On July 2, the EARN IT Act unanimously passed a vote of the Senate Judiciary Committee—the last stage that it needed to pass before being considered by the full Senate. But it’s not the same EARN IT Act that we have been campaigning against since March. The law was abruptly rewritten ahead of the Judiciary Committee hearing, and although superficially similar, it’s now a very different beast. But it could still eviscerate the freedom and security of the Internet, while doing nothing new to protect children.

What hasn’t changed under the new version of the EARN IT Act, is that it continues to force Internet companies to shoulder full responsibility for the detection and prevention of online child sexual exploitation, as if they were the one and only solution to that problem. As we and other groups have pointed out, that simply isn’t the case. What’s new is where the pressure on Internet companies comes from: under the original EARN IT Act, it would have come from an unelected 19 member committee, whose membership is heavily biased towards law enforcement. Internet platforms would become directly responsible for online child exploitation on their platforms if they failed to follow that censorship committee’s recommendations.

The censorship committee still exists under the new version of the EARN IT Act—but probably in recognition of the constitutional problems of allowing it to write rules for the Internet, its recommendations will now be advisory only. That doesn’t mean that they won’t still be influential—when Internet companies face lawsuits over whether they have done enough to prevent abuse (more on that below), the existence of industry best practices is a factor that courts will consider. By constructing a body that is meant to establish such best practices (albeit with a structural bias towards law enforcement), the intention remains that the censorship committee will have a heavy influence on how Internet platforms operate.

Legally however, the teeth of the new version of the EARN IT Act have shifted to the states. Rather than making Internet platforms responsible for abuse on their platforms if they fail to comply with the censorship committee’s recommendations, under the new version of the act they will be treated as criminally and/or civilly responsible if a state law says so. As before, the hoops that companies might have to jump through to avoid liability under state law are left unclear by the new version of the law—except that in response to criticism, it clarifies that the simple use of “end-to-end encryption, device encryption, or other encryption services” won’t be enough to trigger liability.

The amended version of the law hasn’t made things better, and in some ways they are now worse. Under the original version of the law, platforms still enjoyed a “safe harbor” of immunity from liability, provided that they had taken whatever steps the censorship committee had laid out for them. Under the new version, there is no safe harbor, and no way to “earn” one. If a prosecutor or a civil litigant fancies their chances of proving that a tech platform has been involved in the “advertisement, promotion, presentation, distribution, or solicitation of child sexual abuse material,” the platform has no choice but to face that allegation in court.

We’ve seen this before, of course. The new version of EARN IT now bears a much closer resemblance to FOSTA, the harmful law that made Internet platforms responsible for sex trafficking, and which resulted not only in adult sex workers being cast offline, but also the deletion of platforms used by non-sex workers such as Craiglist’s personals column, and a range of other material about sex, including child sexual abuse prevention resources. Just like FOSTA, EARN IT will inevitably chill speech about sex even further, as companies raze their platforms clean of anything that could possibly trigger lawsuits, which are a costly nuisance whether they succeed or not.

There is an alternative to EARN IT, the Invest in Child Safety Act, that we support. Rather than taking an easy pot shot at “big tech” as EARN IT does, the Invest in Child Safety Act recognizes that the problem of CSA is a complex one that will require more than just censorship and surveillance to solve. In what could be an historic boost to prevention funding, the law would fund a record $5 billion in prevention and enforcement interventions over 10 years. But the law doesn’t stand a good chance in the current Congress, simply because it doesn’t yet have any Republican co-sponsors.

We still believe that the Invest in Child Safety Act deserves a shot, and we encourage you to contact your representatives (especially if they are Republicans!) to support that law. But first things first—EARN IT urgently needs to be defeated in the Senate. The best case we have to defeat it is not to focus on how damaging it would be to the free and open Internet—even though that’s true—because quite understandably, politicians are more concerned about children’s safety than they are about our freedoms online.

The better way to defeat the EARN IT Act is to point out that it quite simply won’t do what it claims to do—it won’t make children safer. As the group of experts who signed our letter against the law pointed out in March, “It isn’t a matter of Internet platforms being unwilling to provide a comprehensive response to the problem—they simply can’t. And no matter how the EARN IT Act may attempt to compel them to do so, and no matter how popular this approach may be in the climate of the present ‘techlash,’ it is ultimately bound to fail.”

If you are in the United States, now is the time to write to your Senator urging them to vote against this harmful law, that is driven by stigma and populist “anti-tech” sentiment, rather than following the recommendations of the country’s leading child sexual abuse prevention experts. You can write an email to your representative in less then five minutes by clicking the button below—then please follow up with a phone call to their office. Together, we can defeat the EARN IT Act and promote better solutions that protect children while also upholding your rights online.

Prostasia Foundation is proud to launch our latest project: Survivor Expressions, with support from our sponsor Assembly Four. Survivor Expressions is intended to create a platform for survivors of child sexual abuse or trafficking to share their experiences in their own words, without having to conform to anyone else’s narrative. Some of the submissions are personal remembrances, but some survivors may also choose to share poetry, discourse, or to tell us about their lives now. Since survivors should be heard in their own words, contributions will not be censored, but we will try to warn for any explicit content that they may contain.

