sammyatstanford:

I love all the righteous anger on Tumblr rn but I do need to remind everyone (as your friendly neighborhood lawyer) that Tumblr is not banning this content because of Apple (that was just convenient) and they’re not banning it because they hate sex workers (though they don’t fucking care and well may) but because the president of this fair country signed a BIPARTISAN law that makes ALL PLATFORMS/ISPs liable for third parties soliciting sex work on their platform. This law is ostensibly to help protect sex trafficking victims, but many sex trafficking experts believe it will hurt the very people it’s supposed to help because the internet is often the best place to find and help victims of sex trafficking. You can run and hide your porn and your kids and your wife but this affects the ENTIRE internet (at least for US-based platforms) and will take time and money to challenge legally and meanwhile all websites will be deleting content that has nothing to do with sex work to protect themselves from liability. Like I need you to understand that I’m not being dramatic when I say that this is a more serious threat to the internet as a concept than net neutrality and remember how mad about that everyone was?

So get mad at this website and do what you gotta do but remember that YOUR REPRESENTATIVE AND SENATORS probably voted for FOSTA-SESTA and gouged a big hole out of the foundational law governing the internet and most of the people here didn’t even know or care until now, or remember that happening but then promptly forgot about it because life is a daily horror but complacency is the enemy and we all need to PAY BETTER ATTENTION. OKAY?

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.