What FOSTA/SESTA Means For Sex Education

We have entered a dark age of internet free speech.  Online communities that thrive based on the principle of free speech have been threatened by the passing of the FOSTA/SESTA laws.  These laws were passed back in March, and already we have begun to see the effects of these laws reverberating through popular social media platforms and other sites where communities got together to talk about sex.  Shortly after the passing of FOSTA/SESTA, Craigslist removed it's entire personals section, leaving only a note of well wishing towards the couples that met on their platform in its place.  Most recently, Facebook quietly passed a policy change that effectively bans even vague conversation about sex.  This is a step backward for communities that use public spaces to talk about sexual topics, spread online sex education, and encourage a positive view of human sexuality.

The FOSTA/SESTA laws were originally intended as a way to crack down on sex trafficking by policing websites that may enable sex trafficking and by enabling those who survived sex trafficking to sue the sites that enabled their victimization.  These laws, however, don't really crack down on the issue of sex trafficking.  In fact, they only further endanger those in the consensual sex trade.  Sex workers who relied on the internet as a safer way to practice their profession are now being cast back out to the streets, where health resources are much more scarce, where they are not able to control the situations in which they meet up, and where they are not able to vet their clients prior to interacting with them.  The internet had made all of these aspects of consensual sex work much safer, but now, the websites that provided these resources are being targeted, and in many cases are being forced to shut down.  This does not make anyone safer; not those affected by sex trafficking, and certainly not sex workers.

On the other side, online sex educators are also being affected by this new legislation.  As websites are now being held liable for the content shared on their platforms, social media sites are starting to  enforce tighter restrictions on adult content, out of fear of potential lawsuits, as evidenced by Facebook's change of policy.  Social media is how many online sex educators, like myself, find audiences and spread knowledge about sexuality.  The current instability of social media is both making it much more difficult to share information and to access information in regards to sexuality.  Resources regarding sexuality are slowly disappearing from the internet.  This is a huge step backwards for resources that rely on the internet for the passage of sex education and for spreading a positive outlook on human sexuality.

While the FOSTA/SESTA laws were originally written as laws that were going to help crack down on sex trafficking, they have only endangered the lives of sex workers, and made the lives of those that share sexual health information and education online more difficult.  Since the FOSTA/SESTA laws were passed in the spring of 2018, popular social media platforms, as well as other sites that used to allow communities to congregate in order to talk about sexual topics have begun to ban discussions that even hint to being of sexual nature.  Information regarding sexual health and education are becoming much more difficult to access, and those that produce such content are left in a limbo.  FOSTA/SESTA does not protect against sex trafficking; it just victimizes those that recognize sex as a normal part of life.  This is truly the dark age of internet free speech.

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