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posted by janrinok on Sunday April 15 2018, @11:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the as-long-as-it-is-not-encrypted dept.

[A] Melbourne-based company Assembly Four created Switter after its founders learned that social media platforms were either removing sex workers' content or banning their accounts. Without the time or resources to build a whole new network from scratch, the group turned to Mastodon.

The Verge reports:

Sex workers are running out of safe online spaces. Craigslist is no longer displaying personal ads. The controversial classifieds site Backpage, which many escorts used to screen clients, has been seized by the FBI. Adult content is disappearing off Google Drive, and many sex workers say they're being forced off social media. With the news that President Trump has signed the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), their options will continue to dwindle — and with it, the ability for many sex workers to pay their bills, let alone do so safely.

Over the past few weeks, sex workers have been turning to an unexpected platform to remain online: the social network Mastodon, under a new instance called "Switter." Melbourne-based company Assembly Four created Switter after its founders learned that social media platforms were either removing sex workers' content or banning their accounts. Without the time or resources to build a whole new network from scratch, the group turned to Mastodon.

Although ostensibly aimed at sex trafficking prevention, FOSTA's reduction of legal protections for websites is having disastrous consequences for sex workers. Faced with the new potential for litigation, many websites are removing any content or avenues that could possibly violate FOSTA. It's disconnecting many of the most vulnerable sex workers from crucial resources.

[...] Switter may offer a temporary salve for the community, yet sex workers say it cannot stand as a last bastion, an end-all be-all answer for their profession. Assembly Four says it's prepared to continue working to make it a safe destination for sex workers, but that they need real change.

"The best-case scenario would be the opposite," says Hunt. "The best-case scenario would be if we didn't need to have safe spaces, if public spaces were somewhere we were accepted."

Fast-Company, Buzzfeed, Vice and Techdirt have related stories.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 16 2018, @03:15AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday April 16 2018, @03:15AM (#667479)

    I am taking the word of a very large number of scientists who have built an interlocking structure that is constantly being tested and re-tested.

    You are mostly taking the word of others who claim to relay the word of a very large number of scientists... I have worked within the system, written papers and seen them published, and a large part of the system appears to be what it claims to be, while other parts of it are not so much. My first distaste was working with "scientists" who purchased our equipment, knew good methodology, but were in the employ of the tobacco industry. To their credit, they mostly just kept silent about their findings - but that silence was a significant distortion of known facts influencing hundreds of millions of lives for decades.

    The next was a collection of articles from the most respected journals, published in all appearances like all the other articles those journals carried. Having worked with the journals for over 10 years at this point, I thought I could spot the "good ones" and these all appeared to be the "good ones." They had all the hallmarks of an interlocking structure, tested and retested, with consistent results collected over 15 years pointing to 33% significant benefit, 33% minor benefit, and 33% no change results for patients using the technology under study. I think there were 8 articles in the collection, all well written and backed by what appeared to be good data, easily searchable to find citing work which mostly backed up those results. A few years later, I went to work for a competing company who pointed to their own collection of articles, not as slick and impressively packaged, but with an apparently larger sample size backing the results of less than 5% significant benefit, 10% minor benefits, and >85% no change for the same technology. If you "go digging for yourself" starting from one point, it can take a very long time to get to the other. When evaluating one technology vs the other, patients generally rely on their doctors for guidance, and their doctors conveniently can pick and choose what literature they want to point to to back up their opinion as to whether they would like to get paid for this particular surgery, or refer it off to another surgeon who specializes in the competing technology...

    When the men in white coats, working in laboratories, are paid (through any of a myriad of channels) by organizations with their own agendas, "science" becomes just as much a political battleground as any election campaign. As I said, I more or less believe the "word of science," but remain open to ideas like: lead in gasoline really is a bad thing, "normal" exposure to asbestos is not harmless, "safe" radiation exposure levels may not be, and maybe, just maybe, you can catch chlamydia from a toilet seat or sharing a hot tub, I would swear, based on observations in my college dorm, that stuff could have been airborne...

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