US Congress recently passed HR 1865, "FOSTA", seeking to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully. 
 
 Any tool or service can be misused. We can't take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we have regretfully taken craigslist personals offline. Hopefully we can bring them back some day. 
 
 To the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through craigslist, we wish you every happiness! ||||| Senate Committee Any Committee Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry (70th-116th) Armed Services (79th-116th) Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs (70th-116th) Budget (93rd-116th) Commerce, Science, and Transportation (79th-116th) Energy and Natural Resources (70th-116th) Environment and Public Works (79th-116th) Finance (70th-116th) Foreign Relations (70th-116th) Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (70th-116th) Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (70th-116th) Judiciary (70th-116th) Rules and Administration (79th-116th) Small Business and Entrepreneurship (81st-116th) Veterans' Affairs (91st-116th) 
 
 State or Territory Indicated Any State or Territory Alabama Alaska American Samoa Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Guam Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Northern Mariana Islands Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Puerto Rico Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virgin Islands Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming 
 
 Nomination Actions Any Nomination Action Placed on calendar as privileged nomination Committee requested information was received Referred to committee Hearings held Ordered reported Reported to Senate Committee discharged Placed on calendar Placed on calendar with footnote Considered by Senate Unanimous consent agreement Cloture motion Cloture invoked/not invoked Rereferred to committee Received message of withdrawal Returned to president Confirmed by Senate ||||| WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate passed legislation on Wednesday aimed at penalising website operators that facilitate online sex trafficking, chipping away at a bedrock legal shield for the technology industry. 
 
 The U.S. Capitol building is lit at dusk ahead of planned votes on tax reform in Washington, U.S., December 18, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts 
 
 The bill passed the House of Representatives last month and was expected to be signed into law as soon as this week by President Donald Trump. 
 
 The legislation, which passed the Senate on a 97-2 vote, would make it easier for state prosecutors and sex-trafficking victims to sue social media networks, advertisers and others that failed to keep exploitative material off their platforms. 
 
 Law enforcement has lobbied for years for such a law, an effort which resulted in part from a crackdown on backpage.com, the second largest U.S. classified ad service and which is used for sex advertising. 
 
 Passage of the bill represented a rare defeat for the internet industry, which despite coming under renewed scrutiny for how companies protect user data or guard against Russian meddling has for years avoided meaningful regulation in Washington. 
 
 Silicon Valley long opposed efforts to rewrite the decades-old Communications Decency Act, which protects companies from liability for content posted by their users and has long been credited for helping Silicon Valley’s rapid growth over the past 20 years. 
 
 But supporters of the bill said that part of the law, known as Section 230, has been too broadly used to protect websites like backpage.com. 
 
 The Supreme Court in January 2017 refused to consider reviving a lawsuit against backpage.com that was filed by three young women who claimed that the website facilitated their forced prostitution, letting stand a lower court ruling because of the protection afforded by the Communications Decency Act. 
 
 “Today’s vote is a victory for trafficking survivors and a victory for our efforts to help stop the selling of women and children online,” said Republican Senator Rob Portman, an original sponsor of the bill, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. 
 
 Facebook Inc (FB.O) and other technology companies and influence groups largely withdrew opposition to the measure in recent months after negotiating some changes that narrowed its potential impact. 
 
 Erin Egan, Facebook’s vice president of U.S. policy, applauded the bill’s passage, saying in a statement that it would help make the internet safer “for vulnerable children, women, and all trafficking targets.” 
 
 Under the bill, victims would be required to show that a website knowingly facilitated sex trafficking in order to file a successful lawsuit. 
 
 Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat, and Senator Rand Paul, a Republican, cast the only votes against the bill. 
 
 Wyden said the bill would lead to an onslaught of lawsuits against small websites that lack the resources to closely police user-generated content or defend themselves in court, and said it would actually benefit large internet companies. 
 
 “People following this debate might ask why some of the biggest internet companies like Facebook support it,” Wyden said. “It’s because it will pull up the ladder in the tech world, leaving the established giants alone at the top.” ||||| Sometime around 2 a.m. last night, Reddit banned several long-running sex worker forums from the platform. The move comes just hours after the Senate passed a bill making digital facilitation of prostitution a federal crime. Under the new law, social media sites and other hubs of user-generated content can be held criminally liable. 
 
 For months, sex workers have warned that the passage of "SESTA" or "FOSTA"—two similarly bad bills that were competing for dominance; FOSTA passed yesterday—would mark the end of all online forums for communication with clients, lawyers, or each other. To sex workers like Liara Roux, Louise Partridge, and Jiz Lee, Reddit's takedown of these subreddits confirmed their fears about the new legislation. 
 
 Even if individuals aren't targeted by law enforcement for placing ads, and even if individual cases brought by state prosecutors are struck down as unconstitutional, a lot of platforms will preemptively ban anything remotely related to sex work rather than risk it. 
 
 So far, four subreddits related to sex have banned: Escorts, Male Escorts, Hookers, and SugarDaddy. None were what could accurately be described as advertising forums, though (to varying degrees) they may have helped connect some people who wound up in "mutually beneficial relationships." The escort forums were largely used by sex workers to communicate with one another, according to Partridge. Meanwhile, the "hooker" subreddit "was mostly men being disgusting," according to Roux, "but also was a place that sometimes had people answering educational questions in good faith." 
 
