Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta, GA, is the hub of sex trafficking in the United States.
FBI reports that Atlanta is the center for the sex-trafficking of adolescence and around 200 to 300 youth are prostituted in Atlanta a month. (At world’s busiest airport, sex trafficking abounds)
With an average of 20 to 30 youths prostituted a day in Atlanta, some members of Congress want to address sex trafficking by censoring the Internet.
Elliot Harmon in Internet Censorship Bill Would Spell Disaster for Speech and Innovation, puts it this way:
There’s a new bill in Congress that would threaten your right to free expression online. If that weren’t enough, it could also put small Internet businesses in danger of catastrophic litigation.
Don’t let its name fool you: the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA, S. 1693) wouldn’t help punish sex traffickers. What the bill would do (PDF) is expose any person, organization, platform, or business that hosts third-party content on the Internet to the risk of overwhelming criminal and civil liability if sex traffickers use their services. For small Internet businesses, that could be fatal: with the possibility of devastating litigation costs hanging over their heads, we think that many entrepreneurs and investors will be deterred from building new businesses online.
Make no mistake: sex trafficking is a real, horrible problem. This bill is not the way to address it. Lawmakers should think twice before passing a disastrous law and endangering free expression and innovation.
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Rather than focusing on a known location for sex trafficking, Congress is putting “…small Internet businesses…” in harm’s way.
The large content providers, Facebook, Google, Twitter, already have the financial and technical resources to meet the demands of SESTA. So in a very real sense, SESTA isn’t anti-sex trafficking but rather anti-small Internet business, in addition to being a threat to free speech.
Call your member of the U.S. House or the U.S. Senate, asking for their vote against Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA, S. 1693).
SESTA:
- Endangers free speech
- Favors large content providers over small ones
- Ignores known sex trafficking locations
- Is a non-solution to a known problem
Sex trafficking is a serious problem that needs a workable solution. Not an ineffectual, cosmetic non-solution that favors large content providers over smaller ones.