Adult World News

Britain's Daily Mail and Mirror newspapers have picked up on a story from Thailand about police and army raid humiliating victims in a Pattaya swingers resort. The Daily Mail wrote:

Dramatic footage shows the moment police raided an illegal orgy at a hotel in Thailand catching middle aged British men with young Thai women.

Images from the raid in Pattaya, often referred to as the sex capital of the world, show the middle-aged Brits sweating heavily and rushing to cover themselves up.

Police burst in on the illegal sex party on Saturday night after getting a tip off guests had paid 1,500 baht (£35) to take part in an orgy.

They stormed the Tulip Hotel (not the real name) at 11.30pm lsparking chaotic scenes.

Dramatic footage shows the moment police raided an illegal orgy at a hotel in Thailand catching sweating middle aged British men with young Thai women+6

Video from a local news report captured the moment 18 men were rounded up with their female partners clutching them to hide their faces.

The British men were also accompanied by Americans, Germans, Canadians, Australians, Russians, Malaysians and Chinese party-goers, who were all questioned and released.

The Chinese hotel owner was arrested for running a hotel illegally and hosting sex parties.

Commenters went to town on the story, eg:

What a charming article for a Monday morning! Could they not try and lose weight, how these girls could touch these filthy fat old men is beyond me but sadly I guess it's 'business' for them.

Meanwhile the Sun had carried a story about an innovative swingers club in Derby that has introduced an indoor dogging zone. Suddenly swingers clubs are all naughty and fun. The Sun writes:

A sex club has created an indoor dogging site with a car to romp in.

It offers randy exhibitionists car park-style thrills with the comfort and safety of being inside.

The Attic club has built the dogging zone with an actual motor to offer punters legal countryside-style sex thrills in the comfort and safety of being inside .

They've got an old Fiat car -- complete with dogging reg plate -- so exhibitionists can show off to leering club-goers.

Punters can also put on a show in a spacious tent -- with a mattress inside -- pitched nearby.

As well as performing under canvas, a picnic table has been placed next to the tent so members can feast their eyes on revellers having sex on the wooden bench.

President Donald Trump has signed the internet censorship FOSTA/SESTA bill into law, paving the way for more law enforcement actions against websites that facilitate prostitution.

Websites started shutting down sex-work forums even before Trump signed the bill. Craigslist removed its Personals section, Reddit removed some sex-related subreddits, and the Erotic Review blocked any user who appears to be visiting the website from the United States.

The bill becoming law will likely lead to more voluntary site shutdowns or law enforcement actions against sites that continue to be used for prostitution.

The SESTA and FOSTA acronyms (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) suggest that the new law is aimed at cracking down on sex trafficking. But the law barely distinguishes between trafficking and consensual sex work.

Operators of websites that let sex workers interact with clients could face 25 years in prison under the new law.

The US authorities have taken control of a classified adverts website used by sex workers to advertise their services.

A notice was posted on Backpage.com's various international front pages late last week to inform visitors.

The site had previously shut down the adult section of its US site, but critics had alleged that prostitution ads had simply moved to other pages.

The authorities claim that some of the adverts were for trafficked sex workers, but such claims are generally hyped up by those campaigning to prohibit adult consensual sex work and rarely amount to any more than a few cases when properly investigated.

The US media has also reported that Backpage's co-founder Michael Lacey was arrested last week and his home raided.

The Californian authorities had previously attempted to close Dallas-based Backpage.com in 2016, when the state prosecuted the business's chief executive and two ex-owners - including Mr Lacey - over claims they had committed pimping offences and generated millions of dollars by hosting sex trade ads. However, the case was dismissed on the grounds that the US's Communications Decency Act said that publishers should not be held responsible for content created solely by their users.

But last month, Congress passed a new law, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (Fosta). It states that websites that facilitate traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts should no longer be granted the same protection.

It has been reported that President Trump will sign a Senate-approved version of the act into law this week.

