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Craigslist Personals, Some Subreddits Disappear After FOSTA Passage (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In the wake of this week's passage of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) bill in both houses of Congress on Wednesday, Craigslist has removed its "Personals" section entirely, and Reddit has removed some related subreddits, likely out of fear of future lawsuits. FOSTA, which awaits the signature of President Donald Trump before becoming law, removes some portions of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The landmark 1996 law shields website operators that host third-party content (such as commenters, for example) from civil liability. The new bill is aimed squarely at Backpage, a notorious website that continues to allow prostitution advertisements and has been under federal scrutiny for years. In a bizarre turn of events, the Department of Justice also warned the House in February 2018 that the bill "raises a serious constitutional concern," as it would apply retroactively -- a seeming violation of the Constitution's ex post facto clause. Congress passed it anyway. The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a blog post: "It's easy to see the impact that this ramp-up in liability will have on online speech: facing the risk of ruinous litigation, online platforms will have little choice but to become much more restrictive in what sorts of discussion -- and what sorts of users -- they allow, censoring innocent people in the process."
If they really wanted to reduce traficking, they just made it harder. It wasn't terribly difficult to suss out potentially bad CL ads. Guys looking for you to be "generous", and for the DEA guys, "let's go skiiing"... in Florida. By getting rid of this stuff, they just shut down a source where people were providing them with leads. Or maybe they were just embarrassed that they couldn't follow up on all that stuff.
You don't even need to censor people anymore, just ramp up the legal risk and they'll do it themselves.
The good news is they FINALLY took Rants & Raves out of "personals" and put it under Community / Local News.
I never did understand why it was under "personals" to begin with. I mean, most of the insults there were pretty personal - but even so - it did not seem to fit with all the other "personals" categories.
And laws like FOSTA are what we get as a result.
Only Ron Wyden and Rand Paul voted against it.
Every last one of the pieces of trash who voted for it need to be voted out of office.
With craiglist personals gone, I suppose the will loose revenue and eye balls. I wonder if this will be a boon to newspaper print since classified adds were a big money maker for them. IIRC newspapers are protected from these kind of lawsuits.
The transition of the Web from "Wild West" to "cable TV" continues.
Fire up those terminal emulators, folks!
(or the real thing (vt320, vt220, vt525, wy60, etc) if you've got them)
Don't blame the Republicans for this. More of them voted against this than we did.
Then where else am I going to find the best 100% heterosexual, no gay stuff, Manhood Camping where guys get around a fire to J/O?
Going forward I'll need to post all my personal ads on Trump's Twitter Feed. If everyone joined me he'd need to face liability, block us all, or shut it down. If only it were that easy.
Over the past few years it really seems like our government is hell bent on pushing internet facing companies out of the country.(USA)
Why?
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
What's that going to take, about an hour?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
There is still a chance that Trump won't sign it. After all, this legislation hits home for him.
We'll be watching you very closely. If you're gonna cave, just shut the doors and turn off the lights. Up until now you have been the most censorship free site around. If you lose that distinction, there is no reason for you to exist.
To the rest of you assholes, YOU voted for this, if you don't sweep all the incumbents out of the house and reverse this crap, fuck you sideways!
To the technical talent, please bring back USENET, and make it unblockable, and tell the whiners crying about spam to learn how to write a filter.
I'm a gay atheist. You can have sex with whoever you want to. Just don't try to force me to pay for the consequences of your sexual escapades (single motherhood, abortions, family courts, STDs, divorce, sexual harassment, etc.).
You're free to pay for the basic living expenses of as many of them as you care to help.
And even if you could be as virtuous as you'd like with everyone else's money, it wouldn't ultimately matter anyway. There are going to be enough men that want sex who are willing to pay for it that some women will engage in prostitution not out of necessity or for their survival, but because it allows them to earn extra money. This may surprise you, but some women like sex as much as most men, especially if they can be discerning in who they're hopping into bed with. If they can get paid for doing what they enjoy, who the hell are you to tell them what they're allowed to do with their bodies?
