The Sex-Ad Law FOSTA Was a Mistake. Some Lawmakers Want to Fix It.

There’s an abundance of evidence that a 2018 law aimed at sex advertising has been bad for sex workers, bad for victims of exploitation, and bad for free speech online. To top that off, it’s also been unnecessary for fighting crime; the Government Accountability Office even admitted as much last year. Nonetheless, some lawmakers and activists keep blithely insisting—without a shred of evidence—that the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) did good. Others like to pretend FOSTA doesn’t exist as they continue to use the same excuse (protecting children) to push the same solution (amending the internet liability law known as Section 230).

But a few members of Congress are bucking this trend. They’re at least willing to consider the possibility that they messed up in passing FOSTA.

To this end, they’re backing legislation that would further study the effects of FOSTA and of the Justice Department’s shutdown of websites—like Backpage and Rentboy—popular for sex worker advertising.

First introduced in 2019, these measures promptly flopped. Now, their sponsors—Ro Khanna (D–Pa.)and Barbara Lee (D–Calif.) in the House; Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) in the Senate—are trying again.

The SAFE SEX Workers Study Act of 2022 would order the Department of Health and Human Services “to conduct a study to assess the unintended impacts on the health and safety of people engaged in transactional sex, in connection with the enactment of [FOSTA] and the loss of interactive computer services that host information related to sexual exchange.” It would also require the U.S. Attorney General to “report on human trafficking investigations and prosecutions in connection with the same.”

In the findings section of the bill, the lawmakers explain (with a shocking lack of moral panic) how the government’s war on sex work advertising has caused a number of reported harms, and how FOSTA—intended to stop sexual violence and exploitation—may have actually increased it.

Upon FOSTA’s passage in early 2018, “websites preemptively shut down, some directly citing the law’s passage as the rationale for closure,” it notes. And after FOSTA passed (but before it was signed into law), the Department of Justice seized the classified ad site Backpage.com and arrested its founders, similar to what it had done with Rentboy.com a few years before. Yet “while these websites and individual accounts have been closing down, there has been no national investigation rigorously examining the impact of losing access to these platforms on the health and safet