What about airlines with online booking websites? People have travelled for sex tourism to countries with trafficked sex workers, and it's such a known phenomenon that there's no reasonable way the operators of an airline could be unaware of it. And yet, they still sell tickets. By the letter of the law, that can certainly "make easier or less difficult" the sex trade by facilitating the transportation of potential customers. Are they then criminally liable if someone is found to have flown on their airline for the purpose of sex tourism?
I don't like the pretense of the law, but the hysteria surrounding this is truly astounding.
No, Gmail, Facebook, and Travelocity are not complicit in the sex trade by virtue of the fact that someone can use their services to conduct such actions. Section 230 still exists. Without it, yes, you might actually be right, and the internet would implode due to the liability involved in running any service at all. We already covered this 20 years ago.
The operative word in the new law is "knowingly." If Gmail knowingly provided services to a pimp, if Facebook knowingly hosted a group to facilitate trafficking, and if Travelocity knowingly sold sex tourism packages ("we see you're renting a hotel and a car-- would you like to add an underaged escort?"), then the law applies. Selling someone a ticket to Thailand isn't a crime. Giving them recommendations on the local brothels might be.
Backpage is in the shit because they knew they were hosting child prostitution ads and actively tried to hide it from police. Silk Road couldn't claim 230 because internal documents showed Ulbricht knew he was facilitating the drug trade (and even knew what the consequences would be!).
The message is clear-- if you're going to run an illegal site, don't participate in its content or market it for those purposes. Don't seed it or hire anybody to seed your content. Just stay out of it, run an agnostic platform and let the users generate their own content (4chan isn't technically a porn site, after all). If something is brought to your attention, delete it and document it-- you fulfilled your obligation.
You'd still have deniability as to what your users are up to; after all, you can't be expected to police all the user-generated content faster than they can create it.
> You'd still have deniability as to what your users are up to; after all, you can't be expected to police all the user-generated content faster than they can create it.
For now… This law is a stepping stone to government–curated mandatory content filtering.
Facebook & Google are already testing & developing the technology voluntarily[1].
The government will initially say you don’t have use it, of course, but maybe if you choose to then you won’t have to worry about that nasty liability laws…
If it’s voluntarily then there’s no 1st amendment issue, they’ll have their lawyers argue.
And the people will agree, nodding along in their safe spaces, as even now they mindlessly repeat that “censorship is legal,” don’t you know, “if the corporations do it.”
And at first it will be fine. But all that’s left for that censorship dream to become a sweet reality is just one final missing puzzle piece. To make the list secret. So close!
How will they do it? Maybe they’ll say that a list of hashes /fingerprints of illegal content is “facilitating” child pornography, because after all that’s how Torrents and DHTs work. Is a magnet link not facilitating piracy?
Not convinced? Just then Google will deliver with an AI technology to recreate images from the Fingerprints, not quite perfect, but the cherry picked examples resembling the original content just enough to make you feel uncomfortable[2].
Could the Fingerprints be modified to prevent it? Is it possible they were in fact designed with this exact goal in mind from the very beginning?
You don’t dare to ask. You are not a PEDOPHILE.
The list becomes secret.
Do you think this is far fetched?[3]
> internal documents showed Ulbricht knew he was facilitating the drug trade
They also showed him ordering hits on people[3] for as long as it was necessary to serve as a convenient distraction.