 This sub had a slur in the name and was mostly men being disgusting but also was a place that sometimes had people answering educational questions in good faith. Instead of increased moderation and a name change, it was removed entirely today. Dead canary. pic.twitter.com/efAFMW9R4z — Liara Roux (@LiaraRoux) March 22, 2018 
 
 If you visit the Reddit "Hooker" community now, you'll see a notice that "this subreddit was banned due to a violation of our content policy." The "Escorts" and "Male Escots" pages provides a little more detail: "This subreddit was banned due to a violation of our content policy, specifically, a violation of Reddit's policy against transactions involving prohibited goods or services." 
 
 Reddit yesterday announced changes to its content policy, now forbidding "transactions for certain goods and services," including "firearms, ammunition, or explosives" and "paid services involving physical sexual contact." While some of the prohibited exchanges are illegal, many are not. 
 
 Yet they run close enough up against exchanges that could be illegal that it's hard for a third-party like Reddit to differentiate. And the same goes for forums where sex workers post educational content, news, safety and legal advice. Without broad Section 230 protections, Reddit could be in serious financial and legal trouble if they make the wrong call. 
 
 Some have suggested that the new content policy, not FOSTA, is to blame for the shutdown of the sex-related subreddits. But FOSTA may also help explain Reddit's new content policy overall. (Reddit did not respond to my request for comment Thursday morning.) 
 
 FOSTA seriously chips away at Section 230, the federal provision that protects web publishers from being treated as the speaker of user-generated content. Proponents of FOSTA have insisted this is just a renovation of Section 230, not a demolition. But as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)—who coauthored the Section 230 language in the '90s—noted yesterday, once you carve out a loophole for one bad thing (in this case, the change is allegedly meant to stop sex trafficking), it's easy for legislators and courts to carve out loopholes and justifications for everything. 
 
 After all, murder is pretty bad. And everyone's pretty jazzed up about the "opioid epidemic" right now. Guns, too. Do you think Congress can resist asking if websites that facilitate these crimes shouldn't be just as liable as those that broker sex? 
 
 In case it's not clear, Reddit's actions today in updating their policies prove that sites will react to SESTA/FOSTA quickly and in the ways we feared most. I don't want to be alarmist, but we are in danger of losing the ability to even talk about sex work in theory online. — Liara Roux (@LiaraRoux) March 22, 2018 
 
 But as Wyden also pointed out yesterday, this strategy doesn't mean that more sex traffickers—or murderers, illegal arms dealers, etc.—will be caught and punished (and perhaps less overall, for a vareity of reasons). It just means treating websites like the criminals instead—which would make the government a lot of money, but do nothing for safety or justice. 
 
 "Section 230 was never about protecting incumbents," Wyden told his colleagues from the Senate floor Wednesday. Yet "despite the fact that section 230 undergirds the framework of the internet as we know it today, there's a signifficant effort to take it down and collapse it." The result will be "an enourmous chilling effect on speech in America," Wyden warned. 
 
 Looks like we're already seeing the effects. ||||| In response to the Senate passing H.R.1865, an anti-online sex trafficking bill that has the potential to seriously harm consenting, adult sex workers, Craigslist has shuttered its all of its personals sections. Even the platonic ones. 
 
 Early Friday morning, Craigslist made a public post regarding the bill commonly known as FOSTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) that explained the logic behind their decision to shut down one of the most widely-used subsections of the platform. The message was straight and to the point: 
 
 “US Congress just passed HR 1865, “FOSTA”, seeking to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully. Any tool or service can be misused. We can’t take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking craigslist personals offline. Hopefully we can bring them back some day. To the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through craigslist, we wish you every happiness!” 
 
 In a post-FOSTA world, websites like Craigslist where sex workers commonly posted ads for their services would be legally responsible for the whatever kinds of illegal interactions users ultimately took part in. 
 
 In the most ideal of situations, a bill like FOSTA could play a role in fighting off sex trafficking. In reality though, the bill (as is the case here) is causing a chilling effect that gooses sites like Craigslist to close up at least part of their shop and actively hurts consenting sex workers who rely on the website. As drastic as it may seem, it’s easy to understand the why of Craigslist’s decision to avoid the consequences of FOSTA, but the question now is whether other sites frequently used by sex workers will follow suit. 
 
 We’ve reached out to Craigslist founder Craig Newmark for comment and will update if we hear back.
– Everyone who has visited Craigslist over the years to find a mate or gawk at the "Missed Connections," "Casual Encounters," and "Rants and Raves" sections is going to have to find a new gathering ground. CNET reports the online classified-ads site has shuttered its much-frequented personals section after an amendment to the Communications Decency Act got the green light from Congress Wednesday. The Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or FOSTA, legislation strips away protections offered by Section 230 of the CDA, putting websites on the hook for content that promotes prostitution. The intent of the bill is to go after online sex trafficking, which has been prevalent on classified-ads sites like Backpage.com. President Trump still needs to sign the bill to make it official, which he may do before the week is out, per Reuters. "Any tool or service can be misused," Craigslist noted in a short statement. "We can't take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking ... personals offline." The FOSTA bill is also having an impact in other online spots, including Reddit, which nixed its Escorts, Hookers, and SugarDaddy subreddits after the bill passed, per Reason. Gizmodo notes that while the law could help tamp down on sex trafficking, it will also have a "chilling effect" by "actively [hurting] consenting sex workers" and causing portals like Craiglist to lose a significant portion of their sites. Craiglist says it hopes one day to reboot the ads, but in the meantime, "to the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through Craigslist, we wish you every happiness!" (Sometimes Craigslist ads are just used to find burger-grilling dads.)