Backpage was seized & its owners arrested BEFORE FOSTA became law, and @WIRED & @GiladEdelman need to issue a correction

The reason this matters is because members of Congress LIED about the pretenses for passing FOSTA & rushed it through against DOJ advice so they could keep up that lie, hoping it would be signed before DOJ separately took down Backpage. They still still failed—

Trump didn’t sign FOSTA into law until after the feds had taken down Backpage. But it was close enough that many politicians are still lying — and getting journalists to play along — about FOSTA being what took Backpage, even FOSTA actually has nothing to do with that prosecution

But if people start realizing FOSTA has nothing to do with the Backpage prosecution, they might start realizing that the entire premise of FOSTA (and a whole lot more Section 230 “reform”) was also a big fat lie all along

It’s clear why authoritarians in Congress & the feds want to spread disinformation (or lies, or fake news, or propaganda, or whatever you want to call it) about Backpage & FOSTA. But I cannot understand why so many in the media seem invested in spreading it too