#sesta/fosta

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Sohn was eminently qualified to serve on the FCC, and there was no mystery as to who she would serve in that role: the American people, especially those who have been abused, forgotten or underserved by Big Telco and Big Cable, from digitally redlined inner-city to rural broadband deserts.

So the monopolists went to work. For sixteen months, they successfully lo the Senate to block her confirmation hearing. Not her confirmation — just the hearing. Over $23 million in telco money flowed into the Senate over this period, and that was just the start.

The ISPs also went to work on the frothing culture warriors of the American right, smearing Sohn as a “groomer” and an “anti-police radical.” They ran a homophobic smear campaign against Sohn, who is gay, and condemned her for her work as a volunteer board member with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on the grounds that EFF opposes unconstitutional digital police surveillance and campaigned against SESTA/FOSTA, a law that has put sex-workers in grave physical danger while doing nothing to accomplish its nominal goal of preventing sex-trafficking (disclosure: I am a Special Advisor to EFF and am proud to have worked with them for over 21 years).

-Culture War Bullshit Stole Your Broadband: Your internet sucks because telco monopolists kept Gigi Sohn off the FCC

[calicostorms]

Etsy banning adult toymakers is genuinely so devastating. So many amazing businesses were there making cool stuff, and it's so much harder to find out about them without a centralized website to start on. I'm really distraught and disgusted by how few of the creators I follow on Etsy are still allowed to sell their wares there now

[trans-axolotl]

"Much ink has already been spilled on Harris’s prosecutorial background. What is significant about the topic of sex work is how recently the vice president–elect’s actions contradicted her alleged views. During her tenure as AG, she led a campaign to shut down Backpage, a classified advertising website frequently used by sex workers, calling it “the world’s top online brothel” in 2016 and claiming that the site made “millions of dollars from trafficking.” While Backpage did make millions off of sex work ads, its “adult services” listings offered a safer and more transparent platform for sex workers and their clients to conduct consensual transactions than had historically been available. Harris’s grandiose mischaracterization led to a Senate investigation, and the shuttering of the site by the FBI in 2018.

“Backpage being gone has devastated our community,” said Andrews. The platform allowed sex workers to work more safely: They were able to vet clients and promote their services online. “It’s very heartbreaking to see the fallout,” said dominatrix Yevgeniya Ivanyutenko. “A lot of people lost their ability to safely make a living. A lot of people were forced to go on the street or do other things that they wouldn’t have otherwise considered.” M.F. Akynos, the founder and executive director of the Black Sex Worker Collective, thinks Harris should “apologize to the community. She needs to admit that she really fucked up with Backpage, and really ruined a lot of people’s lives.”

After Harris became a senator, she cosponsored the now-infamous Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), which—along with the House’s Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)—was signed into law by President Trump in 2018. FOSTA-SESTA created a loophole in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the so-called “safe harbor” provision that allows websites to be free from liability for user-generated content (e.g., Amazon reviews, Craigslist ads). The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that Section 230 is the backbone of the Internet, calling it “the most important law protecting internet free speech.” Now, website publishers are liable if third parties post sex-work ads on their platforms.

That spelled the end of any number of platforms—mostly famously Craigslist’s “personal encounters” section—that sex workers used to vet prospective clients, leaving an already vulnerable workforce even more exposed. (The Woodhull Freedom Foundation has filed a lawsuit challenging FOSTA on First Amendment grounds; in January 2020, it won an appeal in D.C.’s district court).

“I sent a bunch of stats [to Harris and Senator Diane Feinstein] about decriminalization and how much SESTA-FOSTA would hurt American sex workers and open them up to violence,” said Cara (a pseudonym), who was working as a sex worker in the San Francisco and a member of SWOP when the bill passed. Both senators ignored her.

