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Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

craigslist.org

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Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#131

Post by anigbrowl »

SeeDave wrote: post #117
DannyBee wrote: post #44

This is not surprising, but sad. Years ago, i was dragged (i was the only engineer in the local office) into a whitehouse (or maybe it was state department, i can't remember) sponsored working group on online sex trafficking. The non-profits dedicated to fighting this, while seemingly well-intentioned, were completely and totally unwilling to see any other perspective or try to find shared ground. It was scorched ear…

In defense of the "scorched earth approach or nothing" folks: from my perspective... it's a completely and totally human response to faceless, blameless, unapproachable (from their perspective) perpetrators and facilitators of systematic abuse and exploitation of innocent and vulnerable people. If you've ever felt frustrated at an IVR system for routine tasks such as banking, restaurant reservations, canceling a gym…

Great, like the trade is going to suddenly end. All they've achieved is 'out of sight, out of mind.' I'm quite annoyed about this, both because it affects numerous friends of mine who are sex workers and are now scrambling to find alternatives to working on the street, where they're far less safe, and on a more pedestrian level because I met my wife on a Craigslist date years ago.

Life is too short to make excuses for stupid behavior.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#132

Post by adventured »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #119
downandout wrote: post #100

I just read the text of this bill. The way it reads, the entire online dating industry should be closing its doors...tonight. CEOs of these companies face penalties of up to 25 years in prison. Why were there not massive protests over this? I had never heard of this bill before today.

>I had never heard of this bill before today. Who was going to tell you about it? Time, NYT, CNN, WaPo? Nope.

Oh they told you about it, they were favorable to it:

[Feb 14 2018] "Don’t Let Criminals Hide Their Data Overseas"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/14/opinion/data-overseas-leg...

[Mar 5 2018] "A promising solution is the Cloud (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data) Act, introduced by a bipartisan coalition in the Senate last month."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-global-game-of-wha...

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#133

Post by josephagoss »

abritinthebay wrote: post #83
flamedoge wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

decentralized network can't come soon enough. I foresee YC, Reddit, Youtube, FB, and alike get supplanted by technology that has no ownership.

Every single decentralized version of those sites has died a death due to a) being pretty awful b) attracting completely terrible users as it’s base c) terrible user experience. What do you see changing?

> What do you see changing?

As the internet becomes a resource that is completely boring and out of touch to 15-40 year olds people will flock to a less restrictive system. As eyeballs move over people will invest time and effort into making those systems usable.

This happened with the internet and can happen again with decentralized systems.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#134

Post by anigbrowl »

downandout wrote: post #100

I just read the text of this bill. The way it reads, the entire online dating industry should be closing its doors...tonight. CEOs of these companies face penalties of up to 25 years in prison. Why were there not massive protests over this? I had never heard of this bill before today.

Nobody listens to sex workers.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#135

Post by halflings »

sersi wrote: post #115
AFNobody wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the odd thing is they focus on that instead of legalization and helping people report abuses. Legalization is far from perfect but abuse in Nevada brothels is much lower than as street walkers. It seems it's more a puritanical belief system than a genuine desire to render aid.

This is key. I strongly believe that legalization is the only answer to the problem. Driving things underground is only going to cause more issues and abuse to the sex workers. It's kind of ironic when in France, for example, a law gets passed criminalizing the customers while the sex workers go in the street to protest that law saying that it will create more abuse (and one year after, they were right). Trying to st…

> This is key. I strongly believe that legalization is the only answer to the problem.

Why do we have to "believe"? There are many examples to learn from, to see what works and what doesn't.

For example, this study [0].

"This paper suggests it’s the latter. Using trafficking data from 150 countries, the authors find that "countries where prostitution is legal experience a larger reported incidence of human trafficking inflows."

As an example, they discuss Germany, which legalized prostitution in 2002. The minimum estimate of sex trafficking victims in the country increased from 9,870 in 2001 to 11,080 in 2002, to 12,350 in 2003."

As an anecdotal example: Sweden has one of the harshest stances on prostitution, and it's working just fine [1].

[0] http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/06/17/study-legalizing-prostit... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Sweden#Researc...

