Can Someone Explain How SESTA Will Stop Sex Trafficking?

Last week I got into a bit of a debate with a SESTA supporter about the bill, which boiled down to me saying that the bill won't do what it claims, will likely make things worse for victims of sex-trafficking, and will also have massive consequences for the internet and speech online. And the response from the person I was debating was "but my side has all these anti-sex-trafficking groups supporting SESTA." That's not exactly a response to any of the points that I raised. As we've noted from the very start, we may not be experts in sex-trafficking, but we do know how the internet works -- and how laws on intermediary liability impact the internet and content online. And nothing in SESTA will work the way its supporters seem to think it will work.

So I want to directly ask here the same questions I asked the individual I was debating (which he refused to answer before tossing out a few ad hominems and suggesting that I'm not worth talking to because I'm "a blogger."): what in SESTA will actually stop or limit sex-trafficking? Because as far as I can tell, it does absolutely nothing to stop sex-trafficking. It does not target sex-traffickers in any way. Supporters of the bill claim or appear to believe that it will stop sex-trafficking by stopping websites from allowing anyone to engage in sex-trafficking or advertising sex-trafficking victims on their websites. But that's not at all how the bill works.

It's (obviously!) already illegal to engage in sex-trafficking. And it's already illegal to advertise sex-trafficking. And law enforcement can already go after those doing both of those things. And yet, miraculously, both of those things still occur frequently online. Now, a reasonable response to this would be to suggest that law enforcement has a good source of information with which to investigate, arrest, and prosecute sex traffickers, since the necessary information is apparently so easily obtained online.

So, what does SESTA do? Rather than make it easier for law enforcement to go after those illegal activities, it creates a new illegal activity: that of running a website that is used by sex traffickers. So, as we've discussed before, this creates a serious "moderator's dilemma" for websites, leading to one of two likely outcomes. Many websites may stop moderating content, because if they're not looking at the content, they can more credibly claim a lack of knowledge. That means less moderation, less oversight, and likely more use of those platforms for sex-trafficking ads. So, suddenly, sex-traffickers will gravitate to those platforms, and those platforms will be less likely to cooperate with law enforcement because (again) they want to avoid "knowledge" of how their platform is being used, and working with law enforcement risks more knowledge.

On the flip-side of the moderator's dilemma, you will get sites that much more vigorously moderate content. This seems to be the solution that SESTA supports think all platforms will embrace -- which is almost certainly incorrect. Indeed, it's incorrect on multiple levels, because not only will some platforms embrace this more heavy moderation setup, those that do will almost certainly over-moderate to a drastic degree, in order to avoid liability. That will mean fairly aggressive levels of keyword blocking, filters, and automated removals. And, as anyone who has studied how such systems work in the real world, all of those will fail. And they'll fail with both false negatives and false positives. That is, lots of perfectly legitimate content will get taken down (perhaps, as we've discussed before, it could be material to help victims of sex-trafficking), and lots of sex-trafficking content will still get through.

It's that latter point that's pretty important: the people engaged in sex-trafficking are already breaking the law. SESTA changes nothing for them in terms of the illegality of what they're doing. It just means the tools they use are going to change a little bit, and anyone who thinks the traffickers won't adjust with it has apparently never spent any time on the internet. If keywords get blocked, traffickers will come up with new euphemisms (they always do). If forums get shut down, they will gravitate to other forums. If filters are created, they will figure out ways to get around the filters. Nothing in SESTA creates any disincentives at all for actual traffickers.

Indeed, SESTA creates a few things that will make life easier for traffickers. As noted above, it will likely lead some sites to do less moderation, and traffickers will quickly gravitate to such sites. Additionally, it will make it much, much harder for rights groups to post information to help victims of sex-trafficking, since much of that information will be seen as a liability risk, and blocked or taken down. And, finally, it will create massive disincentives for sites to work with law enforcement or families of victims to help them, because of the risk of those actions being used to prove the requisite "knowledge."

So, please: can someone who is a supporter of SESTA explain how the bill will do anything to actually stop sex trafficking? Because I can't find a single useful thing that it does.