It is not about voluntary interactions between consenting adults.
The legislation might be misguided or ineffective--I haven't really looked into it--but it very definitely isn't about restricting the free choice of individuals.
If you truly wanted to curb sex trafficking, you’d legalize prostitution, not drive it farther underground.
There must be some steps in between I am missing.
Legal prostitutes are incentivized to work with the police to report others being coerced, it’s competition.
Bringing things out into the open helps clean them up. Keeping them in the dark allows evil to multiply. The next time Prohibition helped the people it was trying to protect will also be the first time.
Which is why the Prohibition thing rings false with me, especially the alcohol one. Alcohol was pretty much enjoyed by everyone to various degrees. Buying sexual services, while popular, not as much. So it's an analogy, but not the greatest. (Also ignoring that most sexual services are bought by men, while alcohol was/is used to a much larger degree by both sexes.)
https://books.google.nl/books?id=RAXtCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT172&lpg=P...
Forgive me if I’m not especially impressed by the think of the children rhetoric. Drawing a line from Lutherans to modern day Sweden isn’t exactly hard. The judgmental attitude hasn’t changed one iota.
If prostitution was legal and well-regulated like it is in many countries, then workers would have to be documented, they'd get workers' rights, etc. There are people willing to do sex work of their own free will, and if you create a normal market for it, then people will not resort to illicit, lower-quality secondary markets dependent on sex trafficking.
Here's the analogy: to reduce drug violence, legalize drugs.
Intent and actual outcome are two completely different things.
and airbnb is gone, and so on.
The intent was to protect people who are being harmed against their will (held in sex slavery against their will).
Of course the actual effect of the law is different than the intent. The actual effect is limiting.
We're talking about seasoned politicians, not naive dreamers.
But at a certain point, it's reasonable to start objecting that an outcome was so obvious that people claiming they didn't intend it are either dishonest or incompetent, and in either case unfit to make the decision.
In this case, I suspect the answer is a little of each - a lot of anti-trafficking campaigns are run by people who openly oppose voluntary sex work, and also Congress is grossly incompetent at knowing which technology laws will limit free choice.
Given all that - I agree that it's worth knowing whether this was intended, but I worry "not our intent" becomes a shield for Congress to hide behind when they do things with horrible outcomes they were warned about well in advance.
Yes, because legalized prostitution has totally curbed sex trafficking in places where it is legal like Nevada and Germany.
Oh, except that it hasn't. Not even remotely.
I severely doubt that conservatives want anything of the sort. What they do want is for internet companies to take responsibility for keeping kids off their sites which is not that big of an ask if they would just stop their whining and do it.
> which is not that big of an ask
Giving false credentials during signups is a more common practice than what is believed, especially for digital natives. How can you truly ascertain the age of users without mass surveillance practices?
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.