This project has been made possible through the support of Assembly Four. Assembly Four is a collective of sex workers and technologists which serves sex workers from all over the world, by providing them with platforms such as Tryst.link and Switter. Lola Hunt and Eliza Sorensen, two of the co-founders of Assembly Four, were guests on our podcast in May. Take a listen to find out more about what they are doing to serve their community in an online environment that is increasingly hostile to sexual speech.

“It is vital that survivors and sex workers alike have a safe spaces to individualise their stories. Not enough of these stories are present in public discourse, particularly around legislation. This project develops those extremely important connections between survivors and the public,” said Lola Hunt. Meagan Ingerman, who will be managing the Survivor Expressions project, said, “My hope for this project is to give survivors of CSA a platform to tell their stories in their own words and own way. I believe we can learn a lot about CSA prevention by listening to survivors.”

Visit Survivor Expressions here, where you can read our first contribution from a survivor named Grover. If you are a survivor of child sexual abuse, you can also contribute your own story on the same page.

Susan Wright, founder and spokesperson for the National Coalition on Sexual Freedom (NCSF) chats with Meagan Ingerman about the NCSF’s Consent Counts campaign, how it has been received by police and prosecutors, and what people with “vanilla” sexual interests have to learn about consent from the kink, BDSM, fetish, leather, and non-monogamy communities.

Reviewed by Meagan Ingerman

With a dismal 9% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a controversial reputation for its depiction of childhood sexuality, of course we had to review the 1980 film, The Blue Lagoon. It's hardly great art, but this diverting frolic through ignorance and innocence does contain some fascinating ideas—though more so in the premise than the execution.

Starring a 14 year old Brooke Shields and 18 year old Christopher Atkins, the film is a naked romp through what looks like a Disney attraction, and is rife with sexual situations that will likely make you at least a little uncomfortable. For all that, I consider the movie worth a watch, if for no other reason than the thought provoking nature of the characters' relationship. 

Spoilers Abound - It came out in 1980, people. 

Without giving away too much detail, the plot follows two children who end up shipwrecked and living on an island. Eventually the movie is mostly about two naked teenagers, cousins, boy and girl, making a simple life on their island. The plentiful food and water and the building of shelters is part of the more Disney-esque aspect of the movie. 

However, as it tends to do, puberty is lurking. 

This is where the movie becomes really fascinating to me because these teens, no doubt at least somewhat arrested at the age they were left without adult supervision and society to learn from, must now navigate sex. 

We’ll address the incest in the room first. This is a concept that makes most of us at least a bit uneasy but to be honest cousins married cousins commonly for a long time and it frankly still happens. This aspect of the movie seems to be basically a non-issue considering it is set in the Victorian period and Queen Victoria married her first cousin, Albert.  Even if we were going to make an issue of the incest, I would still find it forgivable in a scenario where there is literally no one else to have any kind of contact with. 

The more interesting journey is their relationship as it goes from being childish and friendly to still childish but sexual. They must navigate their changing bodies without any insight as to why the changes are happening. It is unclear how old the characters are when they are presented as teens (younger actors played them earlier in the movie), but Shield’s character is terrified and then embarrassed by her first period and Atkins’ character is observed to presumably be masturbating. Pregnancy is also tackled, which is terribly fascinating and almost nerve wracking to watch, knowing she has no concept of what is happening to her body or what the outcome will be.  

They must also process the emotions that come with puberty and a loving relationship. Much animosity is flung in both directions as the teens try to understand what is happening to them. But they also manage tender moments. 

From where I sit in my life, it’s hard for me to call a movie about two teenagers stumbling through sex and emotions, a love story. But that is basically how the movie is presented. Aside from the Disney-esque nature of the island, there are some other stumbling blocks in the plot and the movie is not well reviewed, though it did snag an Oscar nomination for best cinematography. 

Trivia for this movie abounds. One of the more questionable decisions made by director Randal Kleiser put a picture of Shields over Atkin’s bed so he would look at her as he was falling asleep at night in hopes he’d develop a crush for the sake of chemistry. Apparently this worked for a time, though the two stars, possibly due in part to their ages, ended up bickering a great deal. Kleiser also used this tension, filming tough scenes when the stars were bickering. 

Other fun trivia about the movie includes the discovery of a previously unknown species of iguana on the island where the movie was filmed. 

Brooke Shield’s early career is largely defined by her naked body. Starting with Pretty Baby in 1978 when Shield’s was 12 and continuing with The Blue Lagoon, and Endless Love, Shields has sparked a lot of controversy. So much in fact, that later, she had to testify before a congressional committee that an adult body double was used for all of her nude scenes in The Blue Lagoon. Other creative solutions had to be created for her other scenes, like gluing a long haired wig to her breasts to keep them covered. 

Despite feeling a bit like The Swiss Family Robinson, this movie is not geared towards kids, though neither, despite the controversy, is it explicitly sexual. There is also little explicit violence, though we see some brief gore. Suicide is explored, as is death by other means.

I feel the movie should be viewed as a fantasy experiment in what might happen between two, largely innocent, largely ignorant people absent any other input. It's not a great film by any means. But the premise is an interesting one, and although its Hollywood treatment is a little corny, it's worth watching and considering how—if at all—such a film would be made today.