Legalizing prostitution will do a lot of prevent the kinds of horrible conditions and abuse that many women find themselves in just as repealing prohibition meant that no one had to get shot or poisoned over bootleg liquor.
Tinder is still working!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
If they're smart, Democrats nominate Barney the purple dinosaur before they give Hillary another go. I mean, she couldn't even win against Trump...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
If they can get paid for doing what they enjoy, who the hell are you to tell them what they're allowed to do with their bodies?
We're politicians that aren't getting the lion's share of the money changing hands, that's who!
Now shut the fuck up and pay your taxes like a good slave! /s
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
The fundies really did some good PR work to make human trafficking a synonym to prostitution.
388 - 25 and 97 - 2... I think we can safely say this was entirely bipartisan. After all- sex trafficking bad. You don't wanna be the guy who voted to legalize sex trafficking.
Sure thing, just don't make me pay for your AIDS medicine.
See how offensive that is?
"it would apply retroactively -- a seeming violation of the Constitution's ex post facto clause"
Seeming? That's a clear, unambiguous violation of the Constitution's prohibition against ex post facto laws: "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." There's no wiggle room there.
I've noticed that the term "prostitution" has been replaced by the term "sex trafficking" lately. This strikes me as deliberately misleading terminology, aimed at making people think that human trafficking -- that is, slavery -- is what is being targeted, when in reality it is certain voluntary transactions that are being targeted.
Actually, Sessions' DoJ raised objections to the bill, which Congress ignored: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4390045-DOJ-FOSTA-Letter.html
Every braindead conservative on the Internet is now crawling out of the woodwork to complain that YouTube and reddit are affecting MUH FREEDOMS by violating the First Amendment. It's almost like they have no idea what their own government is doing, or how their own Constitution works, or what rights private companies (that they love to defend against regulation) have.
It has now reached the point were I feel guilty paying for a ticket knowing that some of that money goes to the MPAA. I know democracy is weak in the USA but I'm still saddened when I see a new exploit of the corrupt system they have.
A lot easier to tax a legal business. It's also one of the arguments for legalizing marijuana, of course the right up here are just screaming about the children without stopping to consider we already have one of the highest amounts of usage by children. Same with sex, when our Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional to ban prostitution, they just made it illegal to buy sex and put in regulations like no selling sex within a ridiculous distance from schools. They scream about free speech and being allowed to vent their hatred while doing their best to illegalize other types of speech such as talking about sex and especially pictures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Bear with me here.
This is a good thing because the current makeup of the Supreme Court as mainly 'strict constitutionalists' (I won't say 'conservative' because that's a loaded term) means that most if not all of this bill will likely be struck down if/when any case gets to the Supreme Court and there's no doubt that someone with deep pockets will take it to the Supreme Court level as there's no way to meet the obligations of this bill with 100% accuracy. Further to that though while such a case may be about this bill alone Supreme Court judgments act as precedents for similar laws e.g. they place boundaries on what the government can & cannot pass a law about. Personally I think all laws should REQUIRE a Supreme Court challenge before become law where affected parties would act as the 'plaintiff' just as if they'd run afoul of th law, not just a 'judicial review'.
Secondly, we can conduct a bit of easy Civil Disobedience. We can all gang up and start posting material prohibited by this law to any government website, federal, state, county etc., any website of a sitting politician or candidate that allows positing of material. Let's see how these politicians really act when they are the ones potentially being sued and/or sent to jail for allow 'kiddy porn' on their websites.
Why would it be offensive to me? I just said the same thing. Growing up, I knew HIV medication wouldn't be covered by my medical system and catching HIV would likely be a death sentence. Later, my insurance covered the cheap, less-effective medications but wouldn't have covered the latest treatments from the US; if I wanted those, it would have been expensive. All of this was a strong incentive to practice safe sex. Shielding people from the consequences of their choices is not doing them a favor, whether you are talking about young women or gay men.
