After it successfully pressured Craigslist to remove its adult services section, the brigade of attorneys general who believe that censoring the Internet is an effective way to combat sex trafficking continued to march on.
Its next target of censorship: backpage. The adult services sections under attack contained mainly ads for legal services: massages, escorts and the like. But the AGs insist that since illegal activities like prostitution and child sex trafficking sometimes slip through the cracks, the entire adult services sections should be banned.
Connecticut AG Richard Blumenthal, who in the midst of a tough re-election campaign has spearheaded this censorship crusade, is arguing that Section is outdated and should be amended to impose liability on websites that knowingly host illegal activity on their sites.
If a court adopted this argument, it would undoubtedly have a chilling effect on online speech, threatening the openness of social media as we know it. In addition to posing a free speech threat to online service providers, these latest incidents of online censorship raise interesting questions about the meaning of the First Amendment.
Boyd says this is not a free speech concern, but rather one of transparency. Even if it is more of a transparency concern, that distinction does not take the issue out of the realm of the First Amendment and freedom of speech.
