Small ads sex trafficking: the battle against Backpage | Hacker News Reader

Small ads sex trafficking: the battle against Backpage

theguardian.com

69 pointssalad7798 comments

Backpage sound pretty evil here, any argument about prostitution can be ignored entirely:

Backpage was focused on getting as many ads posted as possible. It instructed moderators to edit ads and strip out the code words used by pimps to indicate that the person in the ad was a child.

Words such as “Lolita”, “fresh” and “amber alert”... were edited out and the ads posted.

In one subpoenaed email believed to be from Backpage management, moderators were instructed: “If in doubt about underage: the process for now should be to accept the ad”

(I added formatting for clarity)

Oof. Penny-wise, pound-sociopathic. I wonder how high up this went? I mean, "management" could be just a low-level moderation supervisor barely above the "moderator" role themselves, or could be somebody just under the C-levels.

Or it could be all of the top level managers. What it could be doesn't really matter though, what matters is what it really was.

When a low level manager institutes a policy to tell child rapists not to use the term "amber alert" in ads that's a really bad thing.

When the owners of the company approve that policy, and spend years in repeated court cases to defend the ads, claiming that they're powerless to stop the ads and even if they weren't powerless to stop the ads they don't need to because that's the law: that's a completely different level if evil.

Yes, which is exactly why this case should be dug out until this is known with as great a precision as possible, who knew of this, who collaborated and who - including investors, shareholders what have you - let it happen to line their own pockets.

I find it hard to believe that such a policy could ever be created without the managers buy in or tacit consent (maybe to create plausible deniability).

If it proven beyond any reasonable doubt that they all knew of this and allowed it then I'm all for piercing the corporate veil and going after all their assets, including private ones and shareholder assets unless it is totally clear that they did not know about this to compensate the victims.

Just some bits from the linked article:

"“I called Backpage dozens of times asking them to take down those photos, that my daughter was just a child and that what had been done to her was a crime,” says Kubiiki. “They refused and said if I didn’t pay for it, they couldn’t take it down. In the end they just stopped returning my calls.”"

That alone makes them complete scumbags, the rest of what's documented in the article should make a good basis for a criminal case against them.

> "“I called Backpage dozens of times asking them to take down those photos, that my daughter was just a child and that what had been done to her was a crime,” says Kubiiki. “They refused and said if I didn’t pay for it, they couldn’t take it down. In the end they just stopped returning my calls.”"

I know. This is where it goes to almost cartoonish villainy.

I'm honestly bewildered how this even happens. This must have escalated up the support levels and involved several people, and one individual listing that isn't even applicable anymore can't be a huge revenue source for them. Even assuming that it's a company led by amoral psychopaths, why push back for so little gain? how did nobody in the chain of information say "what the hell are we doing"?

Possibly to protect the "neutrality and freedom of speech" argument - it's 3rd party content, we only publish, it doesn't contain actual nudity so CP laws don't apply, go ask the poster to take it down, we can't help you.

And then in court: it's 3rd party content, we only publish, we only remove when required by law, posters are responsible for everything.

Of course this cover is busted if they really edited those ads.

From the article:

> “At first I didn’t see the nakedness or what she was wearing or the poses she was in, but then it began to sink in, what the ad was for, and everything just fell apart.”

This does seem to imply actual nudity, which makes it even more surprising they didn't immediately take it down when it was pointed out to them.

Immediately after nakedness it mentions she was wearing something.

Not 100% sure but I'm under impression that there are ways in the US to legally take down any CP. I haven't yet seen a single semi-legit website which allows it, even 4chan etc. Maybe I'm wrong, in such case just disregard this point - the rest still stands.

It was absolutely at the top of the company.

See the photo caption: "In court: (from left) Carl Ferrer, James Larkin, Andrew Padilla and Michael Lacey are sworn-in prior to testifying before the Senate earlier this year. Photograph: Cliff Owen/AP" -- these people knew Backpage was being used to traffic children to be raped, and they fought in court to be allowed to continue to do so.

The I am Jane Doe film is a good documentary that covers the events.

