Before FOSTA passed, a ton of experts warned it would lead to bad things, and now we’re seeing more and more stories about how FOSTA is actually increasing the sex trafficking problem, rather than decreasing it. Police have admitted that it’s now harder to catch traffickers without the information they used to get from Backpage, and pimps have apparently seized on the opportunity to make use of the disappearance of Backpage and other sites to more aggressively position themselves as the only option for sex workers.
?Without being able to advertise online,? Long said, ?a huge number of sex workers were forced to go outside, and many have reported that former pimps came out of the woodwork offering to ?manage? their business again since they were now rendered unable to find and screen clients online.?
[…]
?The very bill that was supposed to stop trafficking has quite literally given formerly irrelevant traffickers new life,? Long said.
I’m truly curious how the various folks who stumped for FOSTA now feel about this. A bunch of Hollywood stars, including Amy Schumer, Seth Meyers, Josh Charles and Tony Shaloub, all stumped on behalf of FOSTA, making claims that were blatantly untrue. It would be nice if these celebrities could respond to all of the new evidence showing that — just as sex workers and experts predicted — FOSTA has made the situation much worse for sex workers, and put many of them in serious danger.
For quite some time we’ve highlighted the horrible laws being pushed by aggressively misrepresenting the size of the problem of sex trafficking — and especially sex trafficking of children. This is not to say that it never happens. Nor is it to suggest that the crime of sex trafficking, especially of minors, is not horrific and hugely problematic. But we shouldn’t overreact to false information. A year ago, we looked at some of the numbers being presented in favor of passing FOSTA, and found they were almost entirely bullshit. This included Rep. Ann Wagner’s (who is the leading pusher of bad laws around “sex trafficking”) claim child sex trafficking alone was a $9.5 billion industry. As we noted, this number came from a bizarre nonsensical extrapolation of a very misleading and confused report by ICE that covered issues of smuggling (not just sex trafficking). Other stats — such as the supposed number of kids “lured” into sex trafficking — showed even more extrapolation, while police were finding very, very few actual cases of this happening.
Wow. That would be a pretty astoundingly successful police operation, and certainly gives weight to the idea that so many kids are lured into sex trafficking rings and then disappear and go missing. Except… details matter. And deep in the NY Post story they actually admit that out of the 123 missing kids only three were “identified as possible sex trafficking victims.” So, uh, why does the headline suggest that all 123 kids are sex trafficking victims when it’s not clear if any are, and clear that the vast majority are not?
What’s more, all but four of the “missing children” were not actually missing. In the remaining cases, minors were listed in a police database as missing but had since been found or returned home on their own. “Many were (homeschooled),” Lt. Michael Shaw told The Detroit News. “Some were runaways as well.”
Indeed, if you look at the report, it notes that all of the kids outside of those four “were found safe with their parents or guardians.”
So, remember, the headline screamed that 123 missing children were found in a sex trafficking “operation.” Now it seems that most of them were “found” at home with their parents, and only three of them might have been victims of sex trafficking. These seem like important details, especially when you have election officials like Rep. Ann Wagner pushing a vast surveillance bill on the basis of the problem of sex trafficking. Pushing bogus information like over a hundred missing kids being engaged in sex trafficking only helps build that narrative — one that appears to actually be much, much more limited than the media or lying politicians will let you know about.
Back in July we were flabbergasted to see a stunningly misleading and dishonest video put out by the the House Judiciary Committee trying to claim that FOSTA had been a huge success in stopping sex trafficking. There is literally no evidence to suggest this, while there’s plenty of evidence to show the harm that has been created by FOSTA. One of the claims in the video came from Rep. Ann Wagner, who was the original sponsor of FOSTA and has been a leading voice in stoking the exaggerated and misleading moral panic around sex trafficking (which is a real problem, but very, very limited compared to what many — including Wagner — have said about it). Wagner’s latest trick has been to try to massively expand the PATRIOT Act for spying on Americans by again freaking everyone out about sex trafficking.
