NEW YORK — Digital rights activist Evan Greer, deputy director for tech advocacy group Fight for the Future, has penned an op-ed for the Daily Beast arguing that politicians aiming to “fix Big Tech” should stop ignoring sex workers.
Greer’s opinion piece, published yesterday, foregrounds sex worker rights and activism through a lucid overview of the harms of FOSTA/SESTA, the looming threat of the proposed EARN IT Act and the ray of hope in the proposed SAFE SEX Worker Study Act recently proposed by some congressional Democrats.
“In the immediate wake of [FOSTA/SESTA]’s passage, sex workers — particularly queer and trans folks of color — were cut off from online platforms and tools they used to make a living and keep themselves safe,” Greer writes. “This included collectively maintained ‘bad date’ lists, commonly used to protect vulnerable workers from violent assaults on the job. Sex workers and advocates reported an increase in attacks, arrests, self-harm and suicide.”
“Now, four years later,” the piece continues, “lawmakers are once again obsessed with the idea of changing Section 230.”
Greer notes that although “Republicans latched on to largely evidence-free claims of anti-conservative bias in content moderation,” the groups most often censored and de-platformed on social media “are those which conservatives regularly demonize and attack: people of color, trans women and Arab and Muslim folks living outside the U.S., whose speech is systematically ensnared in the wide nets of automated anti-terrorism filters.”
Greer faults Democrats for “consistently” failing to explain “how their proposed changes to Section 230 would actually solve the problems they’re identifying. And worse, they often willfully ignore the ways that such changes can backfire, and harm the very communities Democrats say they want to protect.”
Observing how the ongoing war on sex worker rights — of which the War on Porn is an enormous part — intersects with constant attempts to regulate the power of large technology conglomerates, Greer concludes that the big lesson is: "Big Tech platforms care a lot more about covering their butts and protecting their bottom line than they do about standing up for the human rights and free expression of marginalized people.”
To read Evan Greer’s “Want to Fix Big Tech? Stop Ignoring Sex Workers,” visit the TheDailyBeast.com.