WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) has announced he is planning to re-introduce a bill to study the effects that FOSTA-SESTA legislation has had on sex workers’ safety, rights and issues.
Khanna told Capitol Hill news site Roll Call that the bill — which he first introduced during the last Congress and was supported by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in the Senate — was inspired by what he saw as a lack of representation of sex worker voices in the legislative process.
“There’s no politician who gains political currency for standing up for the voices of sex workers,” Khanna told Roll Call. “They’re not a voting bloc, they’re not a donor bloc, lobbyists don’t represent them on Capitol Hill. And they were just totally shut out. They were simply invisible.”
Roll Call also interviewed sex workers’ advocate Kate D’Adamo, a partner with the organization Reframe Health and Justice, who explained that “there are so many people advocating for the criminalization of the sex industry, whether it’s law enforcement or religious movements, folks who think they can criminalize the sex industry out of existence,”
“They have people on the Hill meeting with offices regularly, and sex workers don’t,” D’Adamo added.
A Crucial Context for Section 230 Reform
Sex worker advocates have pointed out that their voices and experiences are crucial to frame the current bipartisan debates on making further changes to Section 230 protections. FOSTA/SESTA was conceived as a Section 230 exemption, and drafted by religiously inspired Midwestern Republicans like Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) who said it was the “most effective way to ensure websites can no longer traffic children with impunity.”
Khanna’s bill from last year was called “The SESTA/FOSTA Examination of Secondary Effects for Sex Workers Study Act” (aka the “SAFE SEX Workers Study Act”) and would have required the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to conduct a study on sex workers’ health and safety, particularly how they’ve been affected by the 2018 passage of FOSTA-SESTA.
Last month, Roll Call reported, sex worker groups signed a letter from more than 70 organizations to the Biden administration and Congress “warning that further changes to Section 230 would do more harm to already at-risk communities than it would to embattled social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter.”
The organizations recommended passing Khanna’s bill to study the effects of FOSTA-SESTA before making any fundamental changes to Section 230 protections.
“It’s a cautionary tale,” Khanna told Roll Call. “Could you craft reforms to Section 230 that I could get behind? Yes. But we have to be thoughtful and understand that we may not be able to anticipate all the consequences.”
To read “Sex Workers, Sidelined in Last Section 230 Debate, Seek a Seat at the Table,” visit Roll Call.
