Good News: Bill To Study The Impact Of FOSTA Reintroduced

Back in 2019, Reps. Ro Khanna and Barbara Lee along with Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden introduced a bill to study the actual impact of FOSTA on sex workers. While that bill unfortunately went nowhere, the same group is now back and have reintroduced the SAFE SEX Workers Study Act (SSWSA). This is an important bill, especially at a time when many in Congress are looking to follow up FOSTA with a new bill, EARN IT, which takes the FOSTA playbook and goes even further with it. During the EARN IT markup, many Senators bragged about their support for FOSTA, even as the evidence has shown that it has made the problem they claimed they were solving much, much worse.

So it's a tiny, tiny step in the right direction to get a bill that even aims to study whether or not the bill created real harms for sex workers - though, ideally we'd get a bill that studies all of the harms that FOSTA created (not just those to sex workers, even as they almost certainly faced the most harm by far), and one that set up a plan to repeal FOSTA once the study proves the underlying question.

Unfortunately, Congress has long shown that it doesn't care about sex workers. Hell, it doesn't really care about sex trafficking or CSAM or any other problems. It just wants to pretend to care about these issues so it can get headlines and go on TV to look serious about how it's solving" these problems. Whether or not they actually solve any problems is very much besides the point.

Hopefully this cynical take is proven wrong, and Congress can actually come together and pass the SSWSA bill and learn just how much harm they did a few years ago. I'm glad that Reps. Khanna and Lee and Senators Warren and Wyden have put forth this bill, but considering how few sponsors it has compared to things like EARN IT, I'm not holding my breath.