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from the too-risky-to-keep-running-the-dept-generating dept.
In response to the passage of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), Craigslist has removed Personals sections for U.S. users:
Classified advertising website Craigslist has closed its dating ads section in the US, in response to a new bill against sex trafficking.
The bill states that websites can now be punished for "facilitating" prostitution and sex trafficking.
Ads promoting prostitution and child sexual abuse have previously been posted in the "personals" section of Craigslist.
The company said keeping the section open in the US was too much of a risk.
In a statement, Craigslist said the new law would "subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully".
Reddit also took the opportunity to ban a number of subreddits (list not exhaustive), including some like /r/escorts, but many more broadly related to "transactions for goods and services".
Also at Ars Technica and The Verge.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday March 27 2018, @05:24PM
You are pointing at a real problem, but so is the grandparent, and ignoring it doesn't make it go away.
There is always the problem of the enforcement agency deciding to act in it's own behalf rather than in yours. Always. Historically what happens without a central government is lots of small war lords who, if they stabilize, turn into monarchs. In some ways this isn't any worse than the current structure, and in others it's considerably worse. I think the rule was something like one king out of four will be a good king, one king out of four will lead us into disastrous wars, one king out of four will be a playboy, and one king out of four will be an idiot. The benefit is that the bureaucracy tends to be minimized. A secondary benefit is that most of the kings don't want to control your private life. Democracies tend to be much more intrusive. But this can also mean they aren't really interested in enforcing your contracts. This is one of the reasons that police were a late development. Another, of course, is that without rapid transportation and sanitation large cities are inherent death-traps. (Every continuation of this I tried veered into only tangentially related topics. Society is a complex lattice of interconnections.)
But contract enforcement always depends on someone with superior power doing the enforcement. It can be the government, it can be the gang lord, but somebody. Back when personal honor was the excuse is was general social knowledge, but in an age of information overload even extreme dishonor tends to be ignored for the sake of convenience. And it may also depend on limited mobility. In the 1800's US West it was always the outsider who sold fake goods or acted as a confidence man, but in a city with lots of mobility and good communications, how do you recognize the outsider? The old enforcement mechanisms don't work.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.