A History of Sex as a Business 09 | The Digital Turn: Platforms, Algorithms, and OnlyFans

A History of Sex as a Business 09 | The Digital Turn: Platforms, Algorithms, and OnlyFans31 Jul17 min

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<html>What happens when an industry that has been managed through physical geography for five thousand years suddenly loses its geography — when a brothel is a website, a street is an app, and the transaction can happen across continents?This is the question that the digital transformation posed to every institution that had ever tried to regulate, control, benefit from, or protect people in commercial sex — law enforcement, public health systems, anti-trafficking organizations, feminist activists, civil liberties lawyers, and the people in the industry themselves. And the honest answer, which will be familiar to anyone who has watched the internet transform any other industry, is: nobody has figured it out yet.We are now in the present — or close enough to it that the debates are live and the consequences are immediate. Everything we've built in the previous nine episodes — the entire history of how societies have tried to manage the business of sex — is now being run through the solvent of digital technology. Some things are dissolving. Some things are proving remarkably resistant to dissolution. And some entirely new problems are being created that have no historical precedent.<h3>Before FOSTA-SESTA: The Internet's Wild West Period</h3>Before we discuss the legislation that changed everything, it's worth understanding what the landscape looked like before it.From roughly the mid-1990s through 2018, the internet created something genuinely new in the history of commercial sex: the ability for individuals to advertise and screen clients independently, without the need for a third-party organizer. Online classified sites — Craigslist's "adult services" section, Backpage, a range of international equivalent platforms — allowed people working in commercial sex to post advertisements, communicate with potential clients before meeting them, screen clients by requiring advance information or references, and share safety information with each other in online forums and networks.From a safety and harm reduction perspective, this was a significant improvement over the street-level alternative for the people using it effectively. Research consistently found that people working independently through online advertising experienced lower rates of violence than people working on the street. The ability to pre-screen clients, to communicate in advance of meeting, to share warnings about violent or exploitative individuals through peer networks — these were real protections that the digital environment enabled.Trafficking networks also used these platforms. This is not in question. The same technology that enabled independent workers to advertise safely also enabled traffickers to advertise for the people they controlled. Backpage, in particular, became the subject of sustained law enforcement and advocacy attention for its facilitation of trafficking advertisements, ultimately leading to its founders facing federal criminal charges and its seizure in 2018.The policy challenge — and this is genuinely difficult — is that the same platform feature that protects an independent worker also enables a trafficker. The ability to post an anonymous advertisement doesn't know who is posting it. Regulating the platform to reduce trafficking also reduces protection for independent workers. This is a real tradeoff, not a rhetorical one.<h3>FOSTA-SESTA: The Law That Made Things Worse</h3>In April 2018, the United States Congress passed FOSTA-SESTA — the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. The legislation modified Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which had historically provided broad immunity to online platforms for the content their users posted, to remove that immunity for cases involving sex trafficking. It made platforms legally liable for content that "facilitated sex trafficking