That Backpage's C-suite appeared in court does not somehow imply that they were willingly complicit in child abuse. However, the fact that they plead the Fifth does look pretty damning. While it can't be used against them in a court of law, the court of public opinion is a different matter entirely.

I've read the Senate report they're referencing. It's pretty damning. That said, other commenters here have mentioned some important costs to shutting them down. Spokesmen for nonprofits that combat trafficking have lamented that when traffic moves away from Backpage, it becomes infinitely harder to track and reach out to victims.

> “amber alert”

Eghh, I literally had a chill go down my spine while reading that. Yeah, screw Backpage.

Nice of them to not even bother including any of the sex workers' rights groups who can talk about the facilities for making safer arrangements that backpage provided or about how rare actual child enslavement is and how often they're found because the customers report them because that wasn't what they wanted to pay for.

This is basically a PR piece for the puritan/radfem lobby that hates sex workers on principle and has allied itself with NGOs whose budgets depend on vastly inflating the problem and ignoring the fact that under the current system law enforcement are usually more dangerous to the workers than anybody else :(

BULLSHIT. A 13 year old child was kidnapped, abused and sold. she was not a sex worker.

You misunderstood GP's comment. They're not suggesting that abusive sex trafficking doesn't exist, but that it's the small minority of what happens on Backpage.

There has to be a place to draw the line - if somebody is running a child prostitution ring under your nose on your property, then you've failed in your responsibilities as a business owner.

Too many software companies these days operate as "dumb pipes" and are allowed to wash their hands of their responsibilities as middle-men for unthinkable crimes. Whether it's Amazon selling lead-laden baby-toys (and then blame ephemeral Chinese companies for the problem) or classified pages being a storefront for child-prostitutes, or social media being a vector for harassment and threats:

If you own the venue and you profit off of its use, you have a responsibility to not facilitate crime.

Does this logic apply to ISPs facilitating piracy? Phone networks allowing illegal protests to be organized? Operating system vendors letting criminals hide behind encryption?

Finally, letting child sex traffickers post ads online seems like a very easy way for the police to find them. Why are we ignoring the fact that, by doing nothing, Backpage would have made the rescue of the kids easier?

This logic falls down:

1. If the police catch every child sex trafficker selling on Backpage, then there won't be anymore posting to Backpage. The ones left will either get more savvy, or already more savvy and weren't using Backpage.

2. If they don't catch a large enough percentage of the traffickers, then the ease and reach/audience that Backpage provides will still entice people to use it.

Sure, you can use it while it exists (to find and catch traffickers), but it either won't exist for long, or continuing to operate will still allow some amount of trafficking to successfully happen.

Backpage is not only child traffickers though, I've heard that it's used by lots of American prostitutes too (prostitution being illegal in the US, though).

Which is why you have comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695515#14696098

I imagine child sex traffickers aren't very smart people. There will be some organized crime that avoids it, but also some lazy opportunistic perverts that are really really stupid.

Remember, the Dunning-Kruger effect was originally about a guy who robbed a bank without a mask in broad daylight that had cameras. Police showed up at his house the next day and arrested him.

One of the big issues is that as soon as you delve into content-censoring, then the law makes you liable for everything (from child abuse to libel). The law takes an all-or-nothing approach.

For example, think about what YouTube would be like if every video had to be manually vetted by a real person before it was uploaded.

That said, if someone points out illegal things happening on your site (e.g. the mother pointing out the photos of her 13-year-old daughter), and you still do nothing, that is an issue.

Easy workaround: don't censor anything but set up an automated tip generator to the authorities if certain keywords are present in the ad.

I had a file upload service for a while (files.ww.com) and in spite of the very clearly worded warning pedophiles would attempt to use the service and a couple of them (and their buddies) found themselves in more trouble than they ever wished they had. I still got sick of it though and shut the whole thing down but it worked just dandy as a honeypot. The guy at the Dutch vice squad that was my contact died, I'm full of respect for people that will step into this junk to combat it, that can't be easy on the senses. He was called in to deal with the case of a childcare center in Amsterdam where a bunch of sub-humans had been abusing children as young as 19 days old (I wish I was making that up) to make videos in order to sell online.

