Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

See, this is the sort of contradiction inherent in the "positive rights" worldview. Positive "rights" are always in conflict, which is very convenient when you're looking for an excuse to pick and choose which rights other people have and not very useful as a framework for a stable society.

Negative rights, on the other hand, never conflict; there is really only one fundamental right, which is self-ownership: the exclusive right to decide how yourself, and by extension your property, will be used. The only actions are out of bounds are those which would infringe on others' rights of self-ownership. From this you can infer other rights like the freedom of speech, freedom of association, the right to privacy, and the right not to be enslaved against your will, and together with others you can cooperate to provide each other with things which, while desirable, are not rights, such as food, shelter, defense, gainful employment, and healthcare.

> Meanwhile, large numbers of people are currently being forced into slavery - 20.9 million, by one estimate.

And I agree that this is wrong. The key difference is that these people were forced into slavery—it wasn't their choice. Obviously it's not a very attractive option under any circumstance, but one can easily imagine situations where the alternative might be worse. If you need what someone else can provide, and have nothing else of sufficient value to barter for it, giving up your freedom might be a price you'd be willing to pay. No one else should presume to take that option from you.

> Restricting the rights of some small number of hypothetical would-be slaves in order to protect the rights of large numbers of real people in forced bondage is clearly a worthwhile tradeoff.

Putting aside the fact that it isn't your right which you're trading away, and consequently that this isn't your decision to make, it doesn't actually protect anyone. A person who was coerced into such a situation could simply say so, forcing the other party to prove that they had agreed to it in exchange for some form of consideration.

If we feel someone is not operating under their own agency we will disable their account.

Will this fix everything? No. But it is an improvement over existing systems. And we are open to suggestions. If there is broad user/community consensus on how we should handle some scenarios then we can implement those ideas. The critical part of being extrajurisdictional is that we are not compelled to take a specific approach therefore allowing us ethics over legality.

Legalization has always meant "making it legal", which in most societies means "removing laws that make it illegal" (though it might mean something different in North Korea, if you see what I mean).

Decriminalization is a wishy-washier idea, that includes lightening or removing criminal penalties, while potentially keeping other penalities. For example, changing indictable offenses to non-indictable offenses (in the U.S. that'd be roughly equivalent to changing felonies to misdemeanours).

Prostitution should be legalized, not merely have the penalties lightened. And that alone is not sufficient; legal regimes that legalize the actual act of sex-for-money, but still force most prostitutes to hide from the cops (I'm looking at Canadian law, here) are still inadequate, because such regimes still victimize sex workers (consensual or otherwise). It's simply a human rights issue.

I also think it's clear that some degree of regulation is desirable, but I think that reasonable people can disagree on this.