Both sex worker anecdotes, and some larger studies, suggest the availability of such online services actually reduce violence, homicide, and sex trafficking. See for example:
Agreed. The feds just destroyed what could have been their biggest ally against sex trafficking. Even if BackPage itself was not cooperative, the fact that the feds didn't have some sort of automated system that would scrape phone numbers/emails from this site, get warrants to monitor them, and then send humans to assist the girls and arrest the pimps, is unreal to me. They literally had a directory of sex trafficking victims and victimizers that has now been destroyed and pushed underground. This in no way fixed the problem, it just spread it out and made it orders of magnitude harder to deal with.
The larger issues surround freedom of speech and the protections that online service providers have. I would have expected this kind of thing to happen after FOSTA was officially signed into law, which hasn't happened yet. Apparently Michael Lacey, a cofounder of Backpage, has been criminally charged [1]. I don't know all the issues involved, but overall it's a scary day if you own a website that has anything to do with personal ads.
This is a common question in law enforcement: once you discover a facilitator or illegal activity, how long do you monitor it before attacking? You can learn a lot by watching, but eventually you have to Do Something or you become complicit.
would it be less unreal if you didn't consider the goal to be actually stopping sex trafficking etc, but to set precedent eroding freedom of speech and online service provider protections, under the guise of "for the children" and "obscenity"?
Get over the idea law enforcement is here to protect as a priority. They have proven over time its just a capitalist business looking for more clients. Their job is to put as many people in jail as possible with quarterly growth.
I think it's probably more accurate to say most people don't care. The average person isn't approaching policy discussions thinking about real-world effects; if one can't be bothered to spend ten seconds googling the effect of a policy before they talk about or vote on it, that pretty handily crosses the line from ignorance to agency (in the form of willful ignorance).
The sad fact is, the vast majority of people are far more interested in how policies look, what they signal, and how voicing support for them makes them look. The actual effects the policy may have is way, way down the list of motivating factors, if it even enters their mind at all.
Many if not most politicians (and those pulling their strings) passing the laws to enable this crackdown absolutely understand what they are doing. This is about control, at a very basic level. Access to sex and control of sex are a huge lever for shaping society. Moves like this aim to push society in a "traditional" or "reactionary" direction.
It's like all the hiring of illegal immigrants, and then hounding them for coming here and doing the work.
I'm not trying to claim any kind of parity between the two.
I am saying, it's another form of persecuting the supply -- and putting it at increased risk -- in lieu of dealing with the demand or even being honest about it.
It's also another excuse -- vehicle -- for the prescriptive moralists. Who, the more they complain about something, seemingly inevitably turn out to be engaged in it themselves.
"I can't control myself. But, by God, I can control you!"
Sex trafficking is a horrendous circumstance. Unfortunately, I'm left with no trust in our politicians being honest brokers with respect to the laws they introduce. Even if they honestly want to address the problem, they will -- heh -- not be able to "control themselves" with respect to how they use the expanded powers, going forward.
Basic neutral listing sites with links to resources like Backpage outwardly appeared probably are; to the extent that the allegations that the operators actively collaborated with and knowingly worked to conceal trafficking of minors, Backpage itself may not have been.
While there is clearly a crusade against the former (as the aerlier attacks on CLs erotic/adult services listings made clear), and that's probably why Backpage got lots of attention in the first place, it's not clear that the reality of Backpage matched the surface appearance or the reality of the earlier targets.
It's not being siezed because it was allowing adverts for sex.
It's being siezed because it collaborated with criminal gangs who were kidnapping children and selling those children for sex.
People who think Backpage was helping law enforcement keep track of child rapists should read what Backpage themselves admit.
For the "they help law enforcement" argument to work Backpage needed to have kept the orginal ad text submitted by the criminal gangs and then either report that to law enforcement, or have it available to turn over when given a court order. What they actually did add a filter that removed words suggestive of illegal activity and then post the ad anyway.
> At the direction of CEO Carl Ferrer, the company programmed this electronic filter to “strip” —that is, delete—hundreds of words indicative of sex trafficking ( including child sex trafficking) or prostitution from ads before their publication. The terms that Backpage has automatically deleted from ads before publication include “lolita,” “teenage,” “rape,” “young,” “amber alert,” “little girl,” “teen,” “fresh,” “innocent,” and “school girl.” When a user submitted an adult ad containing one of these “stripped” words, Backpage’s Strip Term From Ad filter would immediately delete the discrete word and the remainder of the ad would be published. While the Strip Term From Ad filter changed nothing about the true nature of the advertised transaction or the real age of the person being sold for sex, thanks to the filter, Backpage’s adult ads looked “cleaner than ever.” Manual editing entailed the deletion of language similar to the words and phrases that the Strip Term From Ad filter automatically deleted—including terms indicative of criminality
Clearly, the "they help law enforcement" argument is fucking bogus.
The link is to the report from permanent subcommittee on investigations, and is very illuminating.
I have a big problem with this FOSTA law been passed in the dark with provisions such as retroactive effect which is clearly unconstitutional and indicates shoddy workmanship. But there looks to have been a very serious problem at Backpage.
Well, it's also that human trafficking works under cover of these services hiding as legitimate sex work.
But yeah, it's made a LOT worse by the lack of empathy, compassion, and understanding (not to mention puritanical notions) people have towards sex work.
Yep, the sex trafficking angle has already been debunked.*
I've lost almost all respect for most modern feminists simply because they refuse to acknowledge actual logic and statistics - wage gap BS, sex trafficking hysteria, apex fallacy (e.g. the top 0.001% are over represented by cis white males, but we'll ignore the bottom 20% of laborers, homeless, disposables who are all male), etc.
My litmus test for any feminist is whether they support the legalization of prostitution. Logically, it's her body, her decision. Right?
Nevermind the issue with a male's ability to legally obtain sex / intimacy, even if paid - you'd think this would be considered a human right, deserving of more talk time than, say, the tax-free status of tampons, but I digress...
Feminists who use the sex trafficking BS as a defense against legalization of prostitution deserve 0 respect. They are simply opportunists, trying to establish a monopoly on access to sex, economically no different than Standard Oil, Microsoft, etc.
