A look back at Kamala Harris’s yearslong crusade against online sex work

In the weeks since she stepped into the presidential race, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has repeatedly drawn attention to her time working in the criminal justice system. Harris, who served as the San Francisco District Attorney and California Attorney General before entering national politics, has called herself “smart on crime,” and claimed she was a “progressive prosecutor.” 

But it’s unlikely you’d hear such superlatives when talking to people in the sex work community. In fact, many say Harris was a net negative to their livelihoods, and to the millions of Americans who work in the industry.

While working as California Attorney General, Harris helped bring down Backpage.com, a classified advertising website that was founded in 2004. Two years before it closed, Backpage’s CEO, Carl Ferrer, was arrested after an investigation by Harris’s office. Ferrer was hit with a 10-count complaint charging him with pimping conspiracy, pimping, pimping of a minor and attempted pimping of a minor Some sex workers credited Backpage with keeping them from harm while working in the industry, saying that its closure sex workers off a trusted platform where they could vet and compare clients with their peers. Academic research, conducted after Backpage’s closure, found that sex workers were indeed more financially precarious and felt less safe after the site was shuttered.

Harris’s crusade against online sex work continued well into her Senate career. She was a major impetus around the passing of the 2018 FOSTA-SESTA law, which was meant to stop anyone aiding sex traffickers, but ended up making it more difficult forcing sex workers to migrate to websites and services that often proved more unsafe. She was also a key part of passing the ENOUGH and SHIELD Acts, which tackled intimate image abuse—or the sharing of explicit images, often without consent. And while those two were seen as better than FOSA-SESTA, some researching sex work believe they’re laws that are based on dubious evidence and misguided goals.

“The fact that Kamala Harris supported FOSTA-SESTA and her previous track record with Backpage make the situation quite worrying when it comes to sex workers,” says Carolina Are, a Centre for Digital Citizens innovation fellow at Northumbria University. The problem, to advocates, is that by tackling sex-based problems, she’s causing wider issues. (Many progressives, and those in the sex work community, argue decriminalization is the best path forward.)

“In the case of Harris’s support for FOSTA-SESTA, this has had a well-documented ripple effect, incentivizing platforms to limit content beyond the purview of porn,” adds Maggie MacDonald, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto researching pornography platforms. Writing in The Nation, historian Sascha Cohen noted that the law “made sex workers less safe and the internet less free.” A 2021 Government Accountability Office report found FOSTA-SESTA had a negligible impact on prosecutors’ ability to tackle sex trafficking cases, while three in four sex workers said FOSTA-SESTA had made them less economically secure.

Harris has also been a vocal supporter of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would require social media companies to ramp up safety settings for minors. But KOSA carries major free speech concerns, namely that it grants tech companies too much authority to determine what is harmful to young people. “Evidence supporting these bills—and even the ‘child protection’ premise behind them—are dubious to say the least,” says MacDonald.

What’s more, the evidence of what to do about the problem of protecting children is also highly contested, and sometimes runs more on vibes than scientific evidence—as shown by the brouhaha stoked up by the release of Jonathan Haidt’s book earlier this year on teen anxiety, which he linked (without much evidence) to social media and smartphone use. The American Civil Liberties Union said last month that KOSA “would not keep kids safe, but instead threaten young people’s privacy, limit minors’ access to vital resources, and silence important online conversations for all ages—all while limiting adults’ ability to express themselves online.”

While Harris is, to many in the sex-adjacent space, an infinitely better option than Trump, she nonetheless appears to have quite conservative views when it comes to regulating the issue. “Kamala Harris is very much a cop in terms of mentality,” says Are. “It’s quite worrying that she might go with that approach when it comes to tech—and when it comes to adult content in general.”

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