Sex workers are canaries in the free speech coal mine

You may not have noticed, or you may be pretending you didn't notice, but Congress last week voted to reverse decades of legal protection for free speech online, all in the name of targeting sex workers. These type of things always start off targeting the voiceless - people whose warnings of what's to come are rarely heard. But they never end there. The new bill, misleadingly sold as the "Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act" (SESTA), is a disaster for our community - but not just our community. Sex workers are the canaries in the digital coal mine, and SESTA, if it isn't fought and reversed, is a disaster for all kinds of online speech. [...]

Within hours of the passage of the SESTA in late March, Reddit shut down its escort and sugar daddy communities; not long after, Craigslist deleted its personal ads. Popular industry sites also reacted: The Erotic Review closed its U.S. site, and CityVibe shuttered.

source: Article 'Sex Workers Are Canaries In The Free Speech Coal Mine' by Emily Smith; www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilysmith/sex-workers-sesta-censorship-free-speech; BuzzFeed; 7 April 2018