As we noted back in July, in the video, Wagner tries to imply that FOSTA helped kill off 90% of sex trafficking. She worded it awkwardly so that it clearly implies 90% of sex trafficking went away due to FOSTA, but it could also be read to just say that 90% of sex trafficking ads went away. As we pointed out at the time, this was clearly not true either way. While Backpage contained many ads, it stopped with those ads a year and a half before FOSTA was law, and was taken down by the feds before FOSTA was signed. So there was literally no way that FOSTA could be in any way credited for a drop in ads coming from Backpage.
I missed it, but a few weeks later, the Washington Post set its fact checker on these specific claims, and did an even more thorough analysis, even asking Wagner’s office for details. And those details make Wagner look even worse, leading the Washington Post to give her the full three Pinocchios in their final ruling on the accuracy of her claim. Specifically, Wagner’s office argued that a DARPA analysis saw a “weekly global ad volume dropped 87 percent from January to April.” But, as the WaPo article notes (and as we did as well) the vast majority of that was from the takedown of Backpage, which was not due to FOSTA.
But, from there things get even worse. The Washington Post asked DARPA for what happened after April and found… things are not at all what the House Judiciary Committee and Wagner were claiming. Indeed, while there was an initial decline due to Backpage shutting down (again, not due to FOSTA), it quickly went back up after April — conveniently ignored by Wagner and the HJC. Why contaminate the narrative with facts:
Worldwide ads had a daily average of about 105,000 when FOSTA-SESTA passed on March 21 and had dropped 28 percent by the time Backpage was closed on April 5. It then plunged another 75 percent and reached a low of 19,456 on April 17, for a total decline of about 82 percent.
But on the day the Judiciary Committee posted the video, sex-trade ads were back at about 50 percent of the daily volume before the law had passed; as of Aug. 11, they were at almost 75 percent….
?The volume of ads dropped dramatically after the shutdown of Backpage but has been climbing since,? said Chris Dickson, director of research engineering at Uncharted. ?There is now a volume approaching what we observed before.?
So, once again it appears that Wagner and the HJC like to completely make up stories for grandstanding political purposes. They over-hyped the size of sex trafficking to pass this bad law, and then they massively over-hyped the impact of the law, ignoring (1) that the impact they took credit for had nothing to do with the law, and (2) ignoring that the data didn’t actually support what they claimed.
So why the hell is anyway still listening to Rep. Ann Wagner and her use of “sex trafficking” to try to pass new laws?
If you don’t remember, the momentum around FOSTA/SESTA was that it was going nowhere, until suddenly Facebook did an about face and abruptly (and strongly) supported the bill, leading Congress to incorrectly believe that the tech industry now supported the bill. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, who became the public face of supporting the bill, insisted that there were no problems with the bill, that it wouldn’t create any real problems for internet companies, and that it would be useful in the fight against sex trafficking.
At the time, we pointed out that under the broad definitions in the law, it certainly appeared that Facebook was potentially violating the bill in multiple ways. Even if it turned out that courts rule that the vague language of FOSTA should be construed much more narrowly, the damage is already done, as some companies will have to battle the issue out in court.
And… perhaps not surprisingly… one of the first such cases has been brought against Facebook itself along with Backpage, Backpage’s execs and some local motels (hat tip to Eric Goldman). As you can see, it’s a “Jane Doe” lawsuit filed against Facebook in Harris County, Texas, and the core of the lawsuit is basically tying Facebook to Backpage:
Social Media companies, websites, and the hotel industry should never place their quest for profits above the public good. Human trafficking has hit epidemic proportions in our communities, and it has had a devastating effect on the victims and a crushing financial effect on our world. Driven by profit, social media giants like Facebook and sex brokers like Backpage have treated children as a commodity.
The participants in this venture of abuse share a value–profit. And the bottom line comes before all else–including the safety of children in our community. Facebook’s profic (sic) metric is “connections.” Backpage charged fees to broker sex. And hotels, like the one in this lawsuit, look the other way while children, like Jane Doe, are abused, exploited, and made available for sex acts to multiple perpetrators.
While pimps and sex buyers are sometimes criminally prosecuted, the social media companies, hotel industry, and Backpage have been able to escape taking responsibility for the harms and losses they cause these victims and our community. For years, businesses have been providing predators unrestricted means to prey on victims. Not anymore.
The specific issue relating to Facebook is that the plaintiff “Jane Doe” was recruited from Facebook, and that makes it vicariously liable under FOSTA.