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#136

Post by thaumasiotes »

deelowe wrote: post #102
jacobush wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How... does that follow? To reduce slavery, legalize prostitution? There must be some steps in between I am missing.

You're missing the fact that virtually no one wants to have sex with slaves. If a legal, regulated industry existed for people to get what they wanted, the illegal market would go away. AFAIK Nevada doesn't have a huge issue with sex slaves.

True, Nevada doesn't, but neither do any of the other 49 states.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#137

Post by ShorsHammer »

Method-X wrote: post #42

I'd encourage folks here to check out ZeroNet ( https://zeronet.io ). It's a cool little project I've been following for the past couple years that's attempting to decentralize the Internet. It's not very popular but surprisingly it has 11.5k stars on GitHub ( https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet ).

Would be great if their site was at least readable without js.

There's a few groups working in this field and none seem to have a decent offering, the SAFE network has been at it for over a decade with limited success.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#138

Post by secabeen »

thrden wrote: post #101
bfuller wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This week: Reddit bans Cigar, beer and Alchohol trading subreddits, toy bb gun sales, and gun related coupon clippers Reddit also banned subs that were used for sourcing marijuana, designer drugs, xanax.. direct deals onsite. i'm not defending the drug war, but when you only include the subs you wrote the move looks really silly. if people were only doing giveaways and trading toy bb guns, those subs would still be…

While I'm not saying they should have banned one, and not the other it would have been entirely possible to say ban an opioids sales subreddit, but not the bb-gun subreddit. It would have been trivial to simply make the rule such that only illicit sales/transactions were banned. They decided to create these rules and if the rules make reddit look foolish than maybe thats because they are.

Take the challenge from their side. If they leave the bb-gun sub active, how do they ensure that people aren't going to the bb-gun sub, and trading real guns there? They'd have to have humans police each post, or develop ML algorithms that can reliably identify when someone is hiding a real gun sale as a bb-gun sale. The former doesn't scale reliably (sure, the mods of the bb-gun sub could probably do it voluntarily, but I doubt reddit wants to bet the corporation on their continuing to do so), and the latter doesn't yet exist.

Banning both subs definitely stops the illegal transactions at the (relatively minor) cost of not letting people trade bb-guns on their site.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#139

Post by AnthonyMouse »

pmoriarty wrote: post #123
crispyporkbites wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this could be a boon to bars and other, more traditional ways of meeting people That is insanely optimistic, randomly meeting people in a bar is significantly more dangerous than a prearranged meet, and the first thing most people do after contact online is go to a bar or public meeting point anyway. What is a “traditional” way of meeting someone? Through your parents?

"What is a "traditional" way of meeting someone? Through your parents?" Through friends, hobbies, volunteering, bars, clubs, parties, and various other forms of group entertainment like concerts, plays, etc. Pretty much anywhere people meet face to face counts.

> Pretty much anywhere people meet face to face counts.

But that's the problem, right? People used to do their banking in a bank, get their books in a library, their toothpaste in a drug store, their music in a record store, etc.

Now they do all of that online without leaving home. So they need to meet people online too.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#140

Post by adventured »

pishpash wrote: post #27
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #21

This is completely bizarre, we can't go down this route with the internet. It is madness.

The internet is not "the internet" any more. It's a corporate owned, tapped and monitored, centralized data warehouse. Another decentralized network needs to be formed separately adhering to the original ideals of the internet. In fact this turnover may need to happen periodically. Jump ship from the current so-called internet.

It is in fact governments doing most of the malicious things to the Internet. China firewall, Russia, US espionage & data abuse, Turkey or Brazil censorship, British hate crimes on YouTube or Twitter, anti-porn legislation in Britain or Australia, and so on.

I can relatively easily block Facebook if I want to, on every site I visit. Try figuring out a way to eliminate all of the NSA's data hoovering of you. Tell the TSA you're not giving them your device, etc.

The Cloud Act is government legislation, that was not initially promoted by private industry. Private industry gave in over time because the alternative the government would pursue instead is far scarier. It was a compromise to keep the politicians in DC from doing something even more draconian. I don't agree with that compromise, however, just try saying no to them (see the Yahoo fines).

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