Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

Life is too short to make excuses for stupid behavior.

One is prostitution, a form of sex work which is illegal in most of the United States. The American public have varying feelings about its legal status, how enforcement should be carried out, etc. Public opinion doesn't support measures which endanger sex workers (which FOSTA does), because they're already an at-risk group.

A separate issue is human trafficking, which is moving people across borders for the purpose of slavery/forced labor, including sex slavery. Public opinion is rightly massively against slavery in any form.

What I would like to know is, how much slavery was taking place through the Craigslist personals section? How much of it goes on in America? Can we get some real data injected into this discussion about the nature and the extent of actual forced sex labor? Scorched earth tactics might be appropriate if America has developed a serious slavery problem (again), but they need to be justified with facts.

I've run across people who want to take a scorched earth approach to eradicating prostitution (which will not work any more than the war on drugs did). They refer to all prostitution as trafficking in order to conflate the two issues, mislead the public and build support for their radical policies. There is also a class of people who have used FOSTA as an opportunity to expand government power. Neither of these agendas reflect public opinion.

The form of this is a false equivalency (or perhaps the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition): If you are pro-<activity that is only rarely engaged in by bad actors>, then you are pro-<activity that is ONLY done by bad actors>

The upshot of this will be ZERO startups that deal in user-generated content simply because they cannot afford the manpower or the liability. Which is a pretty bad consequence, IMHO.

This also creates a law open to abuse: If you have a corporate enemy that permits user-generated content, simply anonymously post some objectionable content to their site, take a screenshot, and then alert the authorities with the URL and screenshot. It's like SWATting, except on a whole 'nother level!

Is Giphy really to blame in this fiasco? How are they somehow more to blame than the person who actually posted this? (as they would be, after this law goes into effect) https://mashable.com/2018/03/10/snapchat-instagram-giphy-rac...

The next Craigs list will be on Tor and will have a child prostitute section.

Congratulations on making things worse.

Step 1. End Prohibition of Sex Work

Step 2. Stop Diverting Police Resources to enforcing laws on what consenting Adults do on their own time (both Prostitution and Drugs)

Step 3. Stop Criminalizing Speech driving to further and further under ground were it is no longer tracable at all

The "scorched earth" groups are in no way protecting victims, in fact they are making it WORSE by driving people to more shady platforms deep deep under ground, where law enforcement will be less likely to find information or victims.

Start by legalizing prostitution and removing the black market. That won't end all trafficking, but will end a lot and will make it much easier to go after the remaining illegal black market as it's now been separated from the legal market. Comment about how people who don't learn are doomed to repeat history here. How many black markets for harmless everyday goods and services do we need to ban before the idiots in charge start to understand these simple principles? They're constantly talking about markets, but clearly no one in government understands the first thing about them. Or, more likely, doesn't want to.

No, its more like the Salem witch hunt.

You mean, like millions of illegal immigrants who are working in farming, construction, fast food, and many other industries? How do you feel about scorched earth approach to those?

How can you compare being the victim of misdesigned automated system, who has no conscience and follows blind rules, to being the victim of a trafficker who has full understanding and responsibility for what he's doing and exploiting a mindless computer system designed for an entirely different purpose?

Now I agree we as a society should recognize that some tools, in the hands of the criminal, sociopath or insane can do a lot of harm, and it's fair to move and restrict them. High explosives, nuclear material, anonymous banking are all examples of technologies that, while useful, can and should be restricted.

But at no point it is a fault of the technology, and at no point should we examine the technology divorced from it's nefarious users who ultimately bear responsibility. Restricting useful technology is an extreme measure reserved for the most dangerous situations, otherwise ANY technology can be used for harming others. This particular case seems completely out of balance and likely to have NO impact.

Yes, the instinct is understandable, but by the time we're putting NGO experts in government-sponsored working groups for the purpose of drafting legislation, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that we're expecting something that rises (high!) above mere instinct. Otherwise, we can (almost, somewhat melodramatic exaggeration) just let mobs with pitchforks take care of business and save a ton of effort.

Because if they just knew, if they just understood, if they just had a little human empathy and sympathy for the pain and suffering... Why then they'd take all their money and smart people and Solve the Problem! That this is perhaps an excessively simplistic view doesn't occur to people who fervently believe that it's simply a matter of making the useless arrogant dweebs do the right thing.

Instead, it's scorched earth with good intentions. My heart aches for the wonderful people saving lives out there. For their deep frustration, and for the purity of their beliefs and intentions. Yet, it's perhaps abstractly possible that empathy and good intentions might be subtly different from good policy.

