Last week the President signed into law FOSTA/SESTA a piece of legislation hoping to curb sex trafficking but that aims for that goal by weakening a core prevision of the Internet.

In the 1996 Communication Decent Act one provision, Section 230, basic laid out that a hosting website could not be held liable for what other parties posted on that website. If an act of libel occurs on a website such as Facebook it was not Facebook that faced legal peril but the person who placed the information on the web. This was a necessary update as things like libel laws had grown in an environment where publication was complex, expensive, and there for acted as its own gatekeeper.

In order to go after scum that was using internet ads, personals, and other posting to traffic people coerced into the sex trade, FOSTA/SESTA makes an exception that hold the hosting sites responsible for the ads and such that they host. Overnight personal ads have vanished for most of the Internet. In theory this legislation is used only for sex trafficking but government powers in theory are often quite different when placed into practice. A number of sub-reddits have already vanished and I have heard reports that a number of dating sights have also gone dark. Sites that were principally about people making connections and not prostitution, but small site with limited resources that cannot fight any sort of legal battle. Massive companies such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook can hire scores of lawyers to protect their interests but smaller one cannot.

Now my site has very few commenters, 90% or more of the comments come from just one person so my exposure is quite low. However there is another elements here, spam comments.

Since I launched my site and engaged an application to block spam comments there have been nearly 179,000 attempts to post spam as comments on my blog. Some have slipped through and I deleted them manually.

But what if some bad actors start using comments to traffic? Now the people hosting blogs on their personal sites could be held legally at fault. I cannot ignore that possibility and so I am closing comments indefinitely.