U.K. Pushing New FOSTA Copycat Law to Force Sex Workers Offline (AVN)

Read the full article by Michael French at AVN.com

A member of the British parliament from the country’s left-wing Labor Party says that she sees the “irony” in pushing for a new law inspired by a United States law measure signed and backed by Donald Trump, but Sarah Champion—the 48-year-old Shadow Minister of State in Britain’s leading opposition party—is going ahead with her move for Britain to adopt a copycat version of FOSTA anyway.

FOSTA is the law passed by the U.S. Congress earlier this year and signed by Trump into law in April. The bill’s stated aim is to curtail online sex trafficking, in part by making internet platforms such as Twitter or Craigslist responsible for the activities of their users on the site.

“U.K. legislation needs to be radically overhauled to keep pace with the changing face of prostitution,” Champion told The Guardian newspaper. “We need to update our laws to make websites legally accountable for facilitating and profiting from sexual exploitation. The idea that commercial prostitution sites make it safer for women is not true.”

But according to many sex workers themselves, it is true. According to a report by the tech news site Motherboard in April, almost immediately after Trump signed the FOSTA law, sex workers began to suffer the consequences.

The proposed new ban would target sites including Vivastreet and Adultwork, “two of the largest sex work platforms used in the UK,” according to the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, which also noted that a recent APPG report on the proposals specifically excluded evidence from actual sex workers.