This week, after Congress sent a bill to President Trump that would punish websites used for sex trafficking, the online classifieds site Craigslist removed its “personals’ section. That section enabled anonymous people to connect with each other for romance or sex.
As The New York Times reports, “While many people used the site to find relationships — one of the discontinued categories is ‘strictly platonic’ — it was no secret that some postings were thinly veiled solicitations for prostitution, despite the site’s efforts to fight overt solicitations for money.”
The bill, titled, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, states:
… websites that promote and facilitate prostitution have been reckless in allowing the sale of sex trafficking victims and have done nothing to prevent the trafficking of children and victims of force, fraud, and coercion … whoever uses or operates a facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce or attempts to do so with the intent to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person shall be fined under this title, imprisoned for not more than 10 years, or both. … Whoever uses or operates a facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce with the intent to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person and promotes or facilitates the prostitution of 5 or more persons or acts in reckless disregard of the fact that such conduct contributed to sex trafficking, in violation of 1591(a) shall be fined under this title, imprisoned for not more than 25 years, or both.
Anyone clicking on the personals section of Craigslist will now receive a message redirecting them to a short statement which reads in part, “Congress just passed HR 1865, “FOSTA”, seeking to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully. Any tool or service can be misused. We can’t take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking craigslist personals offline.”
According to the Times, some people have already attempted to circumvent the new policy by visiting the “missed connections” section.
Lauren Hersh, the national director for World Without Exploitation, enthused about the bill. “It really provides both survivors and folks in law enforcement with the tools to hold websites that are knowingly facilitating trafficking accountable,” she said.
All too predictably, a representative of the ACLU protested the bill on behalf of sex workers, writing:
FOSTA threatens the lives and safety of sex workers — people who are disproportionately LGBTQ and people of color. The legislation does this through a dangerously broad definition of “promotion of prostitution,” which is not limited to trafficking and could sweep in any trading of sex for money or other goods. The bill also creates a new, vaguely defined federal crime for the facilitation of prostitution, which could result in a prison sentence of up to 10 years. FOSTA’s definition of “facilitation” is so open to interpretation that it could include critical harm reduction and anti-violence tactics that sex workers depend on to survive.
Freedom Network USA echoed, “Consensual commercial sex workers use harm reduction tools such as online forums to screen clients, avoid high risk activities, share resources, and protect each other.”
Hersh knew better, saying, “We work with survivors, many of whom have been exploited on these websites, and so we are seeing firsthand the extraordinary harm that’s happening to many women and children.”