It is also quite unfitting and stupid and innefective.

That is also largely the government fault because back in 2010 they more or less forced CL to close the Sections of the site that was dedicated to Adult Services... and as predicted the people that were in those sections simply moved to the personals

Legalization is far from perfect but abuse in Nevada brothels is much lower than as street walkers.

It seems it's more a puritanical belief system than a genuine desire to render aid.

This is the crux. These laws are not meant to be enforced universally.

The objective is having ammunition to use when other motives determine the target to strike.

Executives at Tinder, POF, Match.com, etc. should be shaking in their boots right now. Even Facebook and other social networks could have civil and criminal exposure under this law.

[Feb 14 2018] "Don’t Let Criminals Hide Their Data Overseas"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/14/opinion/data-overseas-leg...

[Mar 5 2018] "A promising solution is the Cloud (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data) Act, introduced by a bipartisan coalition in the Senate last month."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-global-game-of-wha...

No, the problem here is that governments and large institutions are using truly evil things to convince people to ban completely innocuous things for commercial reasons. This is online gentrification for the corps. And for government, using kids/terrorism/communists is the oldest trick in the book to violate the rights of their citizens.

Legal brothels have much lower rates of abuse.

It probably does shrink the market, but that just makes the prices rise, maintaining the attraction for middlemen with a larger portion of a smaller pie. Whereas pimped women end up with a smaller portion of a smaller pie. This lowers the attraction of the profession for willing providers, leaving a void to be filled by the unwilling.

The internet has been good to prostitutes. At the the camgirl level, pimps (as camsites) have largely withered away to competing technical service providers, providing nearly indistinguishable commodity platforms competing on features and cost. No reason why this law won't be going for that, either. I'm sure some women on those sites are locally pimped, or follow up private shows with email contact and physical meetings. One occasion would be enough.

The problem is there is so often a disconnect between intentions and predictable outcomes when the bills are being crafted... or worse when actual negative outcomes are apparent yet bills continue to stay active for decades.

For ex: 1970s rent control laws in NYC/Toronto significantly reduced the supply of affordable housing after 5-10yrs while a significant percentage of upper/middle-class people ended up getting cheap rent-controlled apartments and never leaving. Not to mention the massive increase in landlord arsons (who had no other choice in order to 'renovate' the building) causing already bad ghettos in the Bronx to turn into war-zone looking places.

So the big question here: Does this law actually help stop sex trafficking? Does it justify the huge costs it imposes on these web sites for which millions of legal sex workers depend on for their livelihood, just to enforce a tiny minority of bad listings? Especially when they completely shut down? Are sex workers being forced to go back to the streets to look for work because it's too hard for them and their customers to find sex-work listing websites?

Or more generally: First: Does it work, Second: if it does, how do they stack up against the side-effects and externalities imposed on law abiding people/industry to achieve that outcome?

A radical feminist (in my experience) will still say yes, effectively robbing these women of their own personal agency and shaming their choices.

That is an important distinction, and your comparison is watered down by ignoring it.

Most radicals don't consider themselves liberal...

Is having not attractive scantily clad women on the sidelines the answer? No, probably not.

Is getting rid of cheerleaders the answer? Maybe.

Do a lot of girls and women like to be cheerleaders? Apparently.

It seems like the fundamental issue is that men like to see scantily clad attractive women. Efforts to shame or unemploy females who can make money from this is an attempt to fix the symptom, not the cause.

Being a booth babe is an option not open to unattractive people. Seems like a superset.

The arguments against capitalism and against sex workers are two completely orthogonal things. Sex work is a consequence of capitalism + enforced class systems perpetuated by leadership.

Fix those things instead of claiming women who have complete personal agency in what they do with their bodies are still being exploited. Of course they are. All of us are being exploited.

If you truly wanted to curb sex trafficking, you’d legalize prostitution, not drive it farther underground.

The goal isn't relevant. Nobody opposes the goal of ending sex trafficking. The issue is passing laws that restrict freedom and seek to regulate the interpersonal behavior of adults at the point of a gun. Laws should be judged and scrutinized based on their actual impact, not the goals and desires of the people who draft them.

The chilling effects are 100% intentional.

The goal is to target any personal section that does not actively moderate content.

The key is in the definition of coercion. Was violence threatened? Is a person physically restrained? If so, that's coercion. When the law starts to deal with "psychological coercion" it denies agency to adults.