The US has passed laws FOSTA/SESTA that make internet websites responsible for any user content related to sex trafficking. Websites can't distinguish sex trafficking from adult consensual sex work information so have respponded in the only way they can be banning all sex work related content, just in case.

• Cityvibe shut down completely,
• the Erotic Review, the Yelp of the sex trade where men rate their experiences with sex workers, shut down advertisement boards in the United States,
• NightShift shut down to review policies,
• VerifyHim shut down its newsreel,
• Craigslist personals section was shut down,
• Reddit's prostitution-related subreddits were marked private and the site instituted new policies banning the sale of sex acts and drugs,
• Google reportedly deleted its publicly shared commercial sex-related advertising,
• WordPress.com reportedly removed its commercial sex-related advertising sites,
• Paypal reportedly disabled advertised accounts for commercial sex-related payment,
• Rubmaps, Erotic Monkey, and USA Sex Guide had extended maintenance periods over the weekend, suggesting upcoming changes due to the new law,
• Microsoft is issuing new Terms of Service effective May 1st covering all of its platforms, including Skype and Xbox, to urge users not to use the services to share pornography or criminal activity.

The sex trafficking sites Cityxguide and Backpage were reportedly seeing a surge in use by sex workers as the other sites shut down.

Perhaps there's an opportunity for European companies to get a look in and offer replacement services to the US.

Gardai have only initiated 2 prosecutions under a law passed last year to criminalise the purchase of sex. The 2017 Sexual Offences Act 204 which introduced the so-called Nordic model criminalises the customers of sex workers.

Under the law, women must be willing to participate in court proceedings against their clients. This contrasts with Scandinavia where the law lets police officers testify about the paid for sex.

The Times say Garda sources claim some women are often frightened to face a punter in court, as they may be linked to organised crime gangs who can threaten the women's family and friends. But in reality the women aren't going to do very well in business if they don't look after their customers.

Gardai sources also claim the force is missing out on valuable tip-offs from punters about trafficked women, because men are unsurprisingly unwilling to get involved when they themselves would be prosecuted.

As the sun sets on online freedoms, sex workers of all kinds are quietly and swiftly being silenced on social media. Rightfully they're fed up, and are fighting back with a new website Switter, a play on 'sex workers' and 'Twitter', which is an alternative social network that's created by, and for, sex workers.

Switter's creation was initially in response to sites like Twitter, where those in the sex industry have been finding themselves "shadow banned", ie banned by the internet company acting on its own motivations rather than banned by the laws of the land.

Sex workers have always been more or less banned by Facebook but since the new Sosta law, major companies are setting out to censor all sex content as th emores practical or cost effective way of addressing the Sosta requirement to censor sex trafficking content.

Even Skype, the platform that many independent sex workers use to run their private shows, has specified in their latest Code of Conduct that the services not be used for "inappropriate content or material" like "nudity" and "pornography."

The new social network obviously can't be US based so the mantle has fallen to an Australian company, Assembly Four. The software is based on the open source Mastodon and does not have any built-in tracking, doesn't enforce real name policies, and doesn't' ask for any personal information for profiles.

Its early days yet, but the fledging social network says it already has about 8,000 members.

It was a dark day for the Internet.

The U.S. Senate just voted 97-2 to pass the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865), a bill that silences online speech by forcing Internet platforms to censor their users. As lobbyists and members of Congress applaud themselves for enacting a law tackling the problem of trafficking, let's be clear: Congress just made trafficking victims less safe, not more.

