Despite Repeated Evidence That It's Unnecessary And Damaging, Trump Signs SESTA/FOSTA

from the because-of-course dept

This was no surprise, but as everyone expected, yesterday President Trump signed SESTA/FOSTA into law leading to the usual excitement from the bill's supporters -- despite the fact that events of the past couple weeks have proved them all wrong. The bill's supporters repeatedly insisted that SESTA/FOSTA was necessary to stop one company, Backpage.com, because (they falsely insisted) CDA 230 made the site completely immune. Except, that's clearly not true. In the two weeks since the bill was approved by Congress, two separate courts declared Backpage not protected by CDA 230 and (more importantly) the DOJ seized the whole damn site and indicted most of the company's execs -- all without SESTA/FOSTA.

And, on top of that, many many sites have already shut down or modified how they do business because of SESTA/FOSTA proving that the bill's reach clearly is impacting free expression online -- just as tons of civil liberties experts warned. And that's not even touching on the very real concerns of those involved in sex work on how SESTA/FOSTA literally puts their lives in danger -- and how it makes it that much more difficult to actually rescue victims of sex trafficking.

As usual, Professor Eric Goldman has a pretty thorough summary of the situation, and notes that there are still a bunch of open questions -- including the inevitable constitutional challenges to the bill. The retroactive clause (saying it applies to things that happened prior to the bill being signed) is so obviously unconstitutional that even the Justice Department warned that it would doom the bill if not fixed (which Congress dutifully ignored). But, to me, there's a bigger question: whether or not a First Amendment challenge could knock out SESTA/FOSTA in the same way that it got most of the original Communications Decency Act tossed out 20 years ago (CDA 230 was all that survived of the original CDA).

I am also curious whether or not we will see any reaction from those who promoted and supported SESTA for the past year or so, when the rates of sex trafficking don't decrease, but the ability to rescue such victims does decline. Somehow, I get the feeling they'll have moved on and forgotten all of this. And that's because, for most of them, "stopping sex trafficking" was a convenient excuse for trying to attack the internet.

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Filed Under: cda, fosta, free speech, section 230, sesta, trump