More Evidence that FOSTA Benefited No One

October 15, 2022 · by Eric Goldman · in Content Regulation, Derivative Liability, Marketing

This is another empirical study into FOSTA’s effects. At the Stanford Trust & Safety conference, I heard a presentation of this paper: Helen Shuxuan Zeng, Brett Danaher, & Michael D. Smith, Internet Governance Through Site Shutdowns: The Impact of Shutting Down Two Major Commercial Sex Advertising Sites, being published in Management Science. Essentially, the paper didn’t find any benefits from FOSTA. The paper’s findings:

Ad Volume

FOSTA did not permanently reduce the volume of ads for commercial sex. The quantity bounced back after FOSTA, but distributed across more sites. A “key element of the rebound appears to be that the commercial sex market moved predominantly to offshore sites that could still reach U.S.-based customers and advertise U.S.-based providers.” In other words, as predicted for Congress, FOSTA scattered the ads worldwide rather than changing any of the underlying supply or demand factors.

Arrests

The authors found no statistically significant trends in the arrests for sex trafficking and prostitution pre- and post-FOSTA. Overall, their estimates “indicate a 2.5% decrease in sex trafficking cases and a 5.7% increase in prostitution arrests.” This would be consistent with the many post-FOSTA reports that law enforcement departments substituted from rescuing sex trafficking victims towards standard enforcement of prostitution laws.

Crimes Against Women

The authors found no statistically significant trends regarding female homicide and rape cases pre- and post-FOSTA. This implicitly disagrees with a study that found that Craigslist’s entry into a new community reduced female homicides.

The Authors’ Conclusions

The paper concludes that “targeting a small number of prominent sex advertising portals is unlikely, by itself, to be effective in combating sex trafficking, given the fluidity of online markets for illegal activity.”

Then the paper adds this unfortunate non-sequitur: “ISP-level website blocking may be more suited to policing some types of illegal online activities, including online sex trafficking.” Huh? That will also just scatter the ads, so it solves no problem, plus it creates all of the problems associated with site blocking. Just no.

Implications

As I’ve mentioned before, there is no evidence that FOSTA benefited any community. This paper reinforces that point, showing that FOSTA did not suppress commercial sex ads and it did not increase sex trafficking enforcement. The paper suggests that maybe FOSTA didn’t make things worse for women based solely on homicide and rape metrics, but (1) this ignores the impacts on male sex workers entirely, and (2) sex workers experienced many other physical, psychological, emotional, and financial harms due to FOSTA. The paper also does not model FOSTA’s detrimental impacts on speech, which continue to reverberate today. So, I ask again…how did FOSTA improve anything?

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More Evidence that FOSTA Benefited No One

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