Post-SESTA/FOSTA Self-Censoring for Twitter, Reddit, and Other Social Media

Decentralized projects will have to resist the urge to listen to these people, because otherwise they shouldn't even bother if the decentralized projects will have built-in censorship mechanisms.

Law enforcement should go straight after the criminals, not after the platforms, just like when they go straight after the people publishing child porn on the Tor network, not after the Tor browser. That's how it should work.

Yeah, Craigslist was scared. And so are a lot of people. Laughing that off is what’s damning.

That's a really disingenuous statement, though I'd expect nothing less from a person who has everything to gain from making Craigslist look shady.

The law very intentionally uses the word "knowingly", which has a lower legal bar than other considerations, like "intentionally". In this case, that means that even if Craigslist took active measures to prevent people from using Craigslist for sex work, they would still be liable for anybody who successfully circumvented their methods.

Secondly, sex trafficking is not the same as sex work. The bill purports to target sex trafficking, but it really applies to sex work - that is, to consensual sexual activity in which money changes hands.

Blumenthal, I should point out, has a long history of targeting Craigslist specifically, going back all the way to his days as AG. He failed to secure the case he wanted against them as AG, so he's going for a scorched earth approach now that he's in the Senate. For him, the Craigslist shutdown is a personal victory, and sticking it to Craigslist was honestly probably one of his motivations for cosponsoring the bill in the first place.

They've been trying to pass something like this for years and I remember reading about this back in the day and actually feeling neutral with the bill if they were able to do it the right way. Given the power of the internet giants I assumed that that would happen, but I guess not. This was awful implementation.

There is a bright side. Now within the new law, this gives a small business a good opportunity to create something similar while testing the legal grounds. If you try hard to prevent all sex trafficking/illegal activity, will the law bend and allow some leeway? Now that many sites are exiting the personals market, it's a good time to try. The advantages these sites had were not due to UI or tech features, but due to wide adaptability so this means it could be a free for all and one business could create a vastly greater user experience because those sites had no reason to innovate.

Do I have the guts to do it? No way. The penalties are too scary and any prosecuter trying to make a name for themselves could destroy anyone's reputation and life.

Our legal system is not one in which only those actually liable under any reasonable reading of the law bear costs, and when you widen the scope of liability you also widen the sphere outside that scope where claims that lack genuine merit still aren't trivially dismissable and, especially when you’ve got a prominent (inter)national-scale target and politically driven (and often publicly-funded) opposition, there is a huge chilling effect outside the actual zone of prohibition anytime you expand the scope of legal liability for being a vehicle through which communications flow.

And Senator Blumenthal isn't a big enough idiot to fail to realize that's what is being said, he's just twisting it because he doesn't want to engage with it.

Until this law actually gets tested in the courts, it is basically impossible to tell what the long-term impact will be. My suspicion is that Reddit et al want to do everything possible to keep a low profile while Facebook is occupying the spotlight. After that has run its course, I would bet there would be a challenge in some form, whether via PR or directly.