The bill, identified as SESTA, is sponsored by Senator Rob Portman of Ohio and will change Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934. Section 230 currently defends the rights of online users to block and screen offensive content on their own preferably than via government organization.
The bill was proposed on August 1 after Portman chaired a panel that conducted a two-year research of ad-hosting site Backpage for sex trafficking violations. At the end of the research, the panel published this story that stopped that Backpage had not only released up child sex trafficking and forced sex trafficking to occur on its site, it had capped up data in the process.
Thus far, SESTA has gained bipartisan support, with leading senators like John McCain and Richard Blumenthal as cosponsors. All 50 state lawyer generals signed a letter defending the bill, according to facts given Tuesday. The trial also featured testimony from the Yvonne Ambrose, whose child lost her life in a sex trafficking-related murder.
So, why oppose a bill intended to curtail sex trafficking? For beginners, many of the advertisements on Backpage are above the age of permission and offering their duties voluntarily. Because while the site can be a road for trafficking, it can be a boon for those who are voluntarily joining in sex work by taking them off the streets, in control of their own advertising, and out of the hands of pimps.
An internet-famous instance of this practice can be found in Zola’s legendary Twitter story.
And opponents of the bill say that sex trafficking is not the single thing the bill would diminish.
“SESTA is just like SOPA/PIPA. It won’t achieve what the sponsors want it to, but it will crush the Internet,” argued Fight for the Future, a non-profit digital rights group.
On StopSESTA, a hub set up by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, another digital rights organization, several internet activists voiced interests about how the implementation of SESTA could alter the social media landscape or point to further censorship.
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