That's the important part. These sites let sex workers establish a pre-screening network with which they could exchange information about clients with one another to make sure they weren't going to wind up as a statistic (up to 75 percent of sex workers face some kind of abuse on the job). These sites were literal lifesavers. This is the reason any city that had a Craigslist personals section saw a big drop in murders and rapes of women. Not just female prostitutes; ALL women in a city.
But if you're a cranky old person who thinks prostitution is gross and wrong, and that ultimately all of these women must be saved from this evil, well, why not vote to shut it all down?
Regulation Can Often Be Like Trying To Kill A Mosquito With A Shotgun
The bill wound up making a sweeping change. From 1996 until now, websites have been largely protected from being sued or prosecuted for what users post. Otherwise, it puts an impossible burden on social media sites to police billions of offensive messages being spewed in real time. But FOSTA says that sites can be prosecuted for facilitating sex trafficking, which is defined in such a broad way that any third party helping someone arrange sex work can now be considered "trafficking."
That means it's too risky for any site to host any activity that looks like sex work. How are they supposed to tell the difference between trafficking (in which unwilling women are forced into sex work) and prostitution (a transaction between consenting adults)? So two days after the bill flew through Congress with overwhelming support from both parties, Craigslist shut down its personals section. Reddit, another popular resource for sex workers, did the same.
Luis Prada