The use of Facebook and the Backpage website for the advertising and recruitment of minors for sex was so pervasive and known to Facebook and the Backpage Defendants that it cannot be said such conduct was so unforeseen as to prevent Facebook and the Backpage Defendants from being liable for such conduct. Rather, Facebook and the Backpage Defendants knowingly aided and assisted sex traffickers, including the sex trafficker who recruited Jane Doe from Facebook and posted the advertisements of Jane Doe on the Backpage website. Facebook and the Backpage Defendants knowingly benefited from this illegal and immoral activity.
In a section about the “allegations regarding Facebook” the complaint makes Facebook out as if it were just as bad as Backpage. Here’s just a snippet:
With each passing day, the gateway to our community’s children is increasingly social media–and Facebook in particular.
People, including children, connecting with their friends, family, and communities are not the only ones passing through Facebook’s gateway.
For years now, Facebook has permitted sex traffickers unfiltered access to the most vulnerable members of our society.
It has continually been used to facilitate human trafficking by allowing sex traffickers an unrestricted platform to stalk, exploit, recruit, groom, recruit, and extort children into the sex trade.
And, yes, it says “recruit” twice in there. This is, of course, hogwash. Facebook connects people, but it gives those users a tremendous amount of control over who is able to contact them — meaning it is hardly “unrestricted.” Either way, because of actions of someone else on Facebook, Facebook should be held liable according to this lawsuit:
The Facebook Friend said Jane Doe could make enough money to pay the rent on her own apartment. The Facebook fried offered to pick her up and console her about her disagreement with her mother.
Within hours of meeting the Facebook Friend, photos were taken of Jane Doe and were posted on Backpage, and then was raped, beaten, and forced into further sex trafficking.
Jane Doe had never been made aware of the dangers of sex traffickers on Facebook.
Jane Doe had never been made aware of the warning signs of sex traffickers on Facebook.
During the whole time that Jane Doe’s Facebook Friend used Facebook, Facebook took no steps to verify his identity.
To date, Facebook has taken no reasonable steps to mitigate the use of Facebook by sex traffickers or exploiters using its platform.
Millions of minors like Jane Doe remain at risk every day when they simply log onto Facebook.
So… given those details, it certainly seems like there’s an obvious criminal case to be brought against this “Facebook friend.” Shouldn’t that be the focus? Also, there are lots of places to learn how to be safe online. Why is it Facebook’s fault that this individual didn’t learn the basics of internet safety? The story is sad, obviously, but blaming Facebook for it is ridiculous. But thanks to Facebook’s own support of FOSTA, it’s at least now possible. In the causes of action, Doe claims that Facebook had a duty to “warn of the dangers of grooming” and failing to do that makes it liable. That seems like a stretch, but again, thanks to FOSTA it’s not an open and shut case like it would have been earlier.
Remember, back when some of us pointed out that under FOSTA almost any website might face crushing liability? But supporters of the bill insisted that was a ridiculous read on the bill, because it would only apply to “bad actors” who “knowingly facilitated sex trafficking.” We kept being told that this would never apply to sites like Facebook, and even had people tell us that Facebook’s own support of the bill somehow “proved” that the law would never be used against Facebook.
And, yet, here we are with Facebook in court, with a victim of sex trafficking claiming that Facebook is liable.
Facebook may get the case tossed — and hopefully that is the end result — but it has already created a legal headache for the company, just as many of us predicted back when the bill was being debated. Also, I can’t wait for all of those who insisted that FOSTA would never be used against sites like Facebook to either (a) refuse to comment on this or (b) now insist that Facebook was, indeed, a “bad actor” despite denying it during the debate over FOSTA and SESTA.
When you’re looking to expand the government’s power, any crisis will do. Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, legislators told us the terrorists hated us for our freedom. Then they rushed through the Patriot Act, demonstrating how much our own government hates us for our freedoms.
In the name of national security, the government was allowed to engage in warrantless searches (and warrantless wiretapping) as the Fourth Amendment was sacrificed to make way for secure skies and secure borders. More of the same is on tap at the federal level, thanks to another “crisis” — one mostly manufactured by a number of government officials who want to expand their power in the name of all the trafficked children in the world.
