Tag: sex trafficking

Google Says Humbug to Child Sex-Trafficking Victims

Just in time for Christmas, it seems Google is up to its Grinchy tricks in the House of Representatives, allegedly the big gun behind an effort to undermine the anti-child-sex-trafficking bill FOSTA, which is the House version of the Senate’s SESTA.  Because these bills propose to amend the liability shield in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996), the major tech firms, along with organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have worked to clobber the proposals, lobbying Members of Congress and promoting anti-SESTA campaigns to the public.

Shortly after representatives of Facebook, Google, and Twitter endured some uncomfortable grilling on the subject of Russian disinformation campaigns, the Internet Association endorsed SESTA in early November.  But according to a new editorial in The Hill by Mary Mazzio, it looks like Big Tech lobbyists are orchestrating a bill swap in the House, proposing an approach that avoids amending Section 230. Mazzio is the writer/director of the trafficking documentary film I Am Jane Doe, which apparently inspired legislative action on this issue in the first place.  She states in her article…

“This full replacement of FOSTA was done under cover of darkness, quickly and quietly, with no input on the specific language from the NGO community, victims or survivors. The bill, which now amends the Mann Act, fails to address the Section 230 problem identified in the 1st Circuit, and worse, strips away civil remedies from survivors as well as states attorneys general. The language also appears to permanently foreclose all private rights of action which victims currently have under the federal trafficking statute.”

Her reference to the 1st Circuit is to the case Doe v. Backpage in which the court read the Section 230 statute broadly enough to hold that Backpage’s owners were entirely shielded from civil litigation pursued by several trafficking victims who blamed the site for facilitating their victimization by sex-traffickers. In response to a still-developing body of evidence implicating Backpage’s active role in the trafficking of minors, Congress has sought to at least clarify that the “safe harbor” provision of Section 230 is not meant to shield online services from liability for this type of conduct.

The internet industry, with substantial help from the EFF, has tried to characterize these bills as harmful to free speech and innovation (again) and have promoted a limited body of scholarship claiming that the bills will do more harm than good for victims.  I have written several responses to the anti-SESTA campaign, but Ms. Mazzio sums it up in her description of the alleged new proposal now sitting in the House Judiciary Committee.  “The net result is a new bill which genuflects to the altar of business practices and profitability where children and trafficking victims are collateral damage.”

Collateral damage is exactly right. It’s a concept that musicians and other artists know all too well—not that their losses are comparable to what trafficking victims endure, only that the policy agenda is very familiar.   But this is the price Google & Friends say must be paid in the interest of “internet freedom,” which is actually a euphemism for their liability shields.

Big Tech’s absolutism on Section 230 is this industry’s version of the NRA saying that “spree killings are the price we pay for freedom.”  In fact, if we put it that bluntly—children being sold to be systematically raped is the price we pay for internet freedom—it seems just a little defeatist and lacking in moral authority, least of all in the year when Americans have declared they’re turning the tables on sexual harassment. It seems to me if the Democrats in Congress felt an urgency to shed both Conyers and Franken in the current climate, that it is probably not too much to ask that they give serious attention to the FOSTA proposal, keeping only the victims the foreground, and let Google’s interests be damned.

It’s hard to say that these bills will categorically help trafficking victims; they are a limited remedy at best, given the hideous nature of the crime.  But I’d like to believe we can all agree that the financial interests of the world’s largest company are less important than an effort to mitigate such egregious harm being done to kids. It is rather astounding to see that netizens (whoever the hell they are) are so self-righteous about the Net Neutrality thing that they’ll justify racist attacks and death threats aimed at Ajit Pai.  But some of these same good people are willing to allow children to be collateral damage just because Google & Co. say “free speech.”  If that’s really who we are, somebody show me how to actually break the internet because I’m all for it.

Photo by alexkich

Internet Association Reverses on SESTA. EFF Cranky.

I can’t say I was surprised when the Internet Association announced on Friday that the major internet companies would be halting their lobbying efforts against the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking (SESTA) bill. While representatives for Google, Facebook, and Twitter were enjoying Day Three of occasionally intense inquiry by the Senate Judiciary Committee over foreign meddling in our politics via social media, one thing became abundantly clear: the generic defense that everything online is free speech isn’t going to fly. Not with lawmakers. And not with the American people, it seems.

The reversal on SESTA did rankle the EFF, though, which announced almost immediately that “the Internet Association does not speak for the web,” leaving us to conclude that, presumably, the EFF speaks for the web. Whatever that quite means. Perhaps what the “digital rights” group is most concerned about is that when SESTA passes, which it almost certainly will, people might notice the lack of chilling effect it will have on free speech and think, “Hey, maybe these guys who speak for the web are prone to exaggeration.”