Such an effort is not necessary, because countless studies have shown a clear link between prostitution and the modern slave trade. There is a reason that most modern abolitionist groups target sex trafficking - it’s all too common. It’s inevitable that where you find sex workers in any number, you will find sex slaves.
Either way the legislation that was recently passed that apparently is empowering this seizure is applicable whether or not they are consenting adults.
> To be clear, people were pimping out children on backpage. We’re not taking about consenting adults in every case.
Correct. And I'm all for legislation that empowers a group of LEOs to troll ads to find the people doing that and throw them in jail. Hell, I'd be fine with my taxes being raised to pay for it as well.
Backpage is scum and they clearly interacted with such criminals.
That said, the laws that have been created recently are not a good thing and are intentionally designed to enable reaching beyond the narrow goal we both agree on.
I’ve seen some of the studies and agree. That said, the senate report specific to backpage raises concerns.
I’ve personally donated to St James Infirmary in SF and related to charities that provide related protections.
Even in places where prostitution is legalized (Amsterdam), trafficking is an issue. When I was in Amsterdam 7 or so years ago, I recall stories of Russian and other traffickers.
The extra-cynical might even say that taking down sites like this contributes to a power imbalance between police and sex workers which too many police officers take advantage of:
I am not quite cynical enough to think that law enforcement pursues these sites for the purposes of maintaining that imbalance. There are many different attitudes towards sex work (and everything else) among law enforcement officers, and many of them probably really do believe they're doing it to keep kids safe.
Except there is data to support the fact that even where prostitution is legal, trafficking is still a problem...
In fact, some studies suggest that legal prostitution actually enables trafficking to go unnoticed. If prostitution is illegal the police can crack down on any form of it they encounter, so if the prostitute in question is a victim of trafficking they're now in contact with law enforcement and might be given a way out.
With legal prostitution, the situation can go on much longer before law enforcement can step in and reach these victims.
>and some larger studies, suggest the availability of such online services actually reduce violence, homicide, and sex trafficking. See for example:
What study was this and how do we know its results are accurate and apply in this case?
Edit: Also, hopefully we as a society should be looking to reduce, not increase a trade where a human being has to sell themselves like a piece of meat.
> Edit: Also, hopefully we as a society should be looking to reduce, not increase a trade where a human being has to sell themselves like a piece of meat.
That's basically the argument against capitalism and wage-labor, sure. But, strangely, many people cheering shuttering prostitution marketplaces are quite happy maintaining and exacerbating conditions in which the bulk of the population is economically coerced to sell themselves like a piece of meat, they just prefer making conditions worse for those who don't have much to sell that is valued by anyone with the means to buy other than sex.
Sex work != objectification; although the correlation ("in today's society") is really substantial. In other words, this is not inherently a trade where a human being has to sell themselves like a piece of meat; even if today, many/most people in this trade are being sold like a piece of meat.
Arguably, this is an attitude problem on the demand side - people who want to buy other people like they're pieces of meat - rather than something about the supply, or the trade itself.
Perhaps not all people enjoy having sex in exchange for money, but there are a few people doing this job who like what they do. As long as noone is being coerced, it is fair game. At the same time many people will blame a prostitute for their lifestyle, yet the very same people will marry/date for money.
Edit: By the way you may find exchanging sex for money deplorable, but how about having sex for a promotion, or requesting sex in exchange for funding, how about sex for a home and meal. In reality people use sex all day in exchange for something. It is just when money is involved people flip.
Reducing violence, homicide, and sex trafficking are not the intention -- the intention is enforcing the law. If sex workers want to do their work then they can get on the first flight to Amsterdam.
Everyone who's decrying the demise of backpage as a safe and beneficial place, please take a moment and read the first two pages of the Senate Report.
Backpage had a system in place to detect ads offering e.g. child sex and... edit those ads to conceal their criminal nature from detection by rephrasing the give-away words with less obvious ones. You would think they would report those ads, but no - they concealed.
In Backpage's defense, they were instructed to block those words by their legal team and law enforcement, as those words are not allowed to be posted because they indicate sexual favors in exchange for money, i.e. prostitution.
They could have, you know, rejected the ads outright and/or passed the info on to law enforcement automatically. Simply filtering the words implies they knew what was going on but did just enough to (hopefully) have plausible deniability.
I don't think anyone's questioning whether the site facilitated child sex trafficking. I think they're questioning whether shutting them down does more harm than good.
It's not shutting down backpage that is the critical issue. As an operating business there's zero question it should be shut down for the egregious trafficking crimes they commited and its executives prosecuted aggressively where possible.
The question is: whether adult sex worker sites in general should be legal. I think the answer to that is very clearly yes. If you allow the market for adult sex worker sites to exist, backpage becomes trivial to replace, the market will take care of that overnight.
I read the report [1] and two pages you mentioned and it seems like a reach, in fact it has me more worried about the overreach and blaming them for trafficking after reading their major points against backpage. The arguments amount to backpage having a profanity/ad filter upon entering new ads and that their moderation/reporting on anything that got through was not fast enough.
Backpage essentially had a profanity and bad term filter on their ad posting software, like any site has when you post anything to take out derogatory terms.
The report says backpage 'knowingly concealed evidence of criminality' for removing bad terms? They didn't want people posting ads with these terms because they were bad words, not that they supported it.
> First, Backpage has knowingly concealed evidence of criminality by systematically editing its “adult” ads. As early as 2006, Backpage executives began instructing staff responsible for screening ads (known as “moderators”) to edit the text of adult ads to conceal the true nature of the underlying transaction. By October 2010, Backpage executives formalized a process of both manual and automated deletion of incriminating words and phrases, primarily through a feature called the “Strip Term From Ad Filter.”
> The terms that Backpage has automatically deleted from ads before publication include [insert terms that are bad] When a user submitted an adult ad containing one of these “stripped” words, Backpage’s Strip Term From Ad filter would immediately delete the discrete word and the remainder of the ad would be published.