Sex trafficking is the name of the game — even if the game board seems mostly devoid of players. A number of grandstanders have taken shots at big online services, playing shoot the message board since it’s easier to serve Craigslist, Backpage, or whoever than track down actual traffickers.
One of these grandstanders is Rep. Ann Wagner. Wagner has been leading the charge to destroy Section 230 immunity under the pretense of hunting down sex traffickers. Sex traffickers will go on trafficking. They’ll just be harder to find. Meanwhile, the web gets worse for everyone as websites become less willing to provide platforms for third-party content.
Wagner has made outrageous claims and pushed hard for outrageous legislation. She was one of the leading forces behind FOSTA. But she’s not done yet. As Elizabeth Nolan Brown points out in her excellent article for Reason, Wagner’s new bill is another Patriot Act — but with “human trafficking” standing in for “worldwide terrorism.”
Wagner’s bill (H.R. 6729)—the deceptively named the “Empowering Financial Institutions to Fight Human Trafficking Act” of 2018—is the latest in a long line of assaults on civil liberties disguised as attacks on the biggest crime panic of the decade, sex trafficking. Wagner alone brought us the SAVE Act in 2015 and FOSTA in 2018, both of which take aim at online anonymity, web publishing, social media, sex workers, and free speech under the guise of saving children from “modern slavery.”
Specifically, H.R. 6729 would allow financial institutions, federal regulatory bodies, nonprofit organizations, and law enforcement to share customer bank records between them without running afoul of rules regarding consumer privacy and without opening themselves up to lawsuits. Ostensibly, this would be done “in order to better identify and report potential human trafficking or money laundering activities.”
Wagner will strip immunity from websites and serve up immunity to banks. This plan to end sex trafficking isn’t being carried out in good faith. Distorted facts, distorted stats, and a whole bunch of made up data is par for the course. So, it makes sense the banks won’t have to operate in good faith either.
But these entities need not demonstrate that the “sharing was made on a good faith basis,” according to the current text of the bill.
This sounds like legislative encouragement for fishing expeditions — both by law enforcement and by financial institutions. The Patriot Act’s expansion of government power already lowered the bar for law enforcement, allowing it to obtain records without subpoenas or judicial review. This bill expands the Patriot Act’s confines past the War on Terror to sweep up anything that could conceivably be imagined as related to human trafficking.
The government has already abused the Patriot Act to investigate strip clubs, as Nolan Brown points out. Dropping the national security pretense will allow government agencies to dig into thousands or millions of additional financial transactions. Anything that looks like overreach will be excused by concern for the children or the supposed wiliness of sex traffickers.
The video makes a number of blatantly false claims from various members of the House Judiciary, but let’s focus mainly on the claims of Ann Wagner, whose original bill kicked off the process that became FOSTA/SESTA. She’s been spreading moral panic nonsense about sex trafficking and the internet for ages, so it’s no surprise that she continues to do so. But, at one point in the video she states:
“We have shut down nearly 90% of the online sex trafficking business and ads.”
She kind of swallows that last “and ads” bit so you could miss it, but either way it’s utter and complete nonsense. I looked all over for any evidence of the claim that 90% of online sex trafficking has been stopped and there doesn’t appear to be an iota of support for that. The only stat I could find that is possibly being twisted to make this argument is that when Backpage was seized earlier this year — notably before FOSTA/SESTA was signed into law — a Reuters report claimed that 90% of Backpage’s ads were for “adult ads.”
But, that in no way translates to Wagner’s nutty claim for a whole long list of reasons:
Backpage was not the entire online market for sex trafficking ads (amusingly, Wagner admits this earlier in the same video, in which she falsely claims that there were “hundreds and hundreds of websites selling our children with impunity” < -- narrator: "there were not, in fact, hundreds and hundreds of websites doing so, and they were not doing it with impunity."
Many of the adult ads on Backpage were not for sex trafficking at all
Backpage stopped hosting adult ads a year and a half ago in January of 2017, over a year before SESTA/FOSTA became law and over a year before the site was seized by the feds.
And, again, Backpage was seized before SESTA/FOSTA was even signed into law.
So, where, exactly is Wagner getting this stat of having shut down 90% of online sex trafficking and ads because of FOSTA/SESTA?
