Sex Traffickers Shutting Down Websites After Congress Passes Law

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 30 (C-Fam) Many websites are shutting down or curtailing their sex trade just weeks after the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives passed similar anti-human trafficking bills that would allow victims to sue the websites on which they were bought and sold.

“Illegal commercial sex advertising platforms and forums have been blowing up, and johns have been calling our office and messaging us left and right, indicating that Congress has taken a powerful first step,” Congressman Ann Wagner’s staff told an anti-trafficking coalition on Thursday. “FOSTA-SESTA is disrupting demand for sex trafficking and shaking up the illegal commercial sex industry.”

Rachel Wagley, Wagner’s legislative director, told the coalition that many websites traffickers use to buy and sell victims for sex have shut down or curtailed business in just the last week.

Cityvibe shut down completely, the Erotic Review, the “Yelp of the sex trade” where men rate their experiences with trafficking victims, shut down advertisement boards in the United States, NightShift shut down to review policies, VerifyHim shut down its “newsreel,” Craigslist personals section was shut down, Reddit’s prostitution-related “subreddits” were marked private and the site instituted new policies banning the sale of sex acts and drugs, Google reportedly deleted its publicly shared commercial sex-related advertising, WordPress.com reportedly removed its commercial sex-related advertising sites, Paypal reportedly disabled advertised accounts for commercial sex-related payment, Rubmaps, Erotic Monkey, and USA Sex Guide had extended maintenance periods over the weekend, suggesting upcoming changes due to the new law, Microsoft is issuing new Terms of Service effective May 1st covering all of its platforms, including Skype and Xbox, to urge users not to use the services to share pornography or criminal activity.

The sex trafficking sites Cityxguide and Backpage were reportedly seeing a surge in use by sex traffickers as the other sites shut down.

Backpage was the subject of the Netflix movie I am Jane Doe by director Mary Mazzio and producer Alec Sokolow which demonstrated that judges and state attorneys-general were powerless to prosecute traffickers because of a clause in a 1996 law called the Communications Decency Act. Tech giants like Google fought Wagner’s bill, claiming the 1996 law gave them immunity, before finally succumbing to pressure last November.

The two new bills amend the 1996 law. FOSTA passed the House on February 27^th. The Senate passed SESTA last week.

“FOSTA-SESTA set out to establish a meaningful criminal deterrent, so that fewer businesses would ever enter the online sex trafficking industry,” Wagley said. As a result, sex traffickers have been calling Wagner’s office to demand other venues open up.

“Criminal sex buyers have been arguing that they should have the right to buy sex,” Wagley said. “There are 3,142 counties/county equivalents in the U.S., and prostitution is legal in only two of them. And even in those two counties, the promotion of prostitution—at which FOSTA aims—is illegal.”

Congressman Wagner addressed the UN Economic and Social Council high level panel on trafficking last year asking Americans to urge their representatives to support FOSTA, which she co-sponsored. Wagner told UN diplomats that the “Internet has become a red-light district,” and that it was time to shut down online trafficking. The event was co-sponsored by the Group of the Friends of the Family, and Civil Society for the Family, which is co-chaired by C-Fam, publisher of the Friday Fax.

I oppose the LGBT activism that has grown under Obama but I think even here you will be hard pressed to find someone that will admit they want the government to actively crack down on someone who is privately gay. So likewise if we’re not going to have Caesar persecute people for sleeping around as a homosexual Caesar shouldn’t persecute them for sleeping around as a heterosexual either. Your private sex life is between you and God and certain family. Marriage is the ideal of course but you have to admit the institution has been transformed from a sacred partnership to a risk fraught endeavor with very little (legal) upside if you are a man. Everybody here can probably tick off countless stories of guys they know who have lost everything or conversely are trapped with no outlet because society celebrates their wives denying them physical or any intimacy for the rest of their lives. So like it or not for this and other reasons the explosion of stuff like Backpage should come as little surprise.

Trump signed this thing into law yesterday. Was hoping he would veto it.
This trampling of our first amendment rights should not be applauded by any conservatives IMO. Many websites are shutting themselves down for fear of criminal charges and I wager this will also extend to dating websites next because prostitutes could get on them as well . I don’t believe this has anything to do with the so called “sex trafficking” but just part of a takeover of the internet and the continued war against men.

Feminists are FURIOUS these websites are shutting down! They’re complaining that it was a safe way for “sex workers” (thanks a LOT, nwo), to hook up with customers. As if prostitution were a chosen profession, as opposed to the forced occupation it is for most prostitutes. And you’re justifying it all so “pathetic lonely heterosexual men from being able get the only nookie that they can”? That line of thought itself, is pathetic.

And you’ve watched too many movies glorifying a “profession” that, in reality, is rife with every kind of violence and degradation. Sure there are women who enjoy having sex with multiple partners. (Those types usually have deep psychological problems). But prostitution is not like in the movies; Pimps are involved, unless it’s a small town, one woman show. And even in those situations, women get abused. You’re sick.

I used to volunteer at a Rescue Mission that got women off the streets. Believe me, there was not a glamour girl among them. They were wretched, pathetic, 20 to 30 something women, who, for the most part, had been living on, and working the streets, doing $5 blow jobs to pay for drugs and a little food. Many were diseased, with rotting or missing teeth. Most had grown up in abusive homes. No normal man would have wanted to touch them. I’m sure somewhere in LaLa land, there are gorgeous Bond girls who are doing it for the kicks and big money, but the vast majority are nothing of the kind.

I don’t know where you’ve been but feminism, at least the faction that is currently in power is strongly anti sex, at least heterosexual sex, and so is against prostitution by extension. See examples

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/29/opinion/buying-sex-should-not-be-legal.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/11/prostitution-legalised-sex-trade-pimps-women

So much so, that at this point they’ve replaced the old family values groups as the main driving force against the sex trade. You can tell because the idea that all prostitution = sex trafficking has been formulated in the UN and is replacing moral decay as the main stated reason to go after it. Increasingly johns are targeted for arrest while the hookers are left alone where it used to be the opposite. Sweden...that bastion of conservatism has pretty much recently outlawed prostitution for feminist reasons. So it is an inescapable conclusion that whatever your own reasons for being antiprostitution this crusade you’re a part of is increasingly a militant feminist one driven by hatred of male sexuality.

But regardless of which side pushed it, we as a society have adapted the mantra that private sex lives are not the government’s business. And if theres anything worse than immorality. Its immorality and hypocrisy. Don’t like it? Maybe you should expend 1/10th the effort winning the larger argument rather than dying on the hill of saving poor oppressed women (I assure you women as a group, even and especially sex workers aren’t quite the helpless dainty damsels with hidden hearts of gold you seem to think) from raking in thousands of dollars from desperate heterosexual men in the name of morality while rolling over and giving up for government endorsed SSM, sex change surgeries for children and everything else.

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