How much should Facebook be responsible for sex trafficking?
So, there’s a bill, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act of 2017, that’s generally about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that protects internet companies from liability from user-generated content.
There used to be an adult section of a website called BackPage that had classifieds that facilitated sex-related transactions and potentially contributed to sex trafficking as well.
I definitely see the concerns of both sides of this debate. Internet companies would feel like policing their users would be too burdensome and would generally restrict the freedom of information across the internet.
But, the aims of a bill like this are a bit more narrow, in regards to sex & child trafficking and exploitation. I think the kind of law that the public should desire is for some legal recourse, if the website does not give a good-faith effort to get rid of content that could lead to trafficking and exploitation. This would probably include something like the ability for users to flag content, cause it would be impractical to monitor all content.
The main aspect of our internet that we need to protect though is that censorship isn’t generally automatic. If such a law drew extremely harsh punishments and little leeway for websites, then it could make it so that it’s not worth it for websites like Facebook to allow any kind of lewd content, even if its more or less innocuous.
There’s definitely a need for policing, but I hope that we can allow for a bit more self-policing than a top-down approach. We want to keep our internet as free as we can.