The bill both demonstrably harmed sex workers and failed to drop sex trafficking. “Within one month of FOSTA’s enactment, 13 sex workers were reported missing, and two were dead from suicide,” wrote Lura Chamberlain in her Fordham Law Review article “FOSTA: A Hostile Law with a Human Cost.” “Sex workers operating independently faced a tremendous and immediate uptick in unwanted solicitation from individuals offering or demanding to traffic them. Numerous others were raped, assaulted, and rendered homeless or unable to feed their children.” A 2020 survey of the effects of FOSTA-SESTA found that “99% of online respondents reported that this law does not make them feel safer” and 80.61 percent “say they are now facing difficulties advertising their services.” "

-What Sex Workers Want Kamala Harris to Know by Hallie Liberman

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How do you convince conservatives to vote against decent internet at a decent price? The same way you convince conservatives to do anything:

You tell them it’s woke.

Under Trump, we had FCC commissioners who falsely claimed that municipal broadband would censor conservative voices. This isn’t merely untrue, it’s radioactively wrong: in fact, the only ISPs in America that aren’t allowed to block content on the basis of its viewpoint are the publicly owned ones, thanks to our good old pal, the First Amendment.

Low-information culture-warriors have carried water for cable and telco monopolists for years, even as their situation degraded. 100 million Americans live in places where every ISP has violated Net Neutrality, and rural Americans now overwhelmingly live in deadzones where the normal duopoly of cable/DSL has been replaced by a cable-only monopoly.

In the face of this rapid deterioration, telecoms monopolists have had to invent new ways to gin up fury and hold improvement at bay.

Which brings me to Gigi Sohn.

-Culture War Bullshit Stole Your Broadband: Your internet sucks because telco monopolists kept Gigi Sohn off the FCC

[thelusciouslibra]

December 17th is International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.

We take today to remember those who have lost their lives, demand safer working conditions, and celebrate all that we've accomplished.

Please take today to support and stand in solidarity with sex workers.

A few educational resources for you to check out and donate to today: Free Speech Coalition How “Project 2025” Threatens the Rights of Sex Workers and the LGBTQ+ Community Sex Workers Outreach Project USA Decriminyalize Sex Work on SESTA/FOSTA

[not-poignant]

Is it just me or is censorship all across social media getting really bad lately? Pinterest just removed a whole bunch of my pins for sexual content - they were all fully clothed queer men and women showing vague intimacy, nothing overtly sexual at all. Like one they removed was literally just two men's heads leaning on each other. That's wacko right??? Have I missed something big going on?

Tbh it's been getting increasingly terrible for a long time, anon, it's not a lately thing, it's been since before the Tumblr purge, and it is at least in some part due to the SESTA/FOSTA law that got passed in the USA, and the increasing passing of laws in many countries that are specifically concerned with removing net neutrality and treating all of us like 3 year olds.

It will get worse, not better. And you've probably been missing a few big things! It sounds like you were most directly impacted by what happened with Pinterest, so you've just noticed it. Many of us noticed it around 2018 with the Tumblr purge. Some of us have been impacted by elements of it way earlier, due to Livejournal's Strikethrough which necessitated the invention of Dreamwidth and helped to really get AO3 off the ground. And this was back even before we now have many laws that scare a lot of big companies into removing adult content.

Steve Jobs famously hated / loathed pornography and was on a mission to literally try and remove it from the internet, and part of that mission was to - as much as possible - make it nearly impossible for apps that have it to get listed in the Apple store. This is partly why AO3 doesn't have an app. This is why Dreamwidth doesn't have an app. This is why the Tumblr Purge happened - so they could continue to have an app. And while some sites don't get targeted, as soon as you do get targeted by the Apple store, it's either 'provide your legal identity to prove that you're the age you say you are' to access adult content or it's 'goodbye adult content.'

We've also had an increasing rise of morally panicked, puritanical TERF-informed anti-shippers who believe that their emotional reactions to fictional content they find troubling are firstly valid moral judgements, and secondly, a valid reason to abuse, bully and send death threats to real people. And these people basically work hand-in-hand (often without realising) with extremely powerful Evangelical Christians who have government influence and a lot of money in the USA and literally work to change laws to make it reflect an extremely puritanical vision they have of the future. You know, the homphobic, transphobic, misogynistic, racist, kinkphobic, bigoted, antisemitic etc. etc. etc. one. (It's highly ironic and tragic that most antis are young and queer and just extremely uneducated).