Disgusting doesn't begin to describe it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_sex_crimes_case

Please be warned that this is not a pleasant page to read.

I read an article a few years ago about some of the people who work to identify child pornography victims. One of the quotes stuck with me when one of the investigators talked about some of their worst cases where they've literally watched these children grow over the course of years through the images of them that's shared online. People talk about maintaining your distance, but I don't know if that's even possible in that kind of situation. The idea of going into work everyday, knowing that there's even the slightest possibility that you'll find new images of a child you haven't been able to identify or save for the bulk of their childhood, is a mental challenge I can't even begin to comprehend.

They not only did nothing, they went to court to protect their ability to do nothing, and to keep running the ads, and to keep profiting off the kidnap and rape of children.

yes but if we don't permit the dumb pipes in the hands of our companies then won't they just be run by people outside of the countries we have legal jurisdiction making the problem harder to solve? Will we then assume as we can't see the problem that we've fixed it? Is it about actually solving the problem or just that its uncomfortable that its near daylight? That's what I wonder as many of these "solutions" just push the problem away instead of solving it.

I sympathize, but shirking liability has been a central tenet of Capitalism longer than child sex trafficking has been illegal.

When I design apps and platforms, I have to deal with this issue all the time. Too much to check and too many slippery slopes. What are the good solutions?

And when you build open source then people can install it and do whatever they want. That's the price of decentralization.

I feel that's missing the point of the article, which is a specific attack on Backpage's policy and approach to sexual content involving children. Nothing is said about sex work generally hosted on the website.

> under the current system law enforcement are usually more dangerous to the workers than anybody else :(

The system forces them underground and to take more risks, but I'm pretty sure that the cops aren't usually the ones abusing them (though this obviously depends on locality, I guess).

This isn't about stopping sex work. This is pretty much centred on stopping child rapists kidnapping and selling children to be raped by other men, using a variety of codewords to communicate that these are children being sold.

There were tens of thousands of children involved here.

The article is about discovery in litigation showing that Backpage pursued specific policies to encourage ads selling children. Taking that evidence at face value, there was obviously enough money in it for backpage to want to facilitate such activity.

I agree with your point in general terms: people who hate freedom will always latch onto this sort of thing to shut down activity that they don't like that isn't harmful. At the same time, people who do like freedom shouldn't defend those who abuse their freedom. There are things, like child prostitution, that society just won't stand for. Chalking it up to "collateral damage" is not a viable response. If we want a society where the Internet is free, we're going to have to accept that when someone does cross the line from providing a neutral platform to actively facilitating unacceptable activity, the there will have to be tremendous consequences.

What do you feel is a reasonable amount of children to be raped and sold on a website before shutting it down?

How many do we let be raped and sold before we shut down the internet? How many children do we let get mutilated in car crashes before we outlaw driving? The answer surely is non-zero for you in both of these cases. There is a usually unarticulated cost to freedom.

(I'm simply pointing out the foolishness of this argument, not offering an opinion on this case)

You clearly have not read the article, specially this part:

   The trafficker was caught and given five years in jail, 
   but the explicit photos of MA remained online. “I called
   Backpage dozens of times asking them to take down those
   photos, that my daughter was just a child and that what
   had been done to her was a crime,” says Kubiiki. “They
   refused and said if I didn’t pay for it, they couldn’t
   take it down. In the end they just stopped returning
   my calls.”

Possibly my bias as an American, but only 5 years for kidnapping a child into sex slavery?

If there was any sanity in the world, it should be death.

I have.

Given the article's blatantly a hit piece, and doesn't offer a second side to the story whatsoever, I'm unwilling to assume that that's a complete and accurate rendition of what happened.

Mate, I have no time for swerfs or "moral majority" puritans. They can all go die in a fire. But people in positions of power who knowingly allow child sex trafficking to go on on their site whilst taking every action to protect _themselves_ but not _the children_? I don't care how rarely they did it, it's like saying you only rarely murdered someone.