That seems like ANY site filter out there and included bad words, derogatory words and words that traffickers might use to block them. Because they posted the ad later doesn't mean they 'knowingly concealed' it, it just means they blocked ads that have words they don't want advertised i.e. derogatory or bad words or words that seem underage even if it was a legal worker such as 'school girl outfit'.
They eventually even started blocking outright but let the user know what words were banned. Seemingly a basic profanity filter.
> Over time, Backpage reprogrammed its electronic filters to reject an ad in its entirety if it contained certain egregious words suggestive of sex trafficking. But the company implemented this change by coaching its customers on how to post “clean” ads for illegal transactions. When a user attempted to post an ad with a forbidden word, the user would receive an error message identifying the problematic word choice to “help” the user, as Ferrer put it. For example, in 2012, a user advertising sex with a “teen” would get the error message: “Sorry, ‘teen’ is a banned term.” Through simply redrafting the ad, the user would be permitted to post a sanitized version.
The items above seem mainly focused at adult sex workers. Basically legal sex workers using taboo words not trafficking... everyone knows 'teen' is a range starting at 18 and like under 30 on porn sites. Just strange that they call it concealing it when they are blocking it.
The argument for child sex trafficking is weak as well. It blocked people under 18 posting, if you changed the date/age it would post. Not sure how that is bad either, it was blocking underage posters. This is hardly encouraging it.
> Ferrer directed his technology consultant to create an error message when a user supplied an age under 18. He stated that, “An error could pop up on the page: ‘Oops! Sorry, the ad poster must be over 18 years of age.’” With a quick adjustment to the poster’s putative age, the ad would post.
The argument against child sex trafficking is weak as well and again seems more focused at sex workers.
> Backpage knows that it facilitates prostitution and child sex trafficking. In addition to the evidence of systematic editing described above, additional evidence shows that Backpage is aware that its website facilitates prostitution and child sex trafficking. Backpage moderators told the Subcommittee that everyone at the company knew the adult-section ads were for prostitution and that their job was to “put[] lipstick on a pig” by sanitizing them. Backpage also knows that advertisers use its site extensively for child sex trafficking, but the company has often refused to act swiftly in response to complaints about particular underage users—preferring in some cases to interpret these complaints as the tactics of a competing escort. Backpage may also have tried to manipulate the number of child-exploitation reports it forwards to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The statements, unless there is other supporting evidence, seem like conjecture and again mainly focused at online prostitution advertising not trafficking.
The company employees said "everyone at the company knew the adult-section ads were for prostitution and that their job was to “put lipstick on a pig” by sanitizing them". Well yeah because that is what that section was for probably. How does that relate to child trafficking? Just because they weren't fast to moderate reports doesn't mean they condoned it, "refused to act swiftly in response to complaints".
The items about delayed reporting is bad and if they knowingly had underage people on there that is bad, but most of that just seems like conjecture and the reporting/moderation delays can simply be just that slow processes at any company, on a large site it might take time to moderate it.
This still seems like an attack on sex workers who are adult and the site backpage, the report throws in 'child sex trafficking' to make it seem worse. As if backpage wanted to threaten their whole market position for sex workers and revenues for illegal activity.
Really surprised this whole argument basically is against their profanity/term filter to PREVENT bad postings and they were later moderating it and reporting it just not fast enough apparently. You can't even get a response from youtube quickly but backpage can respond to every claim 24x7.
This is an attack on online sex worker advertising full on.
Legal problems against Backpage have been brewing for awhile. Its CEO was arrested in 2016 and charged with pimping. The pimping charges have since been thrown out but he and his fellow execs face 27 other charges, including money laundering: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article168969032.html
Yup, people would like to spin this as the government cracking down on garden-variety prostitution, yet Backpage in particular has many dubious ties to child trafficking.
> Yup, people would like to spin this as the government cracking down on garden-variety prostitution, yet Backpage in particular has many dubious ties to child trafficking.
The law does criminalize any activity relates to prostitution, not sex trafficking. That's not spin - that's literally the express purpose of the law as written. It's not a coincidence that the law is written to apply to all forms of sex work.
Blumenthal, the senator who authored the bill, has been personally crusading against sex work from the past decade, longer than he's even been in the Senate. He chose Backpage as the particular target for this bill, but it's not like he hasn't gone after any and all forms of sex work in the past.
It isn't a spin because it has resulted in a crack down in garden variety prostitution and a shutdown of multiple services (including ones that were purely defensive exercises of free speech, such as unsafe/bad date lists).
Lacey and Larkin, who started New Times and Village Voice have been getting falsely arrested to try to shut them up multiple times because they are very ardent civil rights donators and organizers [2] and cause big trouble for authoritarians like Arpaio in Arizona [3].
My guess is all of the charges will be dropped as it was mainly to ad hominem them to allow this Backpage takedown.
> Backpage started as the literal back page of the New Times, filled with classified ads. [1]
The New Times has a history in being pro-civil rights and anti-war [3][5].
> The Phoenix New Times is a free alternative weekly Phoenix, Arizona newspaper, published each Thursday. It was the founding publication of New Times Media (now Village Voice Media), but The Village Voice is now the flagship publication of that company.[3]
> The paper was founded in 1970 by a group of students at Arizona State University, led by Frank Fiore, Karen Lofgren, Michael Lacey, Bruce Stasium, Nick Stupey, Gayle Pyfrom, Hal Smith, and later, Jim Larkin, as a counterculture response to the Kent State shootings in the spring of that year. Gary Brennan played a role in its creation. According to the 20th Anniversary issue of the New Times, published on May 2, 1990, Fiore suggested that the anti-war crowd put out its own paper. The first summer issues were called the Arizona Times and assembled in the staff's La Crescenta apartments across from ASU. The Arizona Times was renamed the New Times as the first college issue went to press in September 1970.[3]
New Times has been kicking up dust on authoritarianism since the 70s. Lacey and Larkin also won a lawsuit against Arizona as recently as 2013 for false arrest which is still used to attack them [3].
> In December 2013, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors agreed to pay Phoenix New Times founders Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin $3.75 million to settle their false arrest lawsuit against the county defendants.
Take a look at their civil rights fund to see what I mean about how they take authority orgs/politicians to task and encourage civil rights [2].