There’s other nonsense in the video as well. Wagner’s other whopper was:
“If it’s a crime offline, by golly, it’s a crime online!”
Uh, yes. But that’s always been the case. FOSTA/SESTA didn’t change that. All it did was create a series of new crimes for third party tools and services used by not just sex traffickers, but sex workers. Sex trafficking was already illegal and this bill did absolutely nothing to change that. It is simply wrong to imply that FOSTA/SESTA suddenly made something illegal online that had been legal online before but illegal offline. It’s not true.
Then there’s Mimi Walters’ who brought the amendment that combined FOSTA and SESTA, making both bills worse. Her credibility on this whole thing is already suspect, given that after the feds took down Backpage, she took credit for it falsely saying it was because of FOSTA/SESTA even though that bill was not law yet. But, here she is in the video spewing more nonsense:
“This legislation will now make it illegal to sell people online and give those survivors the opportunity to seek justice.”
Except it was always illegal to sell people online (and offline!) and nothing in FOSTA/SESTA changed that. All it did was create a new crime in which tools and services used by traffickers could also be found to be criminal in addition to the people who were doing the actual selling of people (while also making it harder for law enforcement to find those people — but we’ll get there). She continues:
“Websites that knowingly facilitate sex trafficking are no longer immune from legal action.”
Except they were never immune from legal action. Facilitating sex trafficking is a federal crime and nothing in CDA 230 contained immunity for federal crimes. It really makes you wonder why the primary “authors” of the bill seem to feel so hard pressed to flat out lie about what their own bill does. Why would they do that?
The video also has Judiciary Committee Chair Bob Goodlatte with more of his nonsense as well.
“The provisions of this law are already making the internet safer.”
[Citation needed] Amusingly, right after Goodlatte says that, the video in an effort to support this claim flips to a news report about the shutdown of Backpage… which (and I know I’m repeating myself here) was taken down without the helps of FOSTA/SESTA since it wasn’t even signed into law.
Also, the evidence to date leans heavily against the claim that it has made the internet safer. Indeed, already we’ve seen reports about sex workers being killed and pimps being empowered now that sex workers can’t use sites like Backpage to screen clients. And a big study has highlighted how a lack of such services likely leads to a massive uptick in murder of women (not just sex workers, but women in general). And, lest we forget, police departments themselves are now complaining that they can no longer find sex traffickers thanks to the law.
Notice that the video addresses none of those effects (all of which were widely predicted). It just insists that the internet is safer. This is legislative fantasyland.
Of course, there’s another oddity here. Why the hell is the House Judiciary Committee Republicans suddenly putting out such a video? The bill has already passed and it’s already doing lots of damage. So why is Congress spending taxpayer money on a professionally edited video talking up a bunch of nonsense? Perhaps, as many have suggested, a key part of FOSTA/SESTA was always about grandstanding about how these politicians are “tough on sex trafficking” even if that’s not accurate at all. And now that we’re heading towards election season, I guess they have to milk that grandstanding bullshit for all its worth. Go spend your constituents hard-earned tax money by lying to them! What a job!
Of course, another reason for all of this may be the recent lawsuit claiming that FOSTA/SESTA is unconstitutional. While we’ve written about it already, the stories of some of the plaintiffs in that lawsuit tell the real story of how FOSTA/SESTA is harming people. Among those suing are a national alliance of Asian massage stores, who note that, thanks to FOSTA/SESTA their completely legitimate businesses are now being blocked from advertising, because some falsely assume that any Asian massage stores must be engaged in the sex trade.
…many Internet sites and review platforms flatly refuse content from or about Asian massage providers, DiBenedetto indicated. ?Since it?s assumed we?re in the sex trade because we have Asian women offering Asian massage, platforms that used to run our ads and carry our reviews all the time now want nothing to do with us.?
The loss of those online outlets is devastating to providers of Asian massage services, said DiBenedetto. ?They are unfairly cutting our stores off from the consumers we need to attract in order to stay viable. The business model of the typical Asian massage store requires a continual inflow of new customers. That inflow is heavily disrupted by us being profiled.?
