On Wednesday, the Senate passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) 97-2. The bill, which is very similar to a bill already passed in the House called the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA),​ aims to fight sex trafficking by making a website's owner legally liable if any user promotes or facilitates sex trafficking on their site. On Friday, Craigslist responded by completely shutting down its personals section, replacing it with the following note:

US Congress just passed HR 1865, "FOSTA", seeking to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully. Any tool or service can be misused. We can't take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking craigslist personals offline. Hopefully we can bring them back some day. To the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through craigslist, we wish you every happiness!

[Craigslist]

Why would an anti-sex trafficking bill force a beloved community website to ban all posts about dating? Blame it on legislators who don't really understand sex work or the internet. In the weeks since the House almost unanimously passed its version of the bill, sex workers and online free speech advocates warned that the legislation, despite its good intentions, would do more harm than good. For independent sex workers — those who are not being trafficked but freely choose to perform sex work — the legislation threatened to shut down a crucial means of vetting clients and keeping themselves safe, as Emma Roller explained in Splinter last week.

The internet has been an incredible harm reduction tool for sex workers and, many times, victims of human trafficking. Sex workers can perform background checks, looking up clients' personal information and history before meeting with them for the first time. They can use "bad dates lists" hosted online — and updated by fellow sex workers — to weed out potentially dangerous clients. And they can also use social media to connect with fellow sex workers and sex work organizations, sharing resources to keep each other safe. Research shows sex workers are safer when they're able to screen their clients online before meeting with them. A 2017 study from researchers at Baylor University and West Virginia University estimated that Craigslist's "erotic services" section "reduced female homicide rates by as much as 17.4%" — a staggering number for anyone concerned with reducing violence against women.

[Splinter]

By being vague about what it means to "promote and facilitate prostitution," SESTA-FOSTA will potentially outlaw the channels that sex workers use to keep themselves safe from violence — pretty ironic for an anti-trafficking bill.

At the same time, SESTA-FOSTA also undermines a crucial legal linchpin of the free and open internet. The law, called Section 230, allows websites to host user-generated posts without being liable for the content of those posts. It's what lets sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and any news site with a comments section to operate and create spaces for people to speak freely. By holding websites accountable for certain types of user-generated speech, Congress is encouraging platforms to implement censorship tools that will almost certainly end up shutting down some protected speech as collateral damage. The digital civil liberties organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains how this censorship will work:

It's easy to see the impact that this ramp-up in liability will have on online speech: facing the risk of ruinous litigation, online platforms will have little choice but to become much more restrictive in what sorts of discussion — and what sorts of users — they allow, censoring innocent people in the process. What forms that erasure takes will vary from platform to platform. For some, it will mean increasingly restrictive terms of service — banning sexual content, for example, or advertisements for legal escort services. For others, it will mean over-reliance on automated filters to delete borderline posts. No matter what methods platforms use to mitigate their risk, one thing is certain: when platforms choose to err on the side of censorship, marginalized voices are censored disproportionately. The Internet will become a less inclusive place, something that hurts all of us.

[Electronic Frontier Foundation]

With Craigslist's closure of its personals sections, we've begun to see SESTA-FOSTA's negative impact on the free and open web. (That said, many Craigslist users seem to have moved their personals listings to the "Activity Partners" section of the websites, so it may take a little finagling for Craigslist to eradicate sexually explicit ads.)

On the bright side, President Trump still hasn't signed the bill and he seems to have an itchy veto finger, so there's a chance — albeit a slim one— SESTA-FOSTA won't become law.