They have been trying to take down the New Times, Village Voice Media and Backpage for nearly a decade and a half [3].
Both Larkin and Lacey are big civil right advocates and donate heavily to civil rights causes, sex rights, gay rights and immigrant rights [2][3] and the New Times attack politicians for corruption on the regular. After they attacked Arpaio they had nearly a decade of attacks from him and associated groups [3]. They did a strange tactic attacking Larkin and Lacey going after New Times readers data and identities which Lacey and Larkin refused to give up.
> In October 2007, Maricopa County sheriff's deputies arrested Lacey and Larkin on charges of revealing secret grand jury information concerning the investigations of the New Times's long-running feud with Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio. In July 2004, the New Times published Arpaio's home address in the context of a story about his real estate dealings, which the County Attorney's office was investigating as a possible crime under Arizona state law. A special prosecutor served Village Voice Media with a subpoena ordering it to produce "all documents" related to the original real estate article, as well as "all Internet web site traffic information" to a number of articles that mentioned Arpaio. [3]
Arpaio tried to get all information on all Phoenix New Times readers and the paper has been known to be tough on Arpaio overreaches in Arizona on immigrants and civil rights advocates.
> The prosecutor further ordered Village Voice Media to produce the IP addresses of all visitors to the Phoenix New Times website since January 1, 2004, as well as which websites those readers had been to prior to visiting. As an act of "civil disobedience", Lacey and Larkin published the contents of the subpoena on or about October 18, which resulted in their arrests the same day.On the following day, the county attorney dropped the case after declining to pursue charges against the two. [3]
> The special prosecutor's subpoena included a demand for the names of all people who had read the Arpaio story on the newspaper's website. It was the revealing of the subpoena information by the New Times which led to the arrests. Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas dropped the charges less than 24 hours after the two were arrested [3]
> In the weeks following the arrests, members of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, of which the Phoenix New Times is a member, provided links on their websites to places where Arpaio's address could be found. This was done to show solidarity with the Phoenix New Times.[3]
There is a strange section of the Backpage report attacking Lacey and Larkin for selling it to an outside investor who is offshore. They appear to hide ownership from them some might say wisely if it is being the whipping boy for 'trafficking' claims when really it is a sex worker ad website [4].
> Third, despite the reported sale of Backpage to an undisclosed foreign company in 2014, the true beneficial owners of the company are James Larkin, Michael Lacey, and Carl Ferrer. Acting through a complex chain of domestic and international shell companies, Lacey and Larkin lent Ferrer over $600 million to purchase Backpage from them. But as a result of this deal, Lacey and Larkin retain significant financial and operational control, hold almost complete debt equity in the company, and still receive large distributions of company profits. According to the consultant that structured the deal, moreover, this transaction appears to provide no tax benefits. Instead, it serves only to obscure Ferrer’s U.S.-based ownership and conceal Lacey and Larkin’s continued beneficial ownership[4].
The whole report on Backpage, and their owners Lacey and Larkin who started New Times and Village Voice, might be a massive ad hominem [4]. It also appears to be an attack on owners of alternative media influence and funding for civil rights matters [2].
My guess is Lacey and Larkin, civil rights fighters that seem similar to Larry Flynt [2], won't let this just happen and they'll fight it. Most of the attacks on Backpage, and previously the New Times and Village Voice, attacks their character via ad hominems because they are causing trouble for authoritarians and pushing alternative news media funding, my guess is this takedown of Backpage is no different.
I have posted more here on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16780579, everytime they have been arrested they have later been cleared and even won damages for false arrest in 2013 in Arizona. It is easier for authoritarians to win initially against civil rights advocates if you associate them with bad things and ad hominems, but the truth prevails. This could be a modern day civil liberties event unfolding.
Backpage was a major example of why SESTA/FOSTA was "necessary". It seems convenient that it wasn't taken down until after the passage of SESTA (despite the fact that the takedown did not leverage any of the new provisions, AFAICT (EDIT: as cft points out, the bill has not yet been signed by the President, so clearly it was not necessary))
Backpage.com was a general purpose onlined classified system that included a handful of adult services sections among dozens of others. The use of “sex marketplace” here explains the basis of the seizure, but is misleading as a description of the site seized (Unlike, say, the myredbook.com seizure, which was a straight-up sex marketplace.)
I recall visiting Backpage 4-5 years ago to crosspost some stuff I was trying to sell on CL. I took one look and closed the tab. It was incredibly obvious what their business was focused on.
I think they started as a general purpose classifieds, but there were a lot of other options for all the non-sex ads so they lost a lot of the "general purpose" users and attrition led to them mostly being prostitution classifieds.
I have a real estate business and this is one of the sites I have used to post my real estate listings. It wasn't a large part of business, but I did get regular leads from the site. I mostly used craigslist, facebook and zillow, but this was a solid 4th place source of leads for me. I'm self employed and these sites are how I make my living. So not all of the users are posting sex ads. I don't like the title calling it a sex marketplace. It makes it sounds like this is the only thing on the website.
On the one hand, I don't think prostitution should be illegal.
On the other hand, it's not clear whether marketplaces like backpage bring the black-market closer to the light of day & make things safer for sex workers, or if they amplify demand to the point where suppliers have incentive to find new sex workers using more and more coercive methods.
To help you decide, consider what you think of when you hear "prostitution." Do you think of women standing on a street corner smoking and getting in cars and getting beat up by pimps and unable to go to the police for help like in 80s movies?
Or do you think of something more like a doctor's office with security cameras, a receptionist, online reviews?
Because it seems modern, legal prostitution is a lot more like a medical service, similar to how veterinarians calm a cat in heat [1].
The Backpage version, where they knowingly facilited ads for children who'd been kidnapped, drugged, and were being raped for money, is a bad idea.
It's really fucking weird reading this thread and seeing so much support for backpage. I hope it's because people don't know what Backpage were actually doing.
Appreciate you linking the report here and elsewhere. I haven't used backpage or the services of a sex worker; I'm somewhat aware that sex trafficking is a problem, although I haven't seen any information on what the size and scope of the problem really is. So, I'm fairly neutral here.