I'd say people notice based on what impacted them directly. So some of us realised in 2007. Some of us realised again in 2018. And since then there's been a lot of blows from a lot of sites. In a way, Pinterest is joining an already very bloated bandwagon of sites cornered in the manner. The reason why people say 'unalive' these days instead of suicide, or 'r@pe' these days instead of rape is because of Tiktok censors. The reason so many folks moved their adult fanart and art accounts off Instagram, or they've gone dead, is because of Instagram censors. The reason so many adult writers on Patreon are very careful about what explicit words they write directly onto the site is because of Patreon censorship.

After all this, it's possible that Pinterest has a bug and are implementing a new AI algorithm for detecting adult content, and it's just broken. In those cases, reporting and appealing actually often does help. When Tumblr first implemented their algorithm, it wasn't very well trained yet, and like, pictures of fruit etc. were being banned because the AI algorithm was still figuring out what to do. Tumblr was in a rush in order to keep the app in the Apple store (over 70% of their income is from app users, the site would have literally died if they didn't act quickly), and so they ended up with an extremely overzealous and initially broken (and still sometimes broken x.x) algorithm.

If Pinterest is going through something similar, either with the app store or with having to address a sudden legal change, they may be having algo problems, and reporting will help them train the algorithm better.

Trust me, there will be people behind the scenes - staff at all of these websites - who hate the changes as much as you do, even if they can't say so for professional reasons. But even the new owner of Tumblr got pretty close to saying 'it fucking sucks but we have to do it if you want the site to exist' (which honestly made it a lot more...possible to handle the change, because it's not usually the sites you have to hate/resent, but the laws getting changed around you. Also if anyone here is an adult and can do so - please vote!!!)

[mxjackparker]

Censoring terms like "sex work" and making them unsearchable doesn't stop anyone from finding porn, which can be tagged a million other things, but it does make it harder to hear sex workers talk about their own experiences.

[inthefallofasparrow]

How did the internet become so puritanical? On social media, outspoken anti-sex advocates increasingly cry “gross” at everything from R-rated rom-coms to fictional characters and queer people having sex to consenting adults with slight age gaps to dating short people. They see oversexualization in just about everything. They often accuse the things they dislike of being coded fronts for pedophilia, and the people who enjoy those things of being sexual predators. These social media users frequently form enclaves that turn as nightmarish and troubling as the things they’re ostensibly trying to police.

This dovetails with what we’re being told right now about Gen Z and sex: They’re having less casual sex, they hate dating, they’re more reserved about relationships in general. It’s easy to pigeonhole online anti-sex police as being teens and young adults, a.k.a. “puriteens.” Because so much of this comes down to carnal horror, you might assume that everyone who’s horrified is a teen who just hasn’t arrived at a mature view of sex and other adult activity. Such anti-sex zeal increasingly forces sex-positive communities back into the internet’s underground. It also aids and abets the larger cultural shift toward regressive attitudes and censorship of sexual minorities and sex-positive content.

Yet overwhelmingly, the common thread among this new generation of “antis” — a broad label for people who are opposed to sexual content in media — isn’t that they are minors who are scared of sex. It’s that none of them distinguish between fictional harm and real-world harm. That is, regardless of their ages, they believe fiction not only can have a real-world impact, but that it always has a real-world impact ...

[campgender]

excerpts from Amber Dawn’s “Touch ≠ Touch Screen” that i thought particularly resonated with the most recent iteration of conversations on transmisogynistic + whorephobic censorship on tumblr & other social media

image description: three screenshots of a poem from the collection My Art Is Killing Me (2020) with stylized spacing.

excerpt 1:

Just survivors, I’m talking only to you now (literally you).

Did your abuse fever teach you to solder belonging and harm?

Were you seen and were you shamed in the same

original place? Did you inherit

a coercive dichotomy?

Anxious arousal hand

me downs?

Does your public network see you and hate you in looping rounds?

Does logging on harm you? Does all this somehow feel familiar?

excerpt 2:

Let’s talk about 2018 when

FOSTA-SESTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop

Enabling Sex Traffickers Act) was passed as law by US Congress

on April 11, marking the first ever exception to Section 230.