The version of FOSTA that just passed the Senate combined an earlier version of FOSTA (what we call FOSTA 2.0) with the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA, S. 1693). The history of SESTA/FOSTA -- a bad bill that turned into a worse bill and then was rushed through votes in both houses of Congress2 -- is a story about Congress' failure to see that its good intentions can result in bad law. It's a story of Congress' failure to listen to the constituents who'd be most affected by the laws it passed. It's also the story of some players in the tech sector choosing to settle for compromises and half-wins that will put ordinary people in danger. Silencing Internet Users Doesn't Make Us Safer

SESTA/FOSTA undermines Section 230, the most important law protecting free speech online. Section 230 protects online platforms from liability for some types of speech by their users. Without Section 230, the Internet would look very different. It's likely that many of today's online platforms would never have formed or received the investment they needed to grow and scale204the risk of litigation would have simply been too high. Similarly, in absence of Section 230 protections, noncommercial platforms like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive likely wouldn't have been founded given the high level of legal risk involved with hosting third-party content.

The bill is worded so broadly that it could even be used against platform owners that don't know that their sites are being used for trafficking.

Importantly, Section 230 does not shield platforms from liability under federal criminal law. Section 230 also doesn't shield platforms across-the-board from liability under civil law: courts have allowed civil claims against online platforms when a platform directly contributed to unlawful speech. Section 230 strikes a careful balance between enabling the pursuit of justice and promoting free speech and innovation online: platforms can be held responsible for their own actions, and can still host user-generated content without fear of broad legal liability.

SESTA/FOSTA upends that balance, opening platforms to new criminal and civil liability at the state and federal levels for their users' sex trafficking activities. The platform liability created by new Section 230 carve outs applies retroactively -- meaning the increased liability applies to trafficking that took place before the law passed. The Department of Justice has raised concerns about this violating the Constitution's Ex Post Facto Clause, at least for the criminal provisions.

The bill also expands existing federal criminal law to target online platforms where sex trafficking content appears. The bill is worded so broadly that it could even be used against platform owners that don't know that their sites are being used for trafficking.

Finally, SESTA/FOSTA expands federal prostitution law to cover those who use the Internet to promote or facilitate prostitution.  The Internet will become a less inclusive place, something that hurts all of us.

And if you had glossed over a little at the legal details, perhaps a few examples of the immediate censorship impact of the new law

Immediate Chilling Effect on Adult Content

See  article from xbiz.com

SESTA's passage by the U.S. Senate has had an immediate chilling effect on those working in the adult industry.

Today, stories of a fallout are being heard, with adult performers finding their content being flagged and blocked, an escort site that has suddenly becoming not available, Craigslist shutting down its personals sections and Reddit closing down some of its communities, among other tales.

SESTA, which doesn't differentiate between sex trafficking and consensual sex work, targets scores of adult sites that consensual sex workers use to advertise their work.

And now, before SESTA reaches President Trump's desk for his guaranteed signature, those sites are scrambling to prevent themselves from being charged under sex trafficking laws.

It's not surprising that we're seeing an immediate chilling effect on protected speech, industry attorney Lawrence Walters told XBIZ. This was predicted as the likely impact of the bill, as online intermediaries over-censor content in the attempt to mitigate their own risks. The damage to the First Amendment appears palpable.

• Today, longtime city-by-city escort service website, CityVibe.com, completely disappeared, only to be replaced with a message, Sorry, this website is not available.

• Tonight, mainstream classified site Craigslist, which serves more than 20 billion page views per month, said that it has dropped personals listings in the U.S.

• Motherboard reported today that at least six porn performers have complained that files have been blocked without warning from Google's cloud storage service. It seems like all of our videos in Google Drive are getting flagged by some sort of automated system, adult star Lilly Stone told Motherboard. We're not even really getting notified of it, the only way we really found out was one of our customers told us he couldn't view or download the video we sent him.

• Another adult star, Avey Moon was trying to send the winner of her Chaturbate contest his prize -- a video titled POV Blowjob -- through her Google Drive account, but it wouldn't send.

• Reddit made an announcement late yesterday explaining that the site has changed its content policy, forbidding transactions for certain goods and services that include physical sexual contact. A number of subreddits regularly used to help sex workers have been completedly banned. Those include r/Escorts , r/MaleEscorts and r/SugarDaddy .