All that said, I'm reading especially "Findings (II.B)" and I'm not really convinced that child sex trafficking was really an intention with the site; at worst, it sounds like they weren't super aggressive about dealing with it (which, itself, isn't great).
From those pages:
> Backpage itself reports cases of suspected child exploitation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children; in some months Backpage has transmitted hundreds of such reports to NCMEC.2
...
> NCMEC paid Backpage $3000 to host ads for eight underage girls, including one 13-year-old girl advertised in hundreds of cities across the United States; NCMEC later claimed that the image of the 13-year-old was posted online instantly and received over 30 calls within seven minutes of going live. Although Ferrer disputed NCMEC’s claim in an internal email a week later, asserting that the ad triggered a fraud alert and was removed from the site in less than two minutes, he admitted: "NCMEC posted 8 underage pics. We have not found all of them."
Were these photos of girls who were clearly underage? Depending on photo content, it can be practically impossible for the average person to correctly guess a subject's age, or even just whether or not they're a minority.
NCMEC even says as much:
> NCMEC has noted, "it is virtually impossible to determine how old the young women in these ads are without an in-depth criminal investigation. The pimps try to make the 15 year olds look 23. And the distinction of whether the person in the ad is 17 or 18 is pretty arbitrary."
This is either damning -- if the photos were the sort that the average person could immediately identify as underage -- or kind of a skeezy move by NCMEC.
Andrew Padilla, head of moderation:
> And even if an age verification was a deterrent to someone hoping to post an ad on Backpage to traffic a minor, it doesn’t mean they’re going to stop trying to traffic a minor. It only means they won’t be doing it on our site, where Backpage, NCMEC and law enforcement are in the best position to put an actual stop to the crime.
Assuming they were operating in good faith with NCMEC (not an assumption I'm committed to), he makes a reasonable point. And how would an effective age verification system be built for a site like this?
> Backpage documents also suggest the company failed to use its evaluation and training procedures to impress the seriousness of child exploitation upon its employees. As part of its investigation, Subcommittee staff examined several performance reviews for Backpage moderators...
Okay, if you're going to run a site like this, trying to identify child exploitation should be a much higher priority than this paragraph describes.
Still though, I'm leaning more towards "incompetent and poor judgement" than "malicious intent" here.
Does this report include any defense from Backpage, and if not, why do you find it persuasive? Do you believe that the people compiling the report were altruist agenda-less saints?
The thing is, those engaged in commercial sex have a vested interest in defending deregulation of all parts of it: that way they make more money. If you were to try to pass legislation that, for example, would require a license to purchase sex and that the license would be granted only upon passing sexual health medical exams, people selling sex would see this as an obstacle to getting as many clients as possible. I know several people think you can just tell at a glance if someone has an STI and that condoms give all the protection you need.
I think there are a lot of vulnerable people in the sex trade who just aren't speaking up because, well, they're vulnerable.
Not everyone is vulnerable, of course. There are those who are perfectly ok and happy and vocal. But that can't be everyone.
> people selling sex would see this as an obstacle to getting as many clients as possible
What is your basis for this assertion? I think having a tool that makes it easier to vet clients could just as easily be a boon to many sex workers that would allow them to safely see more clients?
Readit News
https://thinkprogress.org/craigslist-erotic-services-platfor...
The larger issues surround freedom of speech and the protections that online service providers have. I would have expected this kind of thing to happen after FOSTA was officially signed into law, which hasn't happened yet. Apparently Michael Lacey, a cofounder of Backpage, has been criminally charged [1]. I don't know all the issues involved, but overall it's a scary day if you own a website that has anything to do with personal ads.
[1] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investiga...
It’s a challenging strategic issue.
would it be less unreal if you didn't consider the goal to be actually stopping sex trafficking etc, but to set precedent eroding freedom of speech and online service provider protections, under the guise of "for the children" and "obscenity"?
The sad fact is, the vast majority of people are far more interested in how policies look, what they signal, and how voicing support for them makes them look. The actual effects the policy may have is way, way down the list of motivating factors, if it even enters their mind at all.
I'm not trying to claim any kind of parity between the two.
I am saying, it's another form of persecuting the supply -- and putting it at increased risk -- in lieu of dealing with the demand or even being honest about it.
It's also another excuse -- vehicle -- for the prescriptive moralists. Who, the more they complain about something, seemingly inevitably turn out to be engaged in it themselves.
"I can't control myself. But, by God, I can control you!"
Sex trafficking is a horrendous circumstance. Unfortunately, I'm left with no trust in our politicians being honest brokers with respect to the laws they introduce. Even if they honestly want to address the problem, they will -- heh -- not be able to "control themselves" with respect to how they use the expanded powers, going forward.
While there is clearly a crusade against the former (as the aerlier attacks on CLs erotic/adult services listings made clear), and that's probably why Backpage got lots of attention in the first place, it's not clear that the reality of Backpage matched the surface appearance or the reality of the earlier targets.
It's being siezed because it collaborated with criminal gangs who were kidnapping children and selling those children for sex.
People who think Backpage was helping law enforcement keep track of child rapists should read what Backpage themselves admit.
For the "they help law enforcement" argument to work Backpage needed to have kept the orginal ad text submitted by the criminal gangs and then either report that to law enforcement, or have it available to turn over when given a court order. What they actually did add a filter that removed words suggestive of illegal activity and then post the ad anyway.
> At the direction of CEO Carl Ferrer, the company programmed this electronic filter to “strip” —that is, delete—hundreds of words indicative of sex trafficking ( including child sex trafficking) or prostitution from ads before their publication. The terms that Backpage has automatically deleted from ads before publication include “lolita,” “teenage,” “rape,” “young,” “amber alert,” “little girl,” “teen,” “fresh,” “innocent,” and “school girl.” When a user submitted an adult ad containing one of these “stripped” words, Backpage’s Strip Term From Ad filter would immediately delete the discrete word and the remainder of the ad would be published. While the Strip Term From Ad filter changed nothing about the true nature of the advertised transaction or the real age of the person being sold for sex, thanks to the filter, Backpage’s adult ads looked “cleaner than ever.” Manual editing entailed the deletion of language similar to the words and phrases that the Strip Term From Ad filter automatically deleted—including terms indicative of criminality
Clearly, the "they help law enforcement" argument is fucking bogus.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...
