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Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

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Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#181

Post by pgeorgi »

halflings wrote: post #135
sersi wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 traffickin…

> 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."

Careful, such numbers typically come from criminal statistics. Those count reported cases, not convictions, and (by design) can't contain unreported cases.

Alternative reading: by legalizing prostitution, an entire economical sector (there's €€€ involved) is now open to routine law enforcement controls which increased visibility in the trafficking part of it, since sex workers can be more forthcoming with information as they don't need to hide their own business. The ramp up into 2003 could indicate that law enforcement took a while to properly take advantage of that.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#182

Post by cookiecaper »

josephagoss wrote: post #133
abritinthebay wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The internet is pretty much as decentralized as things get while remaining accessible and available to the general public. There is room for some tweaking here, but even if a parallel "NewNet" rose up, it'd come to suffer the same set of problems.

"Decentralized", "peer-to-peer", and "distributed" are not just magic words that make the whole world better. Consider BitTorrent as a case study. Probably the largest "decentralized" tech success story in internet history ... and it depends on a central core of pre-baked trackers, safe DHT bootstrap nodes, and search engines to be usable.

The internet is plenty decentralized technically. The problems we have are that big companies want to get paid and they want to make sure little companies won't threaten their ability to do that. So we get shameful abuses like the CFAA and the RAM Copy Doctrine.

The further problem is that governments and other establishment power brokers want to control narratives. They've been able to do this pretty well for the last 50 years, as your average Joe on the street couldn't just start broadcasting video and competing with the television broadcasts from FCC-approved speakers. But with YouTube, the average Joe can. That is a huge threat to the power brokers.

People are working overtime to make others feel that so much as grunting a sound that sounds similar to the word "Tor" means you're an evil traitor. I don't think that the young, who know little besides the status quo by definition since they haven't experienced much yet..

To save the internet, get out there and teach people about the value of an open forum and free dialogue, even if it makes them uncomfortable. Work hard to counter-influence the negative and evil influences. Abolish the CFAA, revamp Copyright to something sane.

Just whatever you do, don't spend 10 years reinventing the internet just to make us go through this show again in 15 years when Netv2 gets the same treatment.

Pre-edit: literally falling asleep while typing this, excuse any errors etc. Going to sleep now. Goodnight.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#183

Post by mirko22 »

adventured wrote: post #150
abritinthebay wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Decentralized is the ultimate tech fantasy. It never happens at mass consumer scale. There isn't a single example of that in the last 25 years of the Internet. The reason it never happens, is because most people with a heavy tech-tilt don't understand normal users at all. They fail to understand that they're an extreme minority in terms of product behavior. You can dig back a decade or whatever on HN, it's a non-stop…

botcoin did happen though.

So it is not that unimaginable

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#184

Post by djf1 »

kinghajj wrote: post #144

The congress.gov link states "Section 230 limits the legal liability of interactive computer service providers or users for content they publish that was created by others." Wouldn't this exempt Craigslist from the act, since all posts are created entirely by their users?

The bill imposes criminal penalties -- Section 230 does not shield platforms from liability under federal criminal law.

The bill also carves out exceptions weakening Section 230 protections.

[1] https://www.eff.org//deeplinks/2018/03/how-congress-censored... [2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1865

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#185

Post by wwweston »

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…

> we should be burning down craigslist entirely

So, let's all be honest about something about CL personals that means these folks might not be wrong (even if, as is likely, the actual legislation is terrible policy).

I've actually used CL personals to get some dates, and there are things I liked about it (primarily text-focused medium can be nice, are there any more of those?), and I'm single, so having it go away is personally a bit disappointing.

But it is obvious to anyone who has used them that CL personals were utterly overwhelmed by people who are selling the other kind of Saas (Sex as a Service). This was a point of frustration for anyone looking for a connection (however unconventional) rather than a transaction. But worse, no matter your views on whether people should be able to voluntarily do sex work, with the majority of the w4m traffic being prostitution, it seems all but inevitable that there was some coerced trafficking regularly associated with it.

This was at least nominally against the terms of the personals section, but nobody selling cared at all (and in some cases, were cheeky enough to flag legit not-selling-anything ads), and if craigslist mounted any serious effort to fix the problem, it wasn't one I noticed.

This legislation sounds like thoughtless single-dimension policy, but I'm not sure it burns down CL entirely on its own so much as it does forces CL to reckon with the fact that its personals section was already set on fire by pushers much earlier and that they didn't care enough to do anything about it.

(Which is fine, they obviously never derived revenue from it and are under no obligation to divert resources there or let that drag down the rest of their successful classifieds offering.)

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#187

Post by smt88 »

thrden wrote: post #53
jerezzprime wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But one is through mandated censorship, the other is voluntary. YouTube decided to stop serving certain content to better serve it's customers, that is it's perogative as a business. Nothing is preventing a competitor from hosting such content.

its hard to see that its anything but censorship when these platforms hold a pure monopoly on the space. If Gutenberg prevented anything displeasing to him from being printed, we would rightly see that as censorship. Further, censorship takes place in many ways only a small number are the result of state actors. In Mexico reporting on the cartels will cause them to target and perhaps kill you.

If you want to argue that a good defense against censorship is to prevent a single entity from having too much power, I agree.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#188

Post by IanCal »

martimarkov wrote: post #177
halflings wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 traffickin…

This does not take into account the increased number of ppl. As an extreme example to illustrate my point if it has been 2 million ppl living in Germany in 2001 and 10 million in 2002 in the age range they are looking at then it’s actually better. It should be based on % rather than just numbers. Also it doesn’t look at the trend. If it the trend was to increase by 30% but dropped afterwards to 20% then again it has…

Those numbers are all available. Germany's population is very stable and 2001-2003 changed by 0.2% based on world bank figures.

> If it the trend was to increase by 30% but dropped afterwards to 20% then again it has worked in some way.

Only of you have some real reason to expect the number to increase by 30%. Just looking at a trend is not enough.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#189

Post by Arnt »

zeth___ wrote: post #175
draugadrotten wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems some of the men living in Sweden are among the planets worst sexual predators, to word it carefully. Sweden is pushing new legislation that will increase the number of rapes even more. It will be a law of consent and will shift the burden of proof from the victim to the rapist. Unless the rapist can prove consent, he will be sentenced for rape by negligence. Under the new law, having sex with a traffic victi…

I'm curious, is there any Norwegian commentary on Sweden in English?

Approximately: No.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#190

Post by dredmorbius »

ryandrake wrote: post #81
rpearl wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal of the legislation in question is specifically to help individuals that have been coerced, against their free will, into sex trafficking. It is not about voluntary interactions between consenting adults. The legislation might be misguided or ineffective--I haven't really looked into it--but it very definitely isn't about restricting the free choice of individuals.

Laws should be evaluated by their effect, not the intentions behind them.

I'd agree the former may carry more weight, but the latter remains consequential.
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