Suicide, violence, and going underground: FOSTA’s body count

No traffickers were harmed in the enforcing of this law.

Maybe you've noticed a sudden flood of updates to Terms and Conditions recently from the internet services you use. A close look at those agreements will show that many are GDPR related, but some are most definitely not.

Welcome to the culture of fear, ushered in by the passing of FOSTA-SESTA.

For example, Twitter's latest Terms update includes a clause about kicking you off the service if "you create risk or possible legal exposure for us." At the same time we're seeing these updates, a sex workers' rights blog reports: "One person has already taken their life because of this [FOSTA] legislation."

FOSTA is a deeply flawed bill that claims to stop sex trafficking, but works directly against law enforcement efforts to do so and was opposed by the Department of Justice. Everyone from the ACLU and EFF to actual sex trafficking organizations say it is a terrible, harmful, deeply flawed law. Lawmakers didn't fact-check it, question the religious neocons pushing it, nor did they listen to constituents. It has bipartisan support and bipartisan opposition.

Still, you may think that FOSTA only affects the 42 million sex workers in the world trying to use the open internet. But you'd be wrong.

The law legalized sex censorship online, and now we've got a body count for it. Literally.

Let me explain. In the past month net neutrality ended and FOSTA was signed into law. The end of net neutrality will curtail what we can see and access in regard to the internet. FOSTA places control over what we can say into the hands of internet companies, thanks to the US government. Due to impossibly loose language and civil/criminal penalties for companies, it also dictates who can and cannot use online services that are central to the daily life of internet citizens around the globe.

The law conflates sex work with sex trafficking, and much ado has been made about Craigslist shuttering its personals and Reddit deleting community forums before the law was even signed. Not to mention all the others, like life-saving violent-client blacklists and vetting resources.