The Utter Failure Of FOSTA: More Lives At Risk... And Sex Ads Have Increased, Not Decreased

from the pushing-things-further-underground... dept

Once again, as we predicted, FOSTA -- a law ostensibly passed to stop sex trafficking -- has been a total disaster. Passed based on totally inaccurate moral panics, it has resulted in online censorship and highly questionable lawsuits. But, worst of all, despite all the rhetoric about how it was necessary to save the lives of young girls, it has actually put them at much greater risk, and increased the amount of sex trafficking, while decreasing the ability of police to track down and arrest actual traffickers.

As this was all becoming clear a few months back, the legislators who pushed FOSTA tried to completely rewrite history to claim it was a success. Chief among them was the original sponsor of FOSTA, Rep. Ann Wagner, who announced that FOSTA was responsible for "shutting down nearly 90% of the online sex trafficking business and ads." This was wrong on multiple levels. That number was based on the shutdown of Backpage, which happened before FOSTA was law and had nothing to do with FOSTA. Even worse, an investigation into that 90% number by the Washington Post showed that even it was not true. At that time, the research showed that, while there was a brief plunge in sex ads after Backpage was seized (again, separate from FOSTA), the volume was coming back up to about the same level.

And, now, a new report by software company Marinus Analytics has found that online sex ads are showing up at an even higher rate than before FOSTA became law.

According to Pittsburgh-based software company Marinus Analytics, there were about 146,000 online sex ads posted per day in the U.S. on leading escort websites from mid-September to mid-October—and the company expects the total for this month to be even higher. In contrast, there were about 133,000 such ads posted on Backpage in the month before its shutdown, Marinus Analytics found. Instead of backing away amid the government crackdown on sex trafficking, some escort websites are doubling down on their business model and see the Backpage shutdown as an opportunity to expand, said Emily Kennedy, Marinus Analytics' president and co-founder. "They're really competing with each other for that spot now and so we're seeing frequent activity at this point," she said, adding that as long as the business remains lucrative, "people are going to figure out a way to advertise it."

Of course, unlike Backpage -- which regularly cooperated with law enforcement to help -- these new sites obviously have zero incentive at all to cooperate with law enforcement who are trying to track down actual traffickers. Because, thanks to FOSTA, these sites now need to try to stay away from any attention from law enforcement.

So, to recap, this law designed to stop sex trafficking by criminalizing sites that host ads around prostitution has:

Not stopped those ads (indeed, they've increased)

Enabled greater censorship of the internet.

Enabled wasteful and dangerous lawsuits against internet companies.

Made it more difficult for law enforcement to track down and arrest actual traffickers.

Put many, many people in grave risk of injury and death.

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So, where are all the supporters of FOSTA now that basically everything that we critics predicted has come true?

Filed Under: ads, ann wagner, fosta, sex trafficking