Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Ashken Kazarian. On today's show, we're going to go back to a topic very near and dear to our hearts, and we've talked about it in previous episodes that we will link in our show notes to.

We're going to talk about Sesta and Fasta, the laws that were passed through

Congress last year to stop sex trafficking. It was targeted at different internet companies

to kind of help law enforcement go through that. However, that law, as we have warned, was going to

have a lot of unintended, crucial negative consequences on different groups of people.

Joining us is clinical instructor and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, Kendra Albert.

Hello, thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for coming. Kendra. Tell us, what is Sesta Foster?

So Sesta and Foster were two bills that were before Congress last year.

And they were meant to amend Section 230.

And for folks who are unfamiliar,

Section 230 is like the bedrock of online speech law.

And what it does is it, as y'all have probably talked about on the podcast before,

is it protects platforms or basically anyone who hosts other people's content online from being

held liable as a publisher of something for someone, someone else says, held liable as the publisher

for something someone else says. So what that means in practice is, for example, if you, if you're a Yelp and someone writes a

review of a carpet cleaner that happens to be defamatory, it says all kinds of things about

their carpet cleaning that are just untrue, that harm their reputation, meets all the

characteristics of defamatory speech.

Under pre-CDA 230 law, you could potentially be held liable for the,

for the, those defamatory statements about the carpet cleaner.

But CDA 230 makes it so the Yelp can't be held liable for the,

...