy prudish pearl-clutchers, and decided that if they pretended they were about “exploitation” it would give them more credibility.

A key part of NCOSE’s campaign is to lump porn, prostitution, and “sexual objectification in media” into the exact same bucket as child abuse and sex trafficking, even though there’s a massive difference there. But it shouldn’t come as any surprise that as NCOSE has now expanded to create an “International” (ICOSE) branch, it has done so by kicking off a silly program demanding that credit card companies stop working with porn sites like Pornhub. Of course, in true NCOSE fashion, it insists that porn sites are really engaged in sex trafficking and child abuse:

The letter alleges it is impossible to “judge or verify consent in any videos on their site, let alone live webcam videos” which “inherently makes pornography websites a target for sex traffickers, child abusers, and others sharing predatory nonconsensual videos”.

“We’ve been seeing an increasingly global outcry about the harms of pornography sharing websites in a number of ways in recent months,” said Haley McNamara, the director of the UK-based International Centre on Sexual Exploitation, the international arm of the NCOSE and a signatory of the letter.

“We in the international child advocacy and anti-sexual exploitation community are demanding financial institutions to critically analyse their supportive role in the pornography industry, and to cut ties with them,” she told the BBC.

As Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason points out, this is all a repeat of the same old playbook: lumping in non-nefarious practices with much more nefarious (but also much rarer) practices, and then demanding that credit card companies disengage. These campaigns can sometimes be effective, because credit card companies tend to have little spine and freak out that people might make them look bad for processing payments.

This isn’t the first time activists have gone after the ability of websites to process payments related to sex work. When Craigslist and later Backpage were the moral panic’s big targets, advocates including Illinois sheriff Tom Dart lobbied companies to stop doing business with these websites?even though government officials and advocacy groups had earlier asked Craigslist and Backpage to accept credit card payments because they thought it would make tracking customers easier.

“But think of the children…” has long been a successful lobbying and public pressure strategy, but at some point people are going to realize that when what you really fear is consensual nudity, maybe you’ve gone a bit too far.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, cda 230, censorship, fosta, porn, section 230