Just as a little tease… I got this text from my wife during our Substack live the other day — she was tuning in with my mother-in-law, who’s turning 75 this weekend:
I was talking to Davin Strong, née Davin Addison — OnlyFans creator, male escort, go-go dancer, former-Chippendale, porn actor, and overall adult entertainer and sex worker — about how his life was upended after 2018 when Congress passed a law known as FOSTA-SESTA. This was the first and only time Congress has clawed back even just a tiny bit of the immunity Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act confers on “internet service providers” — websites, apps, blogs, social media platforms, etc.
Lawmakers were trying to address a serious problem: criminals using online platforms to sex traffic adults and children, including platforms such as Backpage.com, which sometimes are complicit in the sex trafficking, and victims being blocked by Section 230 from suing them. But FOSTA-SESTA, at least so far, has not been a success. It hasn’t resulted in massive victories for sex trafficking victims. And at the same time, it’s opened up platforms to liability when they knowingly abet sex trafficking — causing companies like Meta, Tumblr, Craigslist, and others to overcorrect and clamp down on a lot of adult performers and sex workers like Davin who were not using the platforms for sex trafficking. In Davin’s case, it drove him to do much more work IRL — escorting in hundreds of strange men’s homes.
As you probably know, I want to change Section 230 and limit the broad immunity tech companies currently get from liability. And I think you have to take what happened with FOSTA-SESTA — and to Davin and his colleagues — into consideration as you figure out the best way to do that.
You can hear Davin’s whole story — how he went from being Question Everything producer Sam Eagan’s wrestling teammate in Wyoming to doing hardcore gay porn — and the big role that this tweak to Section 230 played in it, in our recent episode:
And check out the video of our live chat to hear more from Davin. My mother-in-law loved it.
Brian
