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First they came for the sex workers
Suicide, violence, and going underground: FOSTA’s body count
No traffickers were harmed in the enforcing of this FOSTA law. The FOSTA law conflates sex work with sex trafficking. FOSTA legalized sex censorship online. Maybe you've noticed a sudden flood of updates to Terms and Conditions recently from the internet services you use. Welcome to the culture of fear, ushered in by the passing of FOSTA-SESTA. For example, Twitter's latest Terms update includes a clause about kicking you off the service if "you create risk or possible legal exposure for us." At the same time we're seeing these updates, a sex workers' rights blog reports: "One person has already taken their life because of FOSTA legislation." FOSTA is a deeply flawed bill that claims to stop sex trafficking, but works directly against law enforcement efforts to do so. FOSTA is a terrible, harmful, deeply flawed law. Lawmakers didn't fact-check it, question the religious neocons pushing it, nor did they listen to constituents. You may think that FOSTA only affects the 42 million sex workers in the world trying to use the open internet. But you'd be wrong. In the past month net neutrality ended and FOSTA was signed into law. The end of net neutrality will curtail what we can see and access in regard to the internet. FOSTA places control over what we can say into the hands of internet companies, thanks to the U.S. government. Due to impossibly loose language and civil - criminal penalties for companies, it also dictates who can and cannot use online services that are central to the daily life of internet citizens around the globe. The FOSTA law conflates sex work with sex trafficking. The FOSTA law legalized sex censorship online, and now we've got a body count for it. Literally In what's become an elaborate game of cover-your-ass, internet giants are taking the definition of sex work to extremes in their eagerness to censor, shut down, and eject anyone who even talks about it. Twitter's new Terms update is just one example. Facebook updated its "Community Standards" regarding "Sexual Exploitation of Adults" to prohibit "sexual solicitation slang terms" and "Offering or soliciting sex or sexual fetish partners." Less than a week after Trump signed FOSTA, a social network for sex workers and others, including journalists, with over 55,000 users went offline without notice. We all know they're the world's biggest and most eager censor. Internet companies -- the gatekeepers of free speech -- are afraid of what the U.S. government will do to them without knowing exactly what they would be doing wrong... so they're taking it out on us. And we have cause to be afraid: Do you dare link to an article about Stormy Daniels on websites that police content with incompetent algorithms? Under the loss of net neutrality, it's perfectly reasonable to wonder if ISP's will filter access to websites according to their own interpretations of FOSTA -- or any kind of speech they don't like. At least you're not a sex worker. They have an actual FOSTA body count to contend with now. The sex worker community online started to hear about workers going back out on the street and missing their check-in calls — as of April 15th, 13 sex workers have gone missing and two have been confirmed dead. Two workers have been assaulted at gunpoint, and I can't even count how many other stories of rape and assault I've heard from people returning to or just learning the streets for the first time. One person has already taken their life because of this legislation. Kicking sex workers off the open internet is the kind of thing many of us once thought couldn't be possible. The stuff of Margaret Atwood fiction. The laughably bland fantasy of righty wingnuts who can't grasp what the internet really is, or how it works. But, you know. First they came for the sex workers. by Violet Blue 4-28-2018 
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