And yeah, escorts should be free to advertise their services on the internet and pretty much every law relating to consensual prostitution should just plain be ripped up. But I'm not going to shed a tear over Backpages.

This article is entirely written from the POV of the complainants though, and I'd note that backpage's actual shutdown of that section was due to repeated bad faith attacks from law enforcement, not due to the incident in question.

Maybe backpage fumbled handling it, but their track record for helping in such cases is rather better than the article implies. See also, for example, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/10/backpage-adu... where opinions are divided and https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/backpage-sex-workers... which suggests backpage is actually a tool for supporting workers.

Assuming backpage is exactly as bad as a single lawsuit against them claims is not, IMO, a particularly good way to form an opinion.

Yep, unfortunately there is a whole set of non-profits/NGOs that are financially incented (their budget/survival & salaries depend on it) to inflate the problem to ludicrous scale. Yes, there is definitely an child enslavement / underage prostitution problem - and one even one child suffering like this is too many, but when they lie about the scale of the problem, they lose me. Using lies as their platform destroys their credibility. If their motivations are genuine, then they should be transparent and completely honest.

These articles always have some anecdotal stories to tug at our heartstrings (as children suffering should make us sad about how evil some humans can be), but they always blatantly refuse to provide accurate statistics and lead us on to believe that problem is massive.

For example, they give credence to a completely made up number in the article that a responsible journalist would never cite: "Some campaigners believe that up to 100,000 children like MA are exploited for profit across the country every year." - especially when they can find real statistics (see links below).

Read these articles for fact-based reporting on this subject:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/...

https://www.villagevoice.com/2011/06/29/real-men-get-their-f...

http://www.politifact.com/ohio/statements/2016/jun/10/joyce-...

(edited for formatting)

> “I called Backpage dozens of times asking them to take down those photos, that my daughter was just a child and that what had been done to her was a crime,” says Kubiiki. “They refused and said if I didn’t pay for it, they couldn’t take it down. In the end they just stopped returning my calls.”

Man, I get the argument for free speech, but at least donate the profit from those listings to charity, and respond with empathy & take listings down when the actual mother calls you. He's already been arrested - literally nobody benefits from it staying up.

That's still a place I wouldn't want to be in, but at least you can argue a couple benefits like e.g. being able to catch some of the traffickers that would otherwise have gone deeper underground.

> Kubiiki’s anger at Backpage grew and grew.

Historically, creating Warmaiden mothers whose life goal is to take you down ends badly. It's the only reason the Senate even cared about the issue.

Yes, this is very surprising. There was no reason for backpage not to remove the listing and refusing to do so could only lead to a lot more problems for Backpage.

Mary Mazzio:

"...But the thing that shocked me most about making this film was that those guys who ran Backpage, back in the day they were rabble-raising libertarians, yet, at some point, my view is that maybe the money became so outrageously intoxicating, perhaps there was this notion that the sale of children was simply collateral damage.”

I'm a little unclear about what she was expecting. To my knowledge, libertarians are not find of enforcing their morals on others.

Maybe she was confusing "radical libertarians" with "radical liberals?"

Do you really think someone could spend two years on a documentary without realising such a mistake?

a radical libertarian would basically be an entrepreneurial anarchist - but what would a radical liberal look like.

john brown

A core Libertarian value is individualism. So something like trafficking would be anathema to any Libertarian. Furthermore, I'm sure many would acknowledge that under a certain age it is not credible that any child has the ability to choose prostitution.

I'm not a Libertarian myself, but wanting to reduce the power of the state doesn't mean you believe in slavery.

No, but being libertarian does mean you believe, to varying degrees, that many issues of freedom are not responsibilities of the state.

For most libertarians, it is a fundamental right to not have others interfere in your life. That's why murder, rape, kidnapping would all still be frowned on.

Being made a child sex slave is a pretty major violation of your liberty.

Murder, rape, kidnapping all violate the NAP. Morals aside, child prostitutes are no different than child models, actors, etc. All child professions can be coerced and share the same decision issues of child consent vs parent's rights and so on.

