Fact Check: Has FOSTA Stopped 90% Of Online Sex Ads, As GOP Says?

WASHINGTON, D.C.—A new, slickly produced video posted on YouTube this week by Republican members of the United States House Judiciary Committee makes a number of claims about the FOSTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) law that was passed by the House and Senate earlier this year and signed into law by Donald Trump in April. But a fact check by the technology news site TechDirt shows that many of the key claims made by Republicans in the video are misleading or simply false. The Republican FOSTA video may be viewed at this link. In the video, one of the bill’s original sponsors, Missouri GOP Rep. Ann Wagner, claims that FOSTA has “shut down nearly 90 percent of the online sex trafficking business and ads." But the source of that claim appears impossible to track down. In TechDirt’s investigation, the closest thing to evidence for Wagner’s claim that turned up was a Reuters article which estimated that 90 percent of the income generated by the now-shuttered site Backpage.com was generated by sex-related advertising. On Wednesday, according to an article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, a communications director for Wagner said that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) provided statistics showing an 87 percent drop in online sex trafficking in April, after the law was enacted. DARPA operates a technology known as MEMEX designed to mine data from the “Deep Web,” regarding online sex trafficking advertisements and advertisers. MEMEX stats from April, however, are not yet publicly available. However, even a large drop in the placement of online sex trafficking ads is not synonymous with an overall drop in illegal sex trafficking activity. As AVN.com has reported, law enforcement agencies have already complained that the shutdown of Backpage has left them “running blind” when it comes to pursuing sex traffickers, who can be much more easily monitored and caught when they place public advertisements for their illegal services on the global internet. Also, any drop in online trafficking ads placed in April is likely largely attributable to the federal shutdown of Backpage, which took place in early April, before the FOSTA law took effect. TechDirt calls Wagner’s “90 percent” claim “utter and complete nonsense.” The video also contains statements by California Republican Rep. Mimi Walters, who claims in the video, "This legislation will now make it illegal to sell people online and give those survivors the opportunity to seek justice. ...Websites that knowingly facilitate sex trafficking are no longer immune from legal action." But as TechDirt points out, both claims are highly misleading—because “to sell people online” has always been highly illegal, and sites that “knowingly facilitate sex trafficking” were already committing federal crimes under statutes that significantly pre-date FOSTA. Photo via US House Judiciary GOP Screen Capture