You weren't paying attention—except for blasphemy, those things were from across the spectrum: the most prominent figure for censorship of music (including rap) was Tipper Gore, who was only “conservative” in the sense that the dominant faction of the Democratic Party is center-right. Similarly, the Clinton Administration was active in promoting online censorship in law.

> Now, the push for censorship and control is being spearheaded by the liberals.

It wasn't a liberal Congress that just passed the bill that has is discussing censorship, so I think again you are falsely attributing something they exists across the political spectrum tomone side, just making the error in the opposite direction.

"Big" government is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history; this long predates it.

That's funny - I thought that exactly the opposite was true.

The Internet (not particular sites, not AOL or "the facebook", but The Internet) is naturally un-monopolistic because you can, in fact, just move your video channel to your own website and do whatever you'd like there.

In fact, it's trivially easy to do so - you can probably accomplish the entire task using only your telephone.

If you feel that this is not the case I think you've made yourself fragile to services and processes that have nothing to do with The Internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

This legislation isn’t that but your examples are.

Reddit also banned subs that were used for sourcing marijuana, designer drugs, xanax.. direct deals onsite.

i'm not defending the drug war, but when you only include the subs you wrote the move looks really silly. if people were only doing giveaways and trading toy bb guns, those subs would still be open. the fact is reddit was being used by vendors for direct deals of illegal shit, and in order to put that to a stop reddit had to ban all sourcing.

I can relatively easily block Facebook if I want to, on every site I visit. Try figuring out a way to eliminate all of the NSA's data hoovering of you. Tell the TSA you're not giving them your device, etc.

The Cloud Act is government legislation, that was not initially promoted by private industry. Private industry gave in over time because the alternative the government would pursue instead is far scarier. It was a compromise to keep the politicians in DC from doing something even more draconian. I don't agree with that compromise, however, just try saying no to them (see the Yahoo fines).

The internet already functions well enough for purposes of decentralization. Sure, there are some clear improvements and some less clear trade-offs that could be made, but the brass tacks is that these are social issues, not technical ones. They have to be addressed at the social level.

There has been some shadowy coordinated push behind the scenes over the last week, corresponding with the CLOUD Act and other dubious events, as described above. I believe this is just the beginning of such coordinated pushes. There are powerful forces at work looking to assert their authority and control over the open diaspora of the internet.

Americans take free speech for granted, but they forget that open forums where anyone can make a strong argument that lives and dies on its own merit are extremely dicey for the status quo power structure.

My belief is that the 2016 election pushed some fence-sitters over into the belief that the internet as constituted is a threat to their power, and that they are working triple-time to fix the situation. Ultimately, I believe this will evolve into something like a government verification and ID check system before someone is allowed to publish, and a YouTube-like strike system that will take away those rights as people are "abusive" or otherwise express wrongthink.

The relatively-free internet of the 90s and 00s will be driven into the darkweb where anyone interested in accessing non-corporate-approved content can be trivially mischaracterized as "a Russian agent or sympathizer" (if not much, much worse). What just happened with the purge on reddit is part of that.

The internet has been re-AOLized over the last several years as massive tech companies have consolidated against the grassroots nature of the homegrown internet. The CFAA and the Copyright Act allow companies to sue the living crap out of anyone who tries to free user data, and Google et al now have the resources to enforce this thoroughly.

The long and short of it is that a new network or protocol may offer some nice features, but it's not going to solve the key problem that ensures maintaining a free marketplace for ideas will always be hard: the rich and powerful don't like things that may threaten said richness and power. The internet is arguably the most powerful such tool invented since the printing press.

As another commenter expressed above, the real question is why this has taken them so long.

Met my first wife at college, the "old school" way. Met my current wife through OKCupid (after seeing another girl I was dating at the time using it).

I knew more about my second wife before I'd ever messaged her. Saves a lot of wasted effort simply basing the book on its cover.

Craigslist did not require ads to have pictures, and there were plenty of ads that didn't have them.

Through friends, hobbies, volunteering, bars, clubs, parties, and various other forms of group entertainment like concerts, plays, etc.

Pretty much anywhere people meet face to face counts.

Its own forum was shut down under legal pressure some time ago, and it moved to other personals forums, as I understand.

Which is probably why they are now, with the new legal pressure, killing the personals forums.

I think people often use sarcasm to trot out trite topics because it seems less labored than restating such a popular point of view in earnest.

Oh shit, now you all know about me.

That CL would make a vindictive stand in defense of sex trafficking specifically is just bizarre.