WASHINGTON – Even though the legislation has yet to be signed into law, the “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act” (SESTA) is already having a chilling effect on internet-based speech.
As has been reported far and wide, Craigslist shuttered its personal ads section soon after the Senate finished counting the 97 votes in favor of the measure, while Reddit banned a handful of sex-related subreddits, including Escorts, Male Escorts, Hookers, and SugarDaddy.
As many critics of the legislation warned as the bill was being debated in the House and Senate, SESTA is already having the effect of reducing the outlets and platforms available to sex workers to safely connect with and vet potential clientele – but it’s not a change for which sex workers are sitting still, as several recent developments underline.
As reported by Erika Chan for YNOTCam, a new sex worker-dedicated social network, Switter.at has emerged as an adult-friendly alternative to Twitter and other social networks, in anticipation of such mainstream platforms responding to SESTA by suspending accounts which “promote” sex work.
“Following the passing of SESTA/FOSTA and the ever-increasing number of shadow-bans issued against adult content creators and sex workers, the team at AssemblyFour decided to setup a Mastodon instance for sex workers,” explained Mistress Emelia, a full stack software developer and founder of Unobvious Technology who contributes code for Mastodon. “The thing that makes Switter unique is that we’re doing our best to not be affected by SESTA/FOSTA by being outside of U.S. government control. We locate everything in sex work-friendly countries: Austria for our domain name and presently Australia for our hosting (though we’re trying to move to Switzerland).”
In a similar vein, sex worker Melissa Mariposa recently announced the launch of Red Umbrella Hosting, which Mariposa describes as a “judgement-free alternative to web hosting.”
Welcome to Red Umbrella Hosting. The aim is to offer anonymous and affordable offshore hosting to anyone in the adult industry.
Please visit the website for more informationhttps://t.co/pjdV7VZbeW
And feel free to reach out if you have any questions. pic.twitter.com/8xilEjQ9Hr
— Red Umbrella Hosting and Design (@RedUmbrellaHOST) March 28, 2018
“I decided to set up Red Umbrella Hosting because I am sick of the very people who utilize our services trying to illegalize our existence,” Mariposa said in an interview with the Daily Dot. “I wanted workers to have a place to turn where they could feel safe. They can secure hosting without having to tie this life to their real identity.”
On a different front, other sex workers appear to be preparing to take aim at some of the very people to whom Mariposa refers when she references “people who utilize our services trying to illegalize our existence.” Reports have surfaced concerning an “open google doc going around the sex worker/ally community to indicate (anonymously) members of congress who have procured the services of a sex worker.”
https://twitter.com/astridstoneNYC/status/978485490625245184
While it’s unclear who started the doc, or how many names have been recorded by its collective authors, to me its very existence recalls a past campaign on the part of the part of a sex industry figure who grew frustrated with another episode of Congressional hypocrisy: Larry Flynt’s late 90’s campaign offering $1 million to anyone who could prove they’d had “an adulterous sexual encounter with a current member of the United States Congress or a high-ranking government official.”
Whether the document currently being assembled by sex workers will have an impact similar to Flynt’s campaign (among other things, fear of being outed for his extramarital affairs prompted then-incoming House Speaker Robert Livingston to resign abruptly) remains to be seen, but the very existence of the document, paired with the launch of Switter and Red Umbrella broadly suggest sex workers are not about to go gently into that good night – and rightly so, because as Mariposa notes, the issues here can’t get any more serious or profound from the perspective of sex workers.
“If sex workers lose their storefront and safety tools, two things are going to happen,” Mariposa said. “Number one, the predators will come out to play. Number two, prostitution is going to be pushed right back on the street and in hotel bars by women who will no longer want to see internet clientele and would rather take the risks freelancing. This will create more victims than it helps.”