After all, these organizations have spent a lot of energy telling Americans that the liability shield extended to online providers in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the reason the web has thrived at all. And one way to understand the extent to which this is hyperbole is to note that the amended SESTA bill, which the Internet Association now backs, does not include any changes that would make it any less a “censorship bill” if it had ever been one in the first place.

In fact, the substantive amendments now agreed upon primarily provide for changes to Chapter 77 of the U.S. criminal code (Title 18), which addresses both criminal and civil litigation that may stem from acts of slavery and trafficking, including trafficking of minors for the commercial sex trade. One amendment tightens up the definition of “participation in a venture” that facilitates or profits from crimes committed under §1591 (sex-trafficking of children) by describing this as “knowingly assisting, supporting, or facilitating a violation of…”. The other major amendment to Chapter 77 adds a section to the civil remedies for all slavery and trafficking-related crimes—allowing State Attorneys General to file civil claims in federal court where such remedies may be appropriate.

The EFF insists that SESTA will place smaller entities, which don’t have the financial/legal resources of Google and Facebook, at greater risk of potential litigation by victims of sex trafficking. They further assert that, according to various experts on trafficking, SESTA will not help victims and may even place them in greater jeopardy.

SESTA Doesn’t “Go After” Anyone

It’s important to understand that the purpose of SESTA is not trafficking interdiction itself. All the change to the CDA really does is lower one narrowly-defined barrier for alleged victims of sex trafficking to potentially hold a web business liable, if their owners knowingly profit from their victimization as minors trafficked in the sex trade. That’s a lot of conditions and a fairly high burden to meet in a litigation. Yet, the EFF cites critics like Kristen DiAngelo of the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP), which paints a picture of SESTA driving sex workers off the web and back onto the streets where they are more likely to be preyed upon by traffickers.

Organizations run by former victims should be afforded considerable respect with regard to their views on stemming trafficking; but I think DiAngelo misconstrues the nature of SESTA when she writes in her letter to Senator Thune, “To victims of sex trafficking, the idea of shifting liability to publishers for the actions of actual pimps and traffickers is terrifying.” But that isn’t what SESTA does. While I agree with Ms. DiAngelo that the broader spectrum of criminal justice vis-a-vis prostitution is often hypocritical and too frequently criminalizes victims rather than traffickers or customers, SESTA has nothing to do with criminal prosecution at all. It only slightly amends the landscape for civil action, and it should no more lead to a flood of lawsuits by trafficking victims anymore than we’ve seen mass litigation by victims of child pornography since the CDA became law in 1996.

To put it in practical terms, a group of sex workers could theoretically start their own website tomorrow and maintain that site without concern that SESTA has made them more vulnerable to litigation. As explained in an earlier post, the only issue of criminal or civil liability for Backpage* is whether its owners engaged in willful blindness, or worse, with regard to ads that either explicitly or implicitly promoted minors for sex. What SESTA does is actually limit the liability for the site owners who do take affirmative steps to weed out, mitigate, or report attempts to advertise minors on their platform. If SWOP were interested, for instance, in fostering safer online environments for sex workers, SESTA should actually be conducive to that effort.

Perhaps if the EFF would stop calling SESTA a censorship bill and explain in some clear example how this legislation could possibly cause any of the systemic problems they claim, theirs would be a counterpoint worth considering. Meanwhile, they may want to read the moods of both Congress and many citizens, who seem far less receptive to the universal “hands off my web” message that has prevailed up until now. The danger, of course, is that there may yet be an actual threat to free speech in digital space, and if that happens, who will speak for the internet? Surely not the organization that has cried wolf so many times.

Google Supports Child Slavery with Anti-SESTA Campaign?

That would be an incendiary claim, wouldn’t it?

But let’s be honest. If a different industry (say the motion picture industry) were opposing the anti-trafficking bill called SESTA, then the EFF, Fight for the Future, PublicKnowledge, Techdirt, and about 30 other Google-backed organizations would surely not hesitate to righteously declare from their laptops that “Hollywood Loves Child Sex Slaves.”  There would be a flood of editorials, graphics, memes, tweets, rumors, and maybe even some skywriting, all hammering away at the industry they love to hate.  No analysis of the bill. No nuance. It’s what they did with SOPA, and it worked.