DiBenedetto said Asian massage studio owners and masseuses now, ?go to work every morning wondering if today will be the day their livelihoods vanish because all the doors have been slammed in their faces. This is so demoralizing, not to mention dehumanizing.?
So, to summarize, the House Judiciary Committee appears to be spending taxpayer money on a video celebrating a law that doesn’t do what they claim it does, taking credit for a site takedown that wasn’t because of the law, making up stats that have no basis in reality, ignoring the fact that their law has put many lives in real danger while making it more difficult for law enforcement to do their job, not to mention harming small business owners at the same time.
And people wonder why Congress’ approval rating is so low.
* Our standard practice is not to name the party of politicians unless that’s central to the story. In this case, the video is literally coming from a YouTube account that is apparently run by the Republicans on the House Judiciary. And this is not a “Republican v. Democrat” thing, because the Democrats on the Committee also supported FOSTA/SESTA. It was bipartisan nonsense, so if you happen to support the blue team or the red team, stupid generalizing comments about one party or the other will just make you look silly and tribal, rather than insightful or intelligent.
SESTA/FOSTA was pushed through with the fiction it would be used to target sex traffickers. This obviously was never its intent. It faced pushback from the DOJ and law enforcement agencies because pushing traffickers off mainstream sites would make it much more difficult to track them down. The law was really written for one reason: to take down Backpage and its owners, who had survived numerous similar attempts in the past. The DOJ managed to do this without SESTA, which was still waiting for presidential approval when the feds hits the site’s principal executives with a 93-count indictment.
The law is in force and all it’s doing is hurting efforts to track down sex traffickers and harming sex workers whose protections were already minimal. Sex traffickers, however, don’t appear to be bothered by the new law. But that’s because the law wasn’t written to target sex traffickers, as a top DOJ official made clear at a law enforcement conference on child exploitation. Acting Assistant Attorney General John P. Cronan’s comments make it clear SESTA/FOSTA won’t be used to dismantle criminal organizations and rescue victims of sex traffickers. It’s there to give the government easy wins over websites while sex traffickers continue unmolested.
In April, Backpage.com – the internet’s leading forum to advertise child prostitution – was seized and shut down, thanks to the collective action by CEOS and our federal and state partners. The Backpage website was a criminal haven where sex traffickers marketed their young victims. The Backpage takedown – and the contemporaneous arrests of individuals allegedly responsible for administering the site – struck a monumental blow against child sex traffickers.
But other sites inevitably will seek to fill the void left by Backpage, and we must be vigilant in bringing those criminals to justice as well. With the recent passage of the SESTA-FOSTA legislation, state and local prosecutors are now positioned to more effectively prosecute criminals that host online sex trafficking markets that victimize our children.
“Criminals” that “host sex trafficking markets.” That’s the target. That’s any website that might be used by actual sex traffickers to engage in actual sex trafficking. There’s no dedicated web service for sex trafficking — at least not out in the open where Section 230 immunity used to matter. This is all about taking down websites for hosting any content perceived as sex trafficking-related. It wasn’t enough to hang Backpage and its execs. The government will be scanning sites for this content and then targeting the website for content posted by third parties it seems mostly uninterested in pursuing.
Hosts of third-party content are usually easy to find. The actual third parties are far more difficult to track down. Intermediary liability is back. Section 230 is no longer an effective defense. The edges have been trimmed back and the government knows it can rack up easy wins over web hosts and slowly start destroying the web under the facade of saving sex trafficking victims. The DOJ knew this law would make it harder to track down traffickers. But it also knows the law allows it to target websites instead. And here it is touting the law it fought against to a conference full of law enforcement officials, letting them know targeting websites will give them wins and accolades and far fewer headaches than tracking down the individuals actually engaged in illegal activity.
For many months in the discussion over FOSTA/SESTA, some of us tried to explain how problematic the bills were. Much of the focus of those discussions were about the negative impact it would have on free speech on the internet, as the way the bill was drafted would encourage greater censorship and more speech-chilling lawsuits. But as we heard from more and more people, we also realized just how incredibly damaging the bill was going to be to those it was ostensibly designed to protect. Beyond the fact that it was passed based on completely fictional claims about the size of the problem, those who actually were victims of sex trafficking began explaining — in fairly stark terms — how SESTA/FOSTA would put them in greater danger and almost certainly lead to deaths.
