As Section 230 Repeal Looms, Sex Workers Warn of Potential Harms

LOS ANGELES—Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act — the law often deemed “the First Amendment of the Internet” — is facing possible repeal after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell linked it in a single bill to $2,000 COVID economic relief payments for many Americans.  Donald Trump has been demanding the law’s elimination for months, and even President-Elect Joe Biden has said he supports repealing the law.  And on Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer countered McConnell, saying he would allow a vote on Section 230 repeal if it were separated from the $2,000 payment legislation.  The 24-year-old law appears as if it may be on its last legs. But what happens if Section 230 actually does come off the books? For sex workers, repeal could be a disaster — according to what some told the Washington political site The Hill, in report published December 30. The sex workers told the site that even under the two-year-old FOSTA/SESTA law, which rolled back some of Section 230’s legal liability protections in cases of vaguely defined “sex trafficking,” they have seen their business damaged as major social media sites deplatform them, even though they do not post sexually explicit content. Full repeal of the 1996 law, they fear, would lead to effectively banning sex workers from the internet — followed by all forms of sexual content. “While sex workers are the ones very publicly losing these spaces, what's not far behind is sexual education [and] different activist groups,” sex worker rights activist Kate D’Adamo told The Hill. As AVN reported earlier in 2020, a study found that in the two years since passage of FOSTA/SESTA, one-third of sex workers had faced increased violence in their work, and three out of four reported higher level of economic insecurity. “It would be irresponsible and reckless for lawmakers to ignore the lessons learned from SESTA/FOSTA and rush into more changes to Section 230 before really coming to terms with just how much harm was done the last time they changed it,” Evan Greer, deputy director of the digital civil liberties group Fight for the Future, told The Hill. Photo by Gerd Altmann / Pixabay