Conversely, we have not seen a coordinated campaign to portray the internet industry and its syndicate of sycophants as a bunch of rich, white, ivory-tower, dilettantes indifferent to the plight of child sex-slaves.  Perhaps this is because it would be in bad taste to do so; perhaps it’s because no other industry finances quite so vast a network of opinion-makers as Google does all by itself; perhaps it’s because the people who believe that reasonable law-enforcement can and must apply in cyberspace are reasonable people still committed to arguing the merits of a policy proposal rather than jumping into the mud-fight that passes for political activism on the internet.  Perhaps calling someone a supporter of child slavery is a bridge too far.  But like I say, if the situation were reversed, they’d do it in heartbeat.

I’ve tried not to go there.  In the posts I’ve written about Backpage or the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA), I’ve stated that I don’t believe the folks at EFF or its sister organizations are so morally corrupt that they simply do not care about the victims of human trafficking.  But it is admittedly hard to give them the benefit of that doubt under the circumstances.  Because the bottom line, as I read it, is that these groups are just completely full of crap about the threats SESTA poses to internet users; and it’s hard to remain polite in response to their rolling out the standard hyperbole when the subject is so grave.

To my reading, SESTA proposes a very modest and narrow change to Section 230 of the CDA. It adds language pertaining to sex-trafficking that would be constructed in the statute as equal to the existing language about hosting child pornography online. It does not change the core mechanism of Section 230, namely the underlying rationale or function of the liability shield. The proposed change to the law is short and simple. Anyone can read it for themselves. Basically, if you’ve been using the internet and have thus far managed to avoid being accused of hosting child pornography (because you don’t), that’s about how vulnerable you would be to an accusation of supporting sex-trafficking after passage of SESTA.

The major internet interests are probably less concerned about possible litigation from victims of trafficking than they are with insisting that the CDA should remain calcified in its form as ratified in 1996.  Assuming this is true, the concern on their part would be that a change in the CDA creates a precedent for other changes in cyber-law, for instance in the DMCA, that might limit the manner in which many of the major platforms have profited from infringement since their inception.  But tough noogies. These are the wealthiest and most powerful corporations on the planet. They can behave like citizens.

Surely, we should be able to set aside the underlying debate over the DMCA just long enough to show some solidarity on the far more serious matter of trafficking minors in the sex trade. I’d like to believe that we all agree this is a criminal enterprise depraved enough, and deserving of enough empathy for its victims, that even Google and its network of activist carny barkers would mute their scare-mongering “censorship” rhetoric for a change.  But apparently, there is no criminal conduct deserving of such deference.

Can SESTA impose new liabilities on sites the scale of YouTube? Probably.  But so what?  Google has the the money and the resources to figure it out. Meanwhile, children are being kidnapped, abused, and raped for profit; and if Congress cannot even take this tiny step toward mitigating the role the internet plays in fostering that crime, then shame on us.  Or as a colleague of mine said to me yesterday, “Are we really saying that filming and distributing images of child abuse is illegal, but committing the act itself is okay?” We cannot possibly have our heads that far up Google’s ass, can we?

The Campaign for Accountability states in a recent post, “At least 34 groups that receive Google funding have opposed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), according to research from the Google Transparency Project.”  These include many of the usual suspects like EFF, R Street Institute, and Mike Masnick’s Copia Institute, but also lists the ACLU and PEN America, whose voices on such matters tend to be more sober.  As stated in other posts, funding source alone is not an indictment of a policy position; but Google’s now widely-reported scope of influence through academia and activist groups, combined with messaging that sounds more like PR than debate, paints a picture that is hard to take at face value. For instance, the following paragraph appears to be the meat of the letter sent to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation by the ACLU:

“Online providers cannot and should not suffer criminal liability merely for facilitating the speech of others even if elements those communications are distasteful or even unlawful.  To do so would discourage online hosts from making responsible efforts to police their sites, and that in turn would make it more difficult to expose those actually engaged in criminal behavior.  Just as Internet commerce and speech would not have grown exponentially without the protections of section 230, so penalizing service providers now will discourage online entrepreneurs from moving the miracle of modern Internet communications into its next magical phase.” [Emphasis added]

So, cutting through the fog of language alluding to miracles and magic, the sentence in bold is the alleged problem with SESTA.  But as noted above, it is very hard to see how the proposed amendment to the statute substantially alters the liability implications from the status quo for the vast majority of internet users and entrepreneurs.  And because every complaint I have read so far, like the ACLU letter, spends more energy praising the broad virtues of Section 230 than making a clear case for why SESTA would be hazardous, I will continue to believe there is no there there.  Or to put it another way, to be potentially liable under SESTA, it seems your site would basically have to be Backpage.  And as there is one Backpage out of about a billion websites, I think these organizations are protesting a bit much.