US House Passes Bill To Penalize Websites For Sex Trafficking (trust.org)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Thomson Reuters Foundation News: The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed legislation to make it easier to penalize operators of websites that facilitate online sex trafficking, chipping away at a bedrock legal shield for the technology industry. The bill's passage marks one of the most concrete actions in recent years from the U.S. Congress to tighten regulation of internet firms, which have drawn heavy scrutiny from lawmakers in both parties over the past year due to an array of concerns regarding the size and influence of their platforms. The House passed the measure 388-25. It still needs to pass the U.S. Senate, where similar legislation has already gained substantial support, and then be signed by President Donald Trump before it can become law.

Several major internet companies, including Alphabet Inc's Google and Facebook Inc, had been reluctant to support any congressional effort to dent what is known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a decades-old law that protects them from liability for the activities of their users. But facing political pressure, the internet industry slowly warmed to a proposal that gained traction in the Senate last year, and eventually endorsed it after it gained sizable bipartisan support. The legislation is a result of years of law-enforcement lobbying for a crackdown on the online classified site backpage.com, which is used for sex advertising. It would make it easier for states and sex-trafficking victims to sue social media networks, advertisers and others that fail to keep exploitative material off their platforms.

Comments

Gee, that's too bad

[fustakrakich]

I guess the 1st Amendment will never have the same appeal as the 2nd

Re:Gee, that's too bad

[nctritech]

Was Backpage actually running an underage prostitution ring or were third parties running underage prostitution rings and using Backpage as a place to post ads? The rhetoric around "sex trafficking" is full of logical fallacies, anecdotal evidence, and opinions-as-facts appeal-to-emotion presentations by law enforcement officials and politicians. It is difficult to trust that what is presented is actually truthful, especially when the facts run counter to the prevailing narrative.

https://reason.com/blog/2017/0...

Partial quote: "Both law enforcement and nonprofits such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) routinely use sites like Backpage to search for teenagers reported missing. The cross-country nature of the site allows authorities to track potential victims who may move around a lot, and provides tangible evidence for prosecutors to use against their exploiters. Police also use Backpage extensively when conducting sting operations ostensibly targeting the recovery of minors. Backpage itself has, at least historically, reported suspicious ads (such as those featuring pictures of people who look underage) to NCMEC or local law enforcement."

I'm not saying that Backpage is a company run by angels, but I am definitely saying that there's so much propaganda and lies by omission out there about the Backpage prostitution situation that facts are hard to come by without scooping through truckloads of bullshit and ignoring the moralistic crusaders screaming in your ears that they're right. In any case, the people posting underage prostitution ads are the ones committing the heinous act and going after Backpage won't do a damn thing but shovel a bunch more of the prostitution ad volume onto Tor and I2P. Driving the information further underground and further from the legal reach of law enforcement will only make matters worse.

Re:Gee, that's too bad

[Antique Geekmeister]

Those are very good points. We should expect to see many "think of the children" demands. tied to any such laws.

Re:Gee, that's too bad

[nctritech]

I see nothing to substantiate that claim either. Trying to get market share for prostitution ads is not the same thing as trying to get market share for underage prostitution ads. Also, look at the thing you quoted: a team of "over 100 people" have to review each entry before it's posted for a website that receives so many posts that "about a million ads per month" are blocked. Scrutinizing ad wording is a subjective task and they've got a staff in the hundreds on a website that's receiving posts in the millions per month. None of what's in that Wikipedia article quote is a surprise with that kind of context. They remove fake law enforcement ads faster than they remove ads advertising "children?" (Note: teenagers are not children as in "pedophilia" so there's already some seriously loaded wording by describing underage post-pubescent adolescents this way.) Why is this a surprising thing to anyone? The poster for "jailbait" prostitutes only needs to convey "I'm REALLY young, yo" in a coded way and as one code-word is grey-listed a hundred more euphemisms can be created to replace them, whereas the law enforcement official making shit up will be using up-to-date well-known code words that are on the list of phrases that raise red flags. If Backpage is using data analysis akin to spam email scoring to assist in moderation and they don't know who is and isn't law enforcement, doesn't it make perfect sense that LE posts get red-flagged sooner?

As for TPB, they don't turn a blind eye to torrents that violate copyright. TPB outright doesn't give a damn about copyright. That's kind of their schtick.

Re:Gee, that's too bad

[aussie_a]

Are you saying it's morally ok to have sex with a 16 year old when your on holidays in Alabama but not ok when your on holidays in Colorado?

Your appeal to authority makes no logical sense on this issue.

Re:Gee, that's too bad

[SuricouRaven]

Because in many jurisdictions there is no legal distinction between the teenager who has sex with their girlfriend* just one year younger than themselves and the thirty-year-old who rapes a toddler. This is something of an injustice.