I have a big problem with this FOSTA law been passed in the dark with provisions such as retroactive effect which is clearly unconstitutional and indicates shoddy workmanship. But there looks to have been a very serious problem at Backpage.
But yeah, it's made a LOT worse by the lack of empathy, compassion, and understanding (not to mention puritanical notions) people have towards sex work.
I've lost almost all respect for most modern feminists simply because they refuse to acknowledge actual logic and statistics - wage gap BS, sex trafficking hysteria, apex fallacy (e.g. the top 0.001% are over represented by cis white males, but we'll ignore the bottom 20% of laborers, homeless, disposables who are all male), etc.
My litmus test for any feminist is whether they support the legalization of prostitution. Logically, it's her body, her decision. Right?
Nevermind the issue with a male's ability to legally obtain sex / intimacy, even if paid - you'd think this would be considered a human right, deserving of more talk time than, say, the tax-free status of tampons, but I digress...
Feminists who use the sex trafficking BS as a defense against legalization of prostitution deserve 0 respect. They are simply opportunists, trying to establish a monopoly on access to sex, economically no different than Standard Oil, Microsoft, etc.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/...
[1] https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-... [2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=link+between+prostituti... [3] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/chelsealyn-rudder/sex-for-sal... [4] https://ec.europa.eu/anti-trafficking/publications/links-bet...
Correct. And I'm all for legislation that empowers a group of LEOs to troll ads to find the people doing that and throw them in jail. Hell, I'd be fine with my taxes being raised to pay for it as well.
Backpage is scum and they clearly interacted with such criminals.
That said, the laws that have been created recently are not a good thing and are intentionally designed to enable reaching beyond the narrow goal we both agree on.
Dead Comment
I’ve personally donated to St James Infirmary in SF and related to charities that provide related protections.
Even in places where prostitution is legalized (Amsterdam), trafficking is an issue. When I was in Amsterdam 7 or so years ago, I recall stories of Russian and other traffickers.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/07/02/oakland-police-scanda...
https://babe.net/2017/07/11/perfectly-legal-cops-trick-prost...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_abuse_of_sex_workers_in...
I am not quite cynical enough to think that law enforcement pursues these sites for the purposes of maintaining that imbalance. There are many different attitudes towards sex work (and everything else) among law enforcement officers, and many of them probably really do believe they're doing it to keep kids safe.
I was thinking that they wanted it to be more hidden... so that they could ignore it.
In fact, some studies suggest that legal prostitution actually enables trafficking to go unnoticed. If prostitution is illegal the police can crack down on any form of it they encounter, so if the prostitute in question is a victim of trafficking they're now in contact with law enforcement and might be given a way out.
With legal prostitution, the situation can go on much longer before law enforcement can step in and reach these victims.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
What study was this and how do we know its results are accurate and apply in this case?
Edit: Also, hopefully we as a society should be looking to reduce, not increase a trade where a human being has to sell themselves like a piece of meat.
That's basically the argument against capitalism and wage-labor, sure. But, strangely, many people cheering shuttering prostitution marketplaces are quite happy maintaining and exacerbating conditions in which the bulk of the population is economically coerced to sell themselves like a piece of meat, they just prefer making conditions worse for those who don't have much to sell that is valued by anyone with the means to buy other than sex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_prostitutionhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2kJM9yQs9k
Arguably, this is an attitude problem on the demand side - people who want to buy other people like they're pieces of meat - rather than something about the supply, or the trade itself.
Here's a related interesting phenomenon: https://www.google.com/search?q=professional+cuddling
To end with a question: Would you consider professional dominatrixes to be in the trade [of selling themselves like meat]?
Edit: By the way you may find exchanging sex for money deplorable, but how about having sex for a promotion, or requesting sex in exchange for funding, how about sex for a home and meal. In reality people use sex all day in exchange for something. It is just when money is involved people flip.
Sometimes the law is just shit.
Deleted Comment
Backpage had a system in place to detect ads offering e.g. child sex and... edit those ads to conceal their criminal nature from detection by rephrasing the give-away words with less obvious ones. You would think they would report those ads, but no - they concealed.
[1] https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...
The question is: whether adult sex worker sites in general should be legal. I think the answer to that is very clearly yes. If you allow the market for adult sex worker sites to exist, backpage becomes trivial to replace, the market will take care of that overnight.
Backpage essentially had a profanity and bad term filter on their ad posting software, like any site has when you post anything to take out derogatory terms.
The report says backpage 'knowingly concealed evidence of criminality' for removing bad terms? They didn't want people posting ads with these terms because they were bad words, not that they supported it.
> First, Backpage has knowingly concealed evidence of criminality by systematically editing its “adult” ads. As early as 2006, Backpage executives began instructing staff responsible for screening ads (known as “moderators”) to edit the text of adult ads to conceal the true nature of the underlying transaction. By October 2010, Backpage executives formalized a process of both manual and automated deletion of incriminating words and phrases, primarily through a feature called the “Strip Term From Ad Filter.”
> The terms that Backpage has automatically deleted from ads before publication include [insert terms that are bad] When a user submitted an adult ad containing one of these “stripped” words, Backpage’s Strip Term From Ad filter would immediately delete the discrete word and the remainder of the ad would be published.
That seems like ANY site filter out there and included bad words, derogatory words and words that traffickers might use to block them. Because they posted the ad later doesn't mean they 'knowingly concealed' it, it just means they blocked ads that have words they don't want advertised i.e. derogatory or bad words or words that seem underage even if it was a legal worker such as 'school girl outfit'.
They eventually even started blocking outright but let the user know what words were banned. Seemingly a basic profanity filter.
> Over time, Backpage reprogrammed its electronic filters to reject an ad in its entirety if it contained certain egregious words suggestive of sex trafficking. But the company implemented this change by coaching its customers on how to post “clean” ads for illegal transactions. When a user attempted to post an ad with a forbidden word, the user would receive an error message identifying the problematic word choice to “help” the user, as Ferrer put it. For example, in 2012, a user advertising sex with a “teen” would get the error message: “Sorry, ‘teen’ is a banned term.” Through simply redrafting the ad, the user would be permitted to post a sanitized version.
