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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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
"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.
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.