While supporters of the bill seem to insist that because the bill puts legal liability on platforms that are used for sex trafficking that it will magically make sex trafficking disappear, the reality is more complex. While we can argue about Backpage’s complicity in what happened on its platform, for years it was used as a tool to protect sex workers, giving them more control over their lives and who they worked with. As we’ve pointed in the past, a recent study found that Craigslist, back when it had its “erotic services” section, appeared to decrease female homicide rates by an astounding 17.4%. Backpage picked up the slack when Craigslist was bullied into closing that section, but now it’s gone too.
And stories are already coming in about the damage done. A recent episode of the Reply All podcast all about SESTA/FOSTA had some scary stats at the end, noting that there are already many stories of sex workers who have gone missing or been killed since the bill became law.
Motherboard has a story with much more details, noting that the passing of SESTA/FOSTA has emboldened pimps to take advantage of more victims of sex trafficking. As many sex workers had explained, Backpage actually allowed them to have more control themselves, and helped them get away from pimps. But without Backpage?
?Pimps seem to be coming out of the woodwork since this all happened,? Laura LeMoon, a sex trafficking survivor, writer, and co-founder and director of harm reduction nonprofit Safe Night Access Project Seattle, told me in an email. ?They?re taking advantage of the situation sex workers are in. This is why I say FOSTA/SESTA have actually increased trafficking. I?ve had pimps contacting me. They?re leeches. They make money off of [sex workers?] misfortune.?
The Verge also has an excellent deep dive into how SESTA/FOSTA has put more women’s lives at risk.
What about the claims that SESTA/FOSTA would help law enforcement (many of whom pushed for the law)? Yeah, about that: police are now realizing that it’s more difficult for them to find sex traffickers without Backpage. I mean, it’s not like people were explaining this a decade ago.
Meanwhile, given how many SETSA/FOSTA supporters insisted that the bill was necessary to prevent the sex trafficking scourge, you’d think that sex trafficking prosecutions and arrests would show an upswing, right? Instead, we see things like how a special court in Delaware set up specifically to focus on dealing with sex trafficking cases is shutting down due to the lack of actual sex trafficking victims. The reason the court was shut down according to the judge who shut it down?
… there was “little evidence to suggest the defendants of this court are the subjects” of sex-trafficking enterprises.
So, I’m still wondering why all of the supporters of SESTA/FOSTA seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth in the last couple months as all of this has happened. Can one of them step forward and actually defend what they’ve done as the evidence is showing they’re literally getting people killed and making it more difficult to stop sex trafficking?
Last year we had a post detailing how the numbers that supporters of SESTA were pushing didn’t appear to have any factual basis. Some huge numbers were thrown around, claiming that trafficking was a $9.8 billion industry or that thousands of kids were lured into sex trafficking every year. But, when reporters and experts dug into those numbers, they found that they were either made up, involved egregious sampling errors or insane extrapolation. These reports all suggested that while sex trafficking is real, the problem is not nearly as big as politicians and supporters of SESTA were making it out to be.
Now an article in Buzzfeed by two academics provides even more details in how the claims about sex trafficking used to pass FOSTA/SESTA were based on myths. The two academics, Drs. Jenny Heineman and Brooke Wagner point to a ton of empirical research they did (funded by the Justice Department) that completely debunked some of the key claims behind SESTA/FOSTA. The first myth? That no one chooses sex work, but that nearly all sex workers are victims of trafficking by pimps. That’s not what they found.
In our subsample of youth under the age of 18 who were, at the time of interview, engaged in survival sex, 33 individuals ? 24% ?had a pimp or trafficker, liberally defined as someone with whom the respondent shared their earnings. That definition raises questions of its own, and one young woman?s experience stood out as representative of those questions. Rena, who was 16 at the time of the interview, laughed when we asked if she had a pimp. She tipped her head toward one of her friends.
Again, that’s not to take away from the issue about those who are trafficking or are dealing with abusive pimps. But, if we’re going to tackle a problem it should be focused on the actual problem.
