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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: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday March 27 2018, @06:21AM (6 children)
And yet you provide no support for your argument. "Land of the Free" doesn't mean perfect freedom.
Just ask anyone whose ancestors were refugees from the religious persecution of the 17th or 18th Centuries, refugees from the wars of the 18th and 19th Centuries, or economic immigrants from any period of time. There were tens of millions of people for whom the US happened to mean a better, freer life than what they had.
Just ask anyone who was under the thumb of Fascism or Communism, but isn't any more due to the US.
At least three of the last four presidents of the US committed drug-related crime, they just didn't caught. And given the holdout is Trump, it's probably four. I think that bit of phony morality theater is on its way out the door.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @07:14AM (5 children)
No country can claim to be "the land of the free" and yet conduct unconstitutional democracy-destroying surveillance on the populace. Nor can such a country have organizations like the TSA, forbid people from using certain drugs, routinely have police steal from people and call it "asset forfeiture", have free speech zones, fight unconstitutional wars overseas, etc. Any country that does any of those things is not merely 'not perfect' but bad. No amount of 'not as bad as' fallacies (Example: "Well, at least the US isn't as bad as North Korea!") will change that. Well, actually, they can claim it, but they'll just be wrong.
Don't be satisfied with merely being better when the standards are so ridiculously low. We need a truly free society, and we're not there yet.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 27 2018, @02:40PM (4 children)
"Bad" is a pretty flat label. So how bad is "bad". Is the US just like the bad countries that kill millions of their own citizens? Are we going to have any sense of proportion or is it just an excuse for some whataboutism?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday March 27 2018, @05:55PM (1 child)
Well, it's commonly asserted that the US has the largest percentage of it's population in prison of any country, and I've never heard that denied. And many of those imprisoned are essentially enslaved, forced to work at jobs that pay so little that most would prefer to avoid them. The pay is essentially a false-front to pretend that it's employment rather than slave labor.
So you could say that there's an awful lot of enslavement going on. And the slave labor is used to fatten the wallet of private manufacturers. It's not teaching skills that could be used to get a job afterwards, which was the original justification. And it seems to me (I'd need to check, and I don't feel like bothering) that rather than increasing with inflation the daily wage was actually cut during the recent periods of high inflation. It certainly didn't increase. That the slaves aren't officially owned by private individuals merely means that the private individuals have no reason to care for them when they are aged and infirm. I'm not even sure that their working conditions are inspected for safety, and don't think I'd trust an official report that said it was, considering some of the working conditions that are approved of for non-enslaved labor.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @12:10AM
The USA does have one of the largest prison populations percentage, mostly due to drug 'crime'. Slave/forced labor is specifically legal by the USA constitution so long as its considered a form of punishment for a crime. There's no reason to argue around if it's slavery or not, slavery is legal under these conditions. Most people ignore it because it'll never happen to them, "out of sight, out of mind", and because criminals aren't allowed to vote. The labor fattens the government and prisons, not private companies. Sometimes companies have complained because they can't compete on price. That and because the prisoners would revolt if they didn't get anything is why they're paid anything at all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @06:09PM (1 child)
It is called honesty. By pretty much any moral ruler the US is terrible. The whataboutism is coming from YOU genius... "But whatabout North Korea and China who kill millions of their own citizens?" lololol
Do you TRY to be so self defeating?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 27 2018, @06:54PM
I'd use the other word, dishonesty. So where on this ruler, do you have marked the spots for tens of millions of immigrants' lives improved and made freer? Where on this ruler, is the spot for Europe not turning into a Fascist/Communist cesspool? Where on that ruler is the spot for making seven billion peoples' lives better today through trade and the global economy (of which the US is a principle creator and maintainer)?
For example, if we don't lose a large part of the world's population to die-offs in the next century or two, it's going to be in large part to the efforts of the US today. If that isn't registering on your collection of moral rulers, then you need a new set of them.