The items above seem mainly focused at adult sex workers. Basically legal sex workers using taboo words not trafficking... everyone knows 'teen' is a range starting at 18 and like under 30 on porn sites. Just strange that they call it concealing it when they are blocking it.
The argument for child sex trafficking is weak as well. It blocked people under 18 posting, if you changed the date/age it would post. Not sure how that is bad either, it was blocking underage posters. This is hardly encouraging it.
> Ferrer directed his technology consultant to create an error message when a user supplied an age under 18. He stated that, “An error could pop up on the page: ‘Oops! Sorry, the ad poster must be over 18 years of age.’” With a quick adjustment to the poster’s putative age, the ad would post.
The argument against child sex trafficking is weak as well and again seems more focused at sex workers.
> Backpage knows that it facilitates prostitution and child sex trafficking. In addition to the evidence of systematic editing described above, additional evidence shows that Backpage is aware that its website facilitates prostitution and child sex trafficking. Backpage moderators told the Subcommittee that everyone at the company knew the adult-section ads were for prostitution and that their job was to “put[] lipstick on a pig” by sanitizing them. Backpage also knows that advertisers use its site extensively for child sex trafficking, but the company has often refused to act swiftly in response to complaints about particular underage users—preferring in some cases to interpret these complaints as the tactics of a competing escort. Backpage may also have tried to manipulate the number of child-exploitation reports it forwards to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The statements, unless there is other supporting evidence, seem like conjecture and again mainly focused at online prostitution advertising not trafficking.
The company employees said "everyone at the company knew the adult-section ads were for prostitution and that their job was to “put lipstick on a pig” by sanitizing them". Well yeah because that is what that section was for probably. How does that relate to child trafficking? Just because they weren't fast to moderate reports doesn't mean they condoned it, "refused to act swiftly in response to complaints".
The items about delayed reporting is bad and if they knowingly had underage people on there that is bad, but most of that just seems like conjecture and the reporting/moderation delays can simply be just that slow processes at any company, on a large site it might take time to moderate it.
This still seems like an attack on sex workers who are adult and the site backpage, the report throws in 'child sex trafficking' to make it seem worse. As if backpage wanted to threaten their whole market position for sex workers and revenues for illegal activity.
Really surprised this whole argument basically is against their profanity/term filter to PREVENT bad postings and they were later moderating it and reporting it just not fast enough apparently. You can't even get a response from youtube quickly but backpage can respond to every claim 24x7.
This is an attack on online sex worker advertising full on.
[1] https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...
The law does criminalize any activity relates to prostitution, not sex trafficking. That's not spin - that's literally the express purpose of the law as written. It's not a coincidence that the law is written to apply to all forms of sex work.
Blumenthal, the senator who authored the bill, has been personally crusading against sex work from the past decade, longer than he's even been in the Senate. He chose Backpage as the particular target for this bill, but it's not like he hasn't gone after any and all forms of sex work in the past.
My guess is all of the charges will be dropped as it was mainly to ad hominem them to allow this Backpage takedown.
> Backpage started as the literal back page of the New Times, filled with classified ads. [1]
The New Times has a history in being pro-civil rights and anti-war [3][5].
> The Phoenix New Times is a free alternative weekly Phoenix, Arizona newspaper, published each Thursday. It was the founding publication of New Times Media (now Village Voice Media), but The Village Voice is now the flagship publication of that company.[3]
> The paper was founded in 1970 by a group of students at Arizona State University, led by Frank Fiore, Karen Lofgren, Michael Lacey, Bruce Stasium, Nick Stupey, Gayle Pyfrom, Hal Smith, and later, Jim Larkin, as a counterculture response to the Kent State shootings in the spring of that year. Gary Brennan played a role in its creation. According to the 20th Anniversary issue of the New Times, published on May 2, 1990, Fiore suggested that the anti-war crowd put out its own paper. The first summer issues were called the Arizona Times and assembled in the staff's La Crescenta apartments across from ASU. The Arizona Times was renamed the New Times as the first college issue went to press in September 1970.[3]
New Times has been kicking up dust on authoritarianism since the 70s. Lacey and Larkin also won a lawsuit against Arizona as recently as 2013 for false arrest which is still used to attack them [3].
> In December 2013, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors agreed to pay Phoenix New Times founders Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin $3.75 million to settle their false arrest lawsuit against the county defendants.
Take a look at their civil rights fund to see what I mean about how they take authority orgs/politicians to task and encourage civil rights [2].
They have been trying to take down the New Times, Village Voice Media and Backpage for nearly a decade and a half [3].
Both Larkin and Lacey are big civil right advocates and donate heavily to civil rights causes, sex rights, gay rights and immigrant rights [2][3] and the New Times attack politicians for corruption on the regular. After they attacked Arpaio they had nearly a decade of attacks from him and associated groups [3]. They did a strange tactic attacking Larkin and Lacey going after New Times readers data and identities which Lacey and Larkin refused to give up.
> In October 2007, Maricopa County sheriff's deputies arrested Lacey and Larkin on charges of revealing secret grand jury information concerning the investigations of the New Times's long-running feud with Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio. In July 2004, the New Times published Arpaio's home address in the context of a story about his real estate dealings, which the County Attorney's office was investigating as a possible crime under Arizona state law. A special prosecutor served Village Voice Media with a subpoena ordering it to produce "all documents" related to the original real estate article, as well as "all Internet web site traffic information" to a number of articles that mentioned Arpaio. [3]
Arpaio tried to get all information on all Phoenix New Times readers and the paper has been known to be tough on Arpaio overreaches in Arizona on immigrants and civil rights advocates.