No different? The outcome of being a in bad play or modeling a terrible jumper is very different to being raped and abused. This about the abuse and slavery - are you OK with that? Just hand waving and saying 'other things are kind of bad' doesn't negate the impact that this has on individuals, and that people have been profiting from this abuse.

Prostitution doesn't have to have abuse and slavery. I'm not excusing the BP people, just saying the consent issues are the same for any child labour.

If you are a Libertarian then you believe that free will is key to our interactions, trafficked people are not able to use their free will, therefore they cannot enter into contracts, and therefore should not be something that libertarians allow... But sounds like these guys didn't care about anything except their own freewill, and that of the people that were financing them.

Libertarians would not interfeer with prostitution, but they would very much object to selling somebody else for sex.

Theft of agency is the biggest crime that there is; I don't see how any political group wouldn't object to that sort of thing.

But I could definitely see a Libertarian deciding something along the lines of, "we should err on the side of being permissive." But come on, you don't see big casinos systemically looking the other way on backroom games of Russian Roulette.

Of course not. Who would want to clean up that mess?

Should not cops, like, read this website too and do a raid everybody they seen someone offer themself nearby while looking teenage?

The major problem in our society is that police and detectives cost us a lot of money but basically do nothing. The only thing really saving us is that people of XXI century are unbelievably benign.

I understand the problem is basically understaffing. You don't have enough workforce to spend the time tracking these people down then actually doing something about it. It's the reason burglaries and bank robberies go unsolved until you have multiple occurrences and enough people see footage on the news.

I understand the problem is wrong priorities, where cops are engaged in busy work so they have no time to fight the actual crime.

Said busy work often concerns imaginary crime, like going after weed consumers or "computer pirates".

Often the system is either dysfunctional, and avoids crime, or crooked, and works to cover up crime.

Staffing issues exist, but in general police don't prioritize pimps over johns or girls. Especially if they can get drug convictions.

This a very strange biased analysis. I'm neighbors with a police officer,my best friends sister is a police officer. People are not benign by a long shot, the police stay VERY busy,and prostitution is not a big deal in the first place so it's not a high priority.

So you tell us that prostitution by a 13 years old girl is not a high priority for them? That's all what we ever needed to know then.

I hate to break your bubble but tons of shit happens like this constantly and all the time. Like 1/3 of all murders go unsolved. The police don't have the resources to catch all of the bad shit humans do to each other.

What's "the resources" and why don't they have enough to even try and catch people raping thirteen years old girls!?

Damn, don't we put people in prison whose sole crime is having jpgs with nude photos of said girls? And then we turn a blind eye to men who actually do the pimping and raping of such girls on industrial scale. I call bulshit on this one.

To me this system seems deliberately broken and we should bring people who broke it to justice.

Over half of people in jail are drug offenders, most with no other crimes other than drug possession or dealing.

You want to know where the resources are going, instead of being used to catch people raping 13 year old girls...

Just look where the most money is MADE in the justice system to find out where the manpower is directed.

What's most vile about police enforcement around prostitution is that it focuses quite proactively on punishing all the wrong people.

Women with few choices who need help? Proactive arrest. ESPECIALLY if they're women of color.

Free, safe people who are willingly selling a service to customers? Why, that's a crime!

But pimps? Well that's just way too much work. I still remember an Oakland cop I talked to telling me, "The best way to stop a pimp is to arrest his girls, and then he has no money and gets in trouble with his boss."

It's a truly sad state of affairs when the literal slavers are the people law enforcement feels least inclined to catch, instead focusing on punishing people who for the most part are harmless (often with profound racial biases in enforcement, e.g., the "black women in a parked car with one man is suspicious" policy in many major cities).

The problem is that anti-pimping laws have impeded prostitutes' ability to operate safely without pimps.

Most anti-pimping laws ban any kind of profiting from the proceeds of prostitution. So if a prostitute tries to arrange an apartment to work out of, or hire a legitimate bodyguard, the law sees those people as pimps. As a result, she ends up having to work with a criminal that offers protection and a workplace: IE a pimp.

I'm pretty sure that's a problem, but not THE problem.

