The whole video is worth watching, and discusses how politicians, law enforcement, and sketchy “advocacy” groups repeatedly falsely try to conflate all sex work with sex trafficking
John Oliver Explains How FOSTA (And Lots Of Other Policies To ‘Help’ Sex Work) Has Backfired Badly
from the john-oliver-the-resident-techdirt-tv-host dept
"For not the first time, John Oliver is taking on topics we often cover at Techdirt, and doing a fantastic job of it. His latest show went deep on just how screwed up laws and law enforcement about sex work are, including a specific look at FOSTA.
The whole video is worth watching, and discusses how politicians, law enforcement, and sketchy “advocacy” groups repeatedly falsely try to conflate all sex work with sex trafficking. But, more importantly, it discusses how nearly all of the laws written about sex work and sex trafficking are done without talking to actual sex workers, and because of that it creates laws, such as FOSTA, that actually do a lot more harm than good, and often focus on punishing sex workers while pretending to “help” them.
The part on FOSTA doesn’t go that deep, but does make the key point (as we and others have been making for years) that (1) after insisting that FOSTA was “needed” the government basically never used it, and (2) that it actually has made it much, much, much more difficult for law enforcement to track down and arrest actual sex traffickers. In a clip I hadn’t seen before, Oliver shows a law enforcement official noting that Backpage used to work with law enforcement, but after it was shut down, overseas sites rushed in to fill the void, and none of them are willing to work with law enforcement at all.
Indeed, the episode provides even more support to leaked DOJ documents that showed that Backpage was actually a very helpful partner to law enforcement in helping to track down actual sex trafficking, but balked at… extending that to consensual sex work. In other words, the very point that Oliver tried to raise in this episode.
And, of course, as we see all of this, Congress still refuses to recognize how much harm that FOSTA has done and is, instead, still focused on passing a new law, the EARN IT Act, that is in many ways even worse than FOSTA.
Filed Under: earn it, fosta, john oliver, law enforcement, section 230, sex trafficking, sex work, sex workers
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