the internet.

On April 11th President Trump signed a piece of legislation

based off of a pair of bills.

One started in the Senate known as SESTA or

the "Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act."

The other started in the House called FOSTA or the

"Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act."

Who's gonna oppose something called the stop

enabling sex traffickers act, right? I mean there's you're not gonna make

friends with that.

Both bills sailed through Congress, but critics of the law

claim it will end up hurting the people it's supposed to protect.

FOSTA and SESTA are like an enormous

bully coming into our living room.

And not only that, it could end up changing

the Internet as we know it.

Since 1996, websites have enjoyed a protection built

into a communications law known as section 230.

It basically says that

websites can't be held liable for the content posted by users on the site.

FOSTA, which ended up being the final name of the law, creates an exception to

section 230 which would make websites responsible for knowingly facilitating

prostitution or sex trafficking on their site.

To understand why critics see this

as a problem think of it like a phone call.

If you plan something illegal

during a phone call, your phone carrier isn't held responsible for what you said

during that call.

They're just the service you used.

This is sort of how the

internet worked up until now, but under FOSTA phone carriers might start to

monitor your phone calls to ensure nothing illegal was going through,

to protect themselves from liability.

Of course, monitoring all of these phone

calls is expensive and illegal messages might slip through anyway.

So, phone carriers

might block certain numbers or do away with the phones altogether.

Monitoring and censoring would satisfy part of FOSTA. It would ensure that the

site isn't facilitating prostitution or sex trafficking.

Another option though is

to stop monitoring altogether.

That way a website could claim that they didn't

know about the illegal content on their site.

These outcomes aren't theoretical.

Websites are already reacting this way to FOSTA.

Ever since it passed the Senate

that's when website started freaking out about their terms of services and that's

when we saw Craigslist personals get shut down and Backpage get shut down.

Which I think on its own makes the point that this is really chilling.

Quite a bit of material that's well outside the range of what theoretically this law addresses

FOSTA was particularly aimed at Backpage.com, a website that has long

been known for its sex worker advertisements.

The thing is though FOSTA's stated purpose is to crack down on sex

trafficking - it's right there in the title, but it's sex workers that are

feeling the burden.

The main difference between sex trafficking and sex work is

that sex trafficking is the non-consensual, often underage,

trafficking of human beings and sex work is the consensual arrangement between

two adult-aged people to exchange money for sexual services, whether those are

fantasy services or overtly sexual services.

This covers a wide range of

work, it's not just prostitutes and escorts who are sex workers. Strippers are

sex workers, full-body sensual masseuses are sex workers, cam models, live webcam

models are sex workers, porn performers are sex workers, etc. etc.

In fact one of the things that FOSTA does, is make sex workers

more vulnerable to traffickers and we're seeing this, where you're a sex

worker you used to have an ad up on Backpage now you don't have a Backpage ad,

you're trying to figure out how to find your clients and you start getting

calls from people that are like "hey I know you can't advertise anymore I can

help you get clients, give me a call."

Which is pimping, right?

Critics of FOSTA say that the law will push sex trafficking and sex work back

underground, offline where authorities will have a much harder time tracking

sex trafficking and getting victims to help they need.

We can't screen our clients as easily, we can't engage in the kinds of activities

that help keep us safe, we can't find each other online as easily, we can't

share safety information online as easily.

Senator Portman, the congressman

who co-sponsored the legislation that became FOSTA claims that, with this law

authorities and victims of sex trafficking can go after websites like

Backpage.com.

Ironically though, Backpage.com was

seized by law enforcement before FOSTA was signed into law, which calls into

question how necessary FOSTA was in the first place.

Critics also worry that the law is so vague that its consequences could be

even more far-reaching.

We're gonna see a lot of self-censorship on the Internet,

we're gonna see not just sexual content necessarily getting censored, but

definitely adult content. How does Google know who's a sex worker and who's just

like someone in love with someone very far away?

You know what I mean?

It's just that sex workers are the frontline of that.