The researchers also studied Backpage and how much of it was used for trafficking as opposed to sex workers choosing to use the platform themselves. Take a guess what they found:
Another myth is that the internet ? and in particular sites like backpage.com, which was recently shuttered by the FBI ? is primarily used by pimps. This is not what our research showed. In fact, the percentage of respondents who used the internet to find customers remained the same, whether or not they reported having a pimp.
In fact, the only variable that correlated with using an online platform to find clients was neighborhood conflict ? respondents whose neighborhoods were marked with disputes that led to physical fights or altercations were more likely to seek customers from the internet. This suggests online platforms act as safety nets and buffers against violence.
And, their research also shows — as we noted in a few of our posts — that shutting down sites like Backpage actually puts sex workers at much greater risk of being harmed or killed:
Because law enforcement routinely uses online platforms to entrap and arrest sex workers, it?s clear that these women would rather advertise online and risk arrest ? which can spell death for black, brown, and indigenous people, trans people, and people with mental illness ? rather than face the violence of the street. Our current federal policy is to take away that choice, and the crackdown on online platforms used by sex workers is likely to push those women into violent situations.
There are ways to deal with the actual victims of course. But that involves doing actual police work. Tracking down actual victims (something that online platforms like Backpage actually helped in doing) and arresting their abusers. But that’s actually harder in a post-FOSTA/SESTA world.
And what do we get for this? Well, as Vox recently noted, nothing less than undermining the internet as we know it. If we’re going to do that, it seems like it should have been done based on, you know, actual facts, rather than completely made up statistics and lies. Alas.
One of the main reasons FOSTA/SESTA is now law is because of Facebook’s vocal support for the bill. Sheryl Sandberg repeatedly spoke out in favor of the bill, misrepresenting what the bill actually did. In our own post-mortem on what happened with FOSTA/SESTA we noted that a big part of the problem was that many people inside Facebook (incredibly) did not appear to understand how CDA 230 works, and thus misunderstood how FOSTA/SESTA would create all sorts of problems. Last month, we noted that there was some evidence to suggest that Facebook itself was violating the law it supported.
However, a new article from Buzzfeed presents even more evidence of just how much liability Facebook may have put on itself in supporting the law. The article is fairly incredible, talking about how Facebook has allowed a group on its site that helps landlords seek out gay sex in exchange for housing — and the report is chilling in how far it goes. In some cases, it certainly appears to reach the level of sex trafficking, where those desperate for housing basically become sex slaves to their landlords.
Today, in the first instalment of this series, we uncover some of the damage done to these young men ? the sexual violence ? by landlords, and reveal how they are being enabled by two major internet companies, one of which is Facebook. The world?s largest social media platform, BuzzFeed News can reveal, is hosting explicit posts from landlords promising housing in return for gay sex.
In multiple interviews with the men exchanging sex for rent and groups trying to deal with the crisis, BuzzFeed News also uncovered a spectrum of experiences that goes far beyond what has so far been documented, with social media, hook-up apps, and chemsex parties facilitating everything.
At best, impoverished young men are seeking refuge in places where they are at risk of sexual exploitation. At worst, teenagers are being kept in domestic prisons where all personal boundaries are breached, where their lives are in danger.
I’ve seen multiple people point out — accurately — that the article’s focus on Facebook here is a little silly. The real focus should be on the “landlords” who are seeking out and taking advantage of desperate young men in need of a place to live. But, given that the focus is on Facebook, it certainly appears that Facebook has the knowledge required to be a violation of FOSTA/SESTA:
Despite the explicit nature of the postings on the group?s site, the administrator told BuzzFeed News that Facebook has not intervened. ?We have never had an incident from Facebook,? he said. ?If they [members] want to post something that will not fly with Facebook I write them, and tell them what needs to be changed.?
This has not stopped explicit notices being posted.
When approached by BuzzFeed News to respond to issues relating to this group, Facebook initially replied promising that a representative would comment. That response, however, did not materialise, despite several attempts by BuzzFeed News, over several days, to invite Facebook to do so. A week after first contacting the social media company, the group remains on its site.
It still seems wrong to blame Facebook for what the horrific landlords are doing here, but, hey, FOSTA/SESTA is now the law, and it’s the law thanks in large part to Facebook’s strong support for it. So, given all of this, will Facebook now face legal action, either from the victims of this group or from law enforcement?