*Funnily enough it's less likely to prosecute the other way around.

Re:Gee, that's too bad

[Cederic]

as it happens, yeah, I do.

It's illegal because society deems it to be wrong. Sure, it's an arbitrary cut off but it's very clearly stated and extremely easy to remember.

Being attracted to a woman capable of bearing a child is biologically programmed. Choosing whether to fuck her is a conscious choice.

Re:Gee, that's too bad

[AmiMoJo]

Morally the issue is if that person can really consent. So age isn't as important as their mental state/capacity.

I'd feel worse if I thought that person hadn't been given proper sex education, for example. Or if they had some kind of mental illness / disability. Age isn't really relevant, even if they are over what the local age of consent is that doesn't affect the moral factors.

It's funny...

[SumDog]

..how you can impose platform censorship under the name of preventing sex trafficking. Let's ignore all the rich and/or shitheads that get away with fucking kids and teens without consequence (politicians, the Catholic church, people in Hollywood, etc.) and look at what Craigslist and Backpage provide: prostitution. Is there illegal trafficking? Quite possibly, but there is also prostitution which is legal in the UK, Australia, NZ, much of Europe and a couple of counties in Nevada.

How about just legalizing prostitution, taxing/regulating it, and then go after actual sex traffickers and pedos, without compromising freedom of speech or making it much more difficult for smaller players to enter the walled gardens of content hosting, media distribution and social networks.

Re:It's funny...

[gweihir]

Actual numbers from places were prostitution is legal says basically all prostitutes are doing it of their own choices with exceptions so rare that they do not really matter. Of course, were it is illegal, the politicos and the police use any kind of lie to justify this illegality (which cannot really be justified) and there the myth that a large parts of prostitutes are forced into it comes from. It is not true, unless you count economic incentives, like, you know, people working jobs for the same reason.

Re:It's funny...

[Z34107]

Even if you found its goals laudable, SESTA is not a particularly good piece of legislation. Techdirt hates it because it's intentionally vague--what, exactly, constitutes "knowing conduct by an individual or entity, by any means, that assists, supports, or facilitates a violation"? We know what violates current law, that is, what constitutes "general knowledge" versus "specific knowledge" versus "red flag knowledge" under the DMCA--but knowing what the law actually is means you can comply with it, and that's exactly the flaw this new bill seeks to address.

Lest you think I'm overly cynical (I am), it's worth mentioning that the Department of Justice also hates the bill, also because it's too vague. (Sensing a theme?) While Techdirt's worried that the "knowing conduct" non-definition of "participation in a venture" could be mean anything and everything, the DoJ's worried about the exact opposite--that courts, having been given absolutely no guidance by the bill, could just as easily decide that "knowing conduct" means something highly specific, "effectively creating additional elements that prosecutors must prove at trial." That the trafficking bill's intentional, catch-all vagueness could make it harder for the DoJ to jail traffickers, in other words.

The DoJ is additionally worried that the bill will send you to jail, retroactively, for past "ventures", even if those "ventures" were legal at the time, and again without caring to get too specific on what actually counts as a "venture." If you're reading along, they list that issue under the heading "CONSTITUTIONAL CONCERN", which you'll find capitalized, bolded, and underlined in the original.

In other words, it's a shit bill. If prosecutors were really interested in stopping child trafficking, they would prosecute the traffickers--if allegations are to be believed, you'll find a list of just those people, conveniently enough, on Backpage. Instead, they'd rather go after Backpage--make an example of them, even, since they didn't cave to think-of-the-children grandstanding like Craigslist did.

...which is why we now have a bill tailor made to throw Backpage employees in jail, retroactively, for whatever, because fuck you. I don't think many people here are dumb enough to find credible the sincerity and good intentions of a politician, on the eve of midterms, crying THINK OF THE CHILDREN, but it bears repeating that those sentiments are exactly why we're entertaining an ex post facto law to make King George proud, in 2018, when everything it purports to criminalize is already illegal.

It's interesting...

[crreimer]

..how you can impose platform censorship under the name of preventing sex trafficking. Let's ignore all the rich and/or shitheads that get away with fucking kids and teens without consequence (politicians, the Catholic church, people in Hollywood, etc.) and look at what Craigslist and Backpage provide: prostitution. Is there illegal trafficking? Quite possibly, but there is also prostitution which is legal in the UK, Australia, NZ, much of Europe and a couple of counties in Nevada.

How about just legalizing prostitution, taxing/regulating it, and then go after actual sex traffickers and pedos, without compromising freedom of speech or making it much more difficult for smaller players to enter the walled gardens of content hosting, media distribution and social networks.