The core of the problem here is the fact that prostitution is illegal. If you legalize it, you can regulate it, and take steps to prevent human trafficking and child prostitution. The vast majority of clients will happily go through the legitimate channels and buy from licensed providers. A small minority will continue to trade in children through shady services, but the smaller volume will make it much easier for law enforcement to tackle.

Everything you create online has abuse potential, I found that out the hard way with the whole streaming webcam thing. But it is how you deal with that abuse potential that makes all the difference, these guys appear to have done that in the most cynical way possible: by allowing their website to be used to commit terrible crimes against minors with internal policies explicitly geared towards enabling.

This should not - in my opinion - stop at a fine or some kind of slap on the wrist but should be factored under aiding and abetting and should come with jail time for those involved. If that's what it takes to get people to take this stuff serious then so be it.

BP doesn't do anything that couldn't be facilitated by a P2P system. If someone built a P2P classifieds app - should the developer be responsible for everything listed?

I think policing should fall 100% on the police. If something is illegal to upload or illegal to download - that's the responsibility of the end user - not the ISP, or the router manufacturer, or the SSL issuer, or the OSS contributors.

> BP doesn't do anything that couldn't be facilitated by a P2P system.

Indeed.

> If someone built a P2P classifieds app - should the developer be responsible for everything listed?

No, but that is not the case here. I don't see how you could monetize a p2p system so that the creator of the software would profit of it but would not have a way to shut down illegal content, either requires some central system.

The backend could be powered by an app-coin issued by developers during an ICO.

I could see an argument for criminalizing decentralized architectures because "think of the children".

I know you´re trying real hard to do that but again: that is not the case here. So maybe stick to what is really happening rather than to imagine what you think might happen?

You made the hypothetical point that "Everything you create online has abuse potential" and concluded "it is how you deal with that abuse potential that makes all the difference".

I'm simply making the point that creators have no moral obligation to police how people abuse their creation.

So here's what will happen: BP will be shut down. The service providers and clientele will move to system that's more distributed and harder to track down. LE will chalk this up to a win, BP execs will get punished, and children will continue to be abused except tracking them down will be more difficult.

True, but there's one catch: backpage allegedly edited ads to hide signs that they involve children.

If this is proven, all their claims of neutrality should go out the window.

People doing illegal stuff will use whatever means they can get their hands on to do their illegal stuff. Giving them an easy to find platform means more illegal stuff is done, not less so adding a barrier will cut down the amount of abuse at the expense of making it harder to track them down.

It's a tough choice but rewarding the enabling of crimes like these is entirely the wrong signal, it makes it seem as if this is normal and acceptable which it never should be.

The other side of the coin is that the operators probably already use multiple sources for their 'customers' (I use the word loosely, you might as well read co-criminals for it), and that shutting this one down will only cut off a portion of the hydra that has visibility in the otherwise respectable part of the world. Punishing the customers of child prostitution while at the same time legalizing the regular form goes another step in the right direction, but may not be acceptable in all political climates.

Backpage actions look bad and it may very well be that they deserve a serious fine or prison time for the management.

However, it was not through Backpage that their child was abducted. Instead, without Backpage, they might have never gotten their child back.

As a father, if Backpage is closed, I wouldn't feel any safer for my kid.

> America’s largest classified website, was to buy a fridge. The second time she sold some clothes.

I've never heard of backpage as anything but prostitution. Are there regions where it won out over Kijiji and CraigsList for buy and sell classifieds?

> But the thing that shocked me most about making this film was that those guys who ran Backpage, back in the day they were rabble-raising libertarians, yet, at some point, my view is that maybe the money became so outrageously intoxicating, perhaps there was this notion that the sale of children was simply collateral damage.

Really services like Backpage make the work if finding kidnapped people much easier. This has been going on long before there was a backpage.com site, but before the internet these women were forced to walk the streets and the likely hood of this woman finding her daughter back in the 1980s would have been almost nil. It's a double edged sword but if I were in law enforcement I would see Backpage as a valuable intelligence asset.

Did you read the article? They were editing posts that were obviously offering minors, and then allowing them, so as to profit from the post.

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