Salesforce Can’t Use 230, May Be Liable for Customer Backpage's Sex Trafficking | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce Can’t Use 230, May Be Liable for Customer Backpage's Sex Trafficking

techdirt.com

72 pointsrntn23 comments

The implications of this ruling are mind boggling. Simply doing business with someone who is committing a crime, even if you didn't know, is a crime by this logic. By extension any business using Salesforce is also now engaged with a criminal enterprise and thus criminals too.

Interestingly enough the BackPage prosecution was headed up by Kamala Harris to make it look like she was doing something about sex trafficking. I wonder if her finger is on the scale. It's all so stupid. She's good at that.

"I wonder if her finger is on the scale."

I think she's too busy leading the AI Taskforce...

"leading"

I was with you until:

> Interestingly enough the BackPage prosecution was headed up by Kamala Harris to make it look like she was doing something about sex trafficking.

How is it that politicians (in this case the CA and TX Attorney Generals) doing something to reduce sex trafficking is bad?

Because it was about looking like doing something, and doing something in that case made it actively worse. They not only made sex trafficking harder to track but attacked the greatest cooperator they ever had.

As many sex workers point out, the more you push sex work underground, by criminalizing even being around it, the more control "Pimps" and similar folks get. A sex worker can't go to the police or the Labor board if their employer is doing bad or illegal shit.

> How is it that politicians (in this case the CA and TX Attorney Generals) doing something to reduce sex trafficking is bad?

This would be fine, if the narrative wasn't FALSE.

How do these suits not get dismissed as moot since this original narrative about Backpage is factually wrong?

The very term “sex trafficking” is a kind of newspeak to make a very common thing sound like the worst possible version of it (when you hear the term, you probably think of someone being stuffed into a hot shipping container and moved around like a full-on slave). Sex trafficking is just any kind of work involved in organizing prostitution that isn’t prostitution itself - which can still be very unethical and at its worse the thing I described, but also something fully consented to by all parties.

If you consider sex trafficking to be “all prostitution that isn’t 100% freelance” you might reconsider whether it’s a purely bad thing. Of course, because of the use of the term “sex trafficking” by design arguing from this premise isn’t something people and especially politicians are willing to do in public, which is why the term has had so much success in criminalizing and prosecuting prostitution in recent years

> If you consider sex trafficking to be “all prostitution that isn’t 100% freelance”

Given the response to sites like Backpage, the modern-day Puritans are evidently happy to throw 100% freelance work into the "trafficking" bucket as well.

I say this as a lifelong Democrat: Kamala Harris is the worst sort of useless political moron.

It is sort of like the lesser version of "think of the children".

Yes we need to protect children, but when that is the argument it is a huge red flag that someone is trying to force the argument by relating it to something that we all agree is terrible. that is, trying to bypass normal understanding of the problem.

Given that "love is love" , why can't sex workers be deemed "money-sexuals", i.e. people who's sexual calling is to have sex for money because that's just what they're into - born that way.

Then we can separate out the innocent money-sexuals from those who actually are being forced into it?

This is generally what sex work legalisation looks like.

Some people have been pushing for this for years. Decades, even.

Because the people who hate sex workers also hate "***sexuals" and don't believe that "love is love".

While the concept of "love is love" stands as a testament to the universality of emotions, equating it to the realm of sex work oversimplifies the complexities faced by those in the profession. In a society where money equates to basic necessities like food, shelter, and healthcare, many individuals, especially women, are driven to sex work not out of a "money-sexual" inclination, but due to economic vulnerabilities. Labeling them as "money-sexuals" risks trivializing the very real challenges they face, many of which are systemic and rooted in inequality. It's essential to recognize the broader socioeconomic pressures that contribute to the choice of sex work, rather than attributing it to innate predisposition. By doing so, we can focus on creating a society that offers every individual the autonomy to make choices without the burden of economic coercion.

What makes sex work special, though? Why is it somehow less moral for sex to be sold for money than it is for any other sort of labor?

Question's kinda rhetorical, in the sense that the answers are rather uncomfortable to capitalist socioeconomics and the beneficiaries thereof.

It's rooted in the sexist idea that women are not capable of making decisions about their sexuality.

There's a weird double standard around "love is love" for women. No one is concerned if an adult male has sex with a substantially older partner or engages in sex work, but if a young (adult) woman dates an older man or decides she wants to be a sex worker it's considered fraught.

This is a relic of the patriarchal order that many feminists still cling to.

Putting aside the cases of coercion and rape, is there something fundamentally degrading about sex to a woman that demands special legal protection?

Providing good sex is a skill, whether it's paid or not. There is no reason to stop a woman. or anyone, who freely chooses to sell their sexual skills from doing so. The notion that a woman needs to be protected from her own choices is patronizing.

Same company that spent a presumably enormous sum of money to run a superbowl advert to dismiss space exploration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNYf6b9Yg9Y

This is an insanely bad faith take of that commercial.

I think it's a rather bizarre accusation to accuse me of bad faith. In my view at the time it aired the commercial was an unambiguous attack on space exploration and I know many people who saw it the same way. I've never seen an argument that it was anything but-- it sure doesn't seem to have anything to do with salesforces' business. But perhaps I'm confused, feel free to explain. In any case, I specifically linked the commercial so that people could decide for themselves.

Remember from a year ago when a Google user account was terminated because of false flag of child pr0n? This makes sense. 230 doesn't cover sex trafficking and the company is totally liable, period.

Well if you don't like the shift to cloud everything this is how you fight back against it.

"Sure there are reasons to go to M365 for email, but recent rulings mean they're likely required to review all of our internal messaging and content to make sure it's legal."

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