> The prosecutor further ordered Village Voice Media to produce the IP addresses of all visitors to the Phoenix New Times website since January 1, 2004, as well as which websites those readers had been to prior to visiting. As an act of "civil disobedience", Lacey and Larkin published the contents of the subpoena on or about October 18, which resulted in their arrests the same day.On the following day, the county attorney dropped the case after declining to pursue charges against the two. [3]
> The special prosecutor's subpoena included a demand for the names of all people who had read the Arpaio story on the newspaper's website. It was the revealing of the subpoena information by the New Times which led to the arrests. Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas dropped the charges less than 24 hours after the two were arrested [3]
> In the weeks following the arrests, members of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, of which the Phoenix New Times is a member, provided links on their websites to places where Arpaio's address could be found. This was done to show solidarity with the Phoenix New Times.[3]
There is a strange section of the Backpage report attacking Lacey and Larkin for selling it to an outside investor who is offshore. They appear to hide ownership from them some might say wisely if it is being the whipping boy for 'trafficking' claims when really it is a sex worker ad website [4].
> Third, despite the reported sale of Backpage to an undisclosed foreign company in 2014, the true beneficial owners of the company are James Larkin, Michael Lacey, and Carl Ferrer. Acting through a complex chain of domestic and international shell companies, Lacey and Larkin lent Ferrer over $600 million to purchase Backpage from them. But as a result of this deal, Lacey and Larkin retain significant financial and operational control, hold almost complete debt equity in the company, and still receive large distributions of company profits. According to the consultant that structured the deal, moreover, this transaction appears to provide no tax benefits. Instead, it serves only to obscure Ferrer’s U.S.-based ownership and conceal Lacey and Larkin’s continued beneficial ownership[4].
The whole report on Backpage, and their owners Lacey and Larkin who started New Times and Village Voice, might be a massive ad hominem [4]. It also appears to be an attack on owners of alternative media influence and funding for civil rights matters [2].
My guess is Lacey and Larkin, civil rights fighters that seem similar to Larry Flynt [2], won't let this just happen and they'll fight it. Most of the attacks on Backpage, and previously the New Times and Village Voice, attacks their character via ad hominems because they are causing trouble for authoritarians and pushing alternative news media funding, my guess is this takedown of Backpage is no different.
I have posted more here on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16780579, everytime they have been arrested they have later been cleared and even won damages for false arrest in 2013 in Arizona. It is easier for authoritarians to win initially against civil rights advocates if you associate them with bad things and ad hominems, but the truth prevails. This could be a modern day civil liberties event unfolding.
[1] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2018/04/0...
[2] http://www.laceyandlarkinfronterafund.org/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_New_Times
[4] https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...
[5] http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/
Deleted Comment
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
On the one hand, I don't think prostitution should be illegal.
On the other hand, it's not clear whether marketplaces like backpage bring the black-market closer to the light of day & make things safer for sex workers, or if they amplify demand to the point where suppliers have incentive to find new sex workers using more and more coercive methods.
Or do you think of something more like a doctor's office with security cameras, a receptionist, online reviews?
Because it seems modern, legal prostitution is a lot more like a medical service, similar to how veterinarians calm a cat in heat [1].
[1] https://everything2.com/title/How+to+calm+a+cat+in+heat
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
The Backpage version, where they knowingly facilited ads for children who'd been kidnapped, drugged, and were being raped for money, is a bad idea.
It's really fucking weird reading this thread and seeing so much support for backpage. I hope it's because people don't know what Backpage were actually doing.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...
All that said, I'm reading especially "Findings (II.B)" and I'm not really convinced that child sex trafficking was really an intention with the site; at worst, it sounds like they weren't super aggressive about dealing with it (which, itself, isn't great).
From those pages:
> Backpage itself reports cases of suspected child exploitation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children; in some months Backpage has transmitted hundreds of such reports to NCMEC.2
...
> NCMEC paid Backpage $3000 to host ads for eight underage girls, including one 13-year-old girl advertised in hundreds of cities across the United States; NCMEC later claimed that the image of the 13-year-old was posted online instantly and received over 30 calls within seven minutes of going live. Although Ferrer disputed NCMEC’s claim in an internal email a week later, asserting that the ad triggered a fraud alert and was removed from the site in less than two minutes, he admitted: "NCMEC posted 8 underage pics. We have not found all of them."
Were these photos of girls who were clearly underage? Depending on photo content, it can be practically impossible for the average person to correctly guess a subject's age, or even just whether or not they're a minority.
NCMEC even says as much:
> NCMEC has noted, "it is virtually impossible to determine how old the young women in these ads are without an in-depth criminal investigation. The pimps try to make the 15 year olds look 23. And the distinction of whether the person in the ad is 17 or 18 is pretty arbitrary."
This is either damning -- if the photos were the sort that the average person could immediately identify as underage -- or kind of a skeezy move by NCMEC.
Andrew Padilla, head of moderation:
> And even if an age verification was a deterrent to someone hoping to post an ad on Backpage to traffic a minor, it doesn’t mean they’re going to stop trying to traffic a minor. It only means they won’t be doing it on our site, where Backpage, NCMEC and law enforcement are in the best position to put an actual stop to the crime.
Assuming they were operating in good faith with NCMEC (not an assumption I'm committed to), he makes a reasonable point. And how would an effective age verification system be built for a site like this?
> Backpage documents also suggest the company failed to use its evaluation and training procedures to impress the seriousness of child exploitation upon its employees. As part of its investigation, Subcommittee staff examined several performance reviews for Backpage moderators...
Okay, if you're going to run a site like this, trying to identify child exploitation should be a much higher priority than this paragraph describes.
Still though, I'm leaning more towards "incompetent and poor judgement" than "malicious intent" here.
The thing is, those engaged in commercial sex have a vested interest in defending deregulation of all parts of it: that way they make more money. If you were to try to pass legislation that, for example, would require a license to purchase sex and that the license would be granted only upon passing sexual health medical exams, people selling sex would see this as an obstacle to getting as many clients as possible. I know several people think you can just tell at a glance if someone has an STI and that condoms give all the protection you need.
I think there are a lot of vulnerable people in the sex trade who just aren't speaking up because, well, they're vulnerable.
Not everyone is vulnerable, of course. There are those who are perfectly ok and happy and vocal. But that can't be everyone.
What is your basis for this assertion? I think having a tool that makes it easier to vet clients could just as easily be a boon to many sex workers that would allow them to safely see more clients?