I remember when CL revolved the escorts section. I said then that they would move to casual encounters- the did; all be it slowing over a couple years. Now this... which only means they are either going to adopt another forum or just spam all the forums. I can't wait for this to reach the supreme court to be struck down for being overreaching and and an overburden.
All forums all over the internet are going to be setup with bogus adds by unscrupulous attorneys. I can see many companies coming together showing all the money spent to censor this stuff but it only becoming more prevalent because attorneys can profit from inflating the problem. You are absolutely going to see adds all over big companies forums.
Hey politicians in congress.... you just screwed over big business and speech at the same time.
My mistake was assuming you're from the US.
I am from the US.
My medical insurance covers some high dollar AIDS treatment, which means I help cover some high cost AIDS treatment. Something I'm virtually guaranteed never to contract.
And frankly, I'd rather it did than see a good person die from an unfortunate mistake.
Shielding people from the consequences of their choices when the consequence is an unproductive, short, and expensive rest of their life is doing *society* a favor.
Educational improvement works. Letting them die is stupid.
While this is true there are of course people forced to prostitution by poverty or coercion. There is probably a better way of allowing free people selling whatever they have including temporary access to their private parts while preventing that minors and grownups are forced to do that when they do not want to. Sadly none of the asshats in the parliament (actually any of the Western ones I had a chance to look at closer) is bothered enough to do something in the proper direction.
First, you talk about this as if it were an individual choice, but it's not: under ACA, everybody is forced to do this. Now, you personally may be so wealthy that you may not mind spending $1000/month for something that ought to cost $200/month out of charity, but for other people, the $800 difference is enormous. Second, effective HIV treatment costs a few hundred dollars per year, something that falls within deductibles anyway; the extra spending is for crony capitalism on excessively expensive treatments. Third, we're not usually talking about "an unfortunate mistake": HIV is pretty hard to transmit and most people with HIV got infected after many acts of unprotected sex with many partners.
This thread started with someone mocking Christians for "having a problem with people having sex". It is sensible to have a problem with people having sex outside committed relationships because it is harmful to the individual and it is very costly to society. And it is sensible to have a problem with a system of medical care that completely separates personal responsibility from consequences while forcibly transferring vast amounts of money from tax payers to the private sector in a massive crony capitalist scheme. Not only are your beliefs not helping people, they are causing harm to millions of people. Teaching people about safe sex is far less effective than teaching people to control their base impulses and desires in the first place.
Second, effective HIV treatment costs a few hundred dollars per year
They sure as hell don't here. I'm going to assume you mean "there", or you pulled the number right out of your ass.
First, you talk about this as if it were an individual choice, but it's not: under ACA, everybody is forced to do this.
Nice soap box. Everyone was forced to do this before hand with their FICA taxes, or if they were like the majority of the country with private insurance- insured through their employer- they were doing it that way. What the fuck was your point again?
the extra spending is for crony capitalism on excessively expensive treatments
The extra spending is definitely related to capitalism run amok, but it's not cronyism. The pharmaceutical industry has realized the power it has without any government help whatsoever, short of patent and trademark enforcement.
Third, we're not usually talking about "an unfortunate mistake": HIV is pretty hard to transmit and most people with HIV got infected after many acts of unprotected sex with many partners.
That's still an unfortunate mistake. Everyone is reckless a few times in their life. Sometimes you scrape a knee. Sometime you get in a minor car accident. Sometimes you catch fucking AIDS. You're a callous piece of shit.
Correct: effective HIV treatments abroad cost a few hundred dollars, whereas people pay ruinous amounts for it in the US because of America's broken health care system.
Correct: people didn't have a choice about this before either. My point is that you misrepresent something as a personal choice and charity when, in fact, it is coercion.
The pharmaceutical industry and medical providers in the US can charge very high prices because government forces Americans to pay whatever the industry charges. That isn't capitalism, it's a fascist economic model.
No, it is reckless behavior.
No, I'm afraid it's you who is a "callous piece of shit", because your kind of choices condemn millions to a slow, agonizing death from HIV and other preventable diseases. You're self-righteous, selfish, ignorant, and evil.