So after twenty-two years, yes, twenty-two years, social media platforms

where made responsible for user generated content if that content may be

intended for sex work yes

all sex work, yes, consensual sex work and, yes

anything like a butthole or a female-presenting-assumed nipple, and yes

responsible for or in authority of images, words and phrases

that mend desire together

with age, race, size, orientation, disability, labour

economics and any bodies subject to other-ness.

And with other-ness, I’m talking about

fat babes in neon green lingerie, about two brown men

kissing, about trans women being radiant and using

their real fucking names. I’m talking about

masculine-presenting-assumed folk with baby bumps. I’m talking sexual

assault survivors showing off the scars on our inner thighs. I’m talking about

women posting screenshots of the violent Tinder messages we receive

every damn day. I’m talking about

speaking up. I’m talking language

reclamation. I’m talking decolonizing

sexualities. I’m talking gagged faggots

about dyke march photos

torn down. I’m talking

about locked accounts.

excerpt 3:

viii.

I’m talking about this—

power holding backlash.    How dare we get those likes

those shares, take up virtual space

speak truths, share strategy, love our ash and phoenix

bodies, rise up or dig deep, whichever way or all

directions at once.

We can be nimble AF

but how dare we?

Make the internet

white relentlessly white again

str8 cis thin and norm again

Redesign the sightline

of hating women.         I’m talking about this

power holding backlash.

I think about this a lot—

what it means to spend upwards

of two hours per day

on platforms that believe

we should not legally exist

un      see      able

end image description.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

As good as American cities and towns are at providing fiber, the private sector is very bad at it. When Frontier went bankrupt during the lockdown, their filings revealed that they deliberately withheld fiber from 3,000,000 households, despite projecting one billion in additional profits, because the investment would take a decade to mature (telco analysts downrank the stock of operators who make long-term investments).

Frontier also booked 1,000,000 households in broadband deserts as “assets” because the company knew those subscribers had no alternative, which meant Frontier could provide worse service at higher costs while cutting their maintenance budgets (Frontier’s “installation” methodology involved draping its lines over shrubs or wedging them into tree-branches).

As bad as the private sector is at providing broadband, it is absolutely brilliant at corrupting the political process. Cities that so much as ponder providing decent broadband are beset by “grassroots” activists who are spittin’ mad at the idea of having reliable, low-cost internet. More often than not, these are really astroturf groups, fake activists in the employ of big cable and telephone companies. The whole bestiary of shadowy conservative billionaires get in on this — even the Kochs.

-Culture War Bullshit Stole Your Broadband: Your internet sucks because telco monopolists kept Gigi Sohn off the FCC

[thoughtportal]

the surveillance state always starts with the most vulnerable and marginalized, using our own prejudices against us so we will go along with our own subjugation

[jvzebel-x]

so, i am (pretty openly) a hooker. &i was raped while working.

it wasn't the first time. unfortunately, it will likely not be the last time something like this happens. it's hooker 101-- this risk comes with the business. there will always be shady characters willing to take advantage of a horribly fucked up system to hurt vulnerable workers. there will always be people willing to bank on my hands being tied when it comes to situations like this.

&yet the thing that has made me the most emotional by far is the fact that there are no safety boards to post to. no way for my to warn other workers in the area of a bad client. no where i can post to that will circulate, because this client Will hurt other workers, of this i have no doubt. &i could help, if we still had our resources. if we were allowed to have what little gutter community we even had. ever since fosta/sesta, we don't have community safety resources like we used to.

there's no happy ending here, idk. i'm just angry. if there are any fsswers in the Portland, Oregon, USA, a man going by the name Eric C lives in NE Portland and runs a cabinet shop in Camas, Washington. about 5'5"/5'6", average build, bald, has various colored traditional American styled tattoos all over his body, including a large piece on his chest of a woman and a bull dancing. in his 50s, potentially early 60s. he's a rapist.

be safe, babes. to any&all sex workers, especially full service workers, i'm sending endless amounts of love. so very much of the time, we are all we have. know that if you're hurting for whatever reason, i am there with you&we will make it out together. stay strong in a world that can feel determined to undermine&destroy you. we can do this.

[settlercolonialismisbad]

[r0semultiverse]

this fosta shit is making me fosta a lot of hatred for the old dusty ass skeletons running this shit