The Backpage.com Case Is Testing the Limits of the First Amendment
politico.com
politico.com
I noticed one thing, for example, which I will try to describe in a steel-manning way. It appears backpage, at least in part, was working with law enforcement and human trafficking activists. Perhaps not to the extent that those activists would have liked, but I suspect those activists would have preferred them to shut down completely. In assisting authorities/activists, certain keywords were filtered from ads, keywords which might have indicated that someone was under-age. This act of removing those keywords is what now has them in trouble, because the plaintiffs are arguing that backpage is now the "author" of that material rather than just a platform. If this is true, that seems like a dirty trick. The authorities/activists trick you into "helping" in such a way that you actually become a criminal, and then they come after you for it.
If that standard stands then they are asking for everything to be either user moderated or an absolute cesspool since taking any non-mandatory moderation action would make you responsible for contents. In which case they won't be able to beat up on social media companies for any of their content since they were the ones who tied their hands.
That would make for a hilarious Zuckerberg congress meeting part two. "I would love to help with election meddling but my lawyers can't agree on anything that I could do that wouldn't leave me legally liable for high level felonies."
But it was not doing this. Backpage was in fact doing things that made it harder for law enforcement to take action.
When people describe Backpage's actions as really fucking evil it's not because no-one is steel-manning backpage. It's because Backpage genuinely was really fucking evil.
When someone posts an ad saying something like "16 year old escort" a non-evil company would have alerted law enforcement. Backpage didn't. Backpage returned an error message saying "Oops! Sorry, the ad poster must be over 18 years of age." (This is the real error message). It would then allow the poster to make an ammendment to the ad and re-submit it. Backpage would not keep this information.
Please read this report, because it clearly details what Backpage did. And don't forget, this document just lists the things that Backpage have said they did.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...
Besides the great Alt-Comics section with Life in Hell and Red Meat, they had a sprawling "personals" section that read like a BDSM and fetish smorgasbord. Nobody seemed to mind that.
Pimps hold far less power when the prostitutes have legal recourse and police on their side.
Decriminalizing prostitution and criminalizing the person doing the "buying" in public is the maximum that is viable without encouraging abuse.
Pretending it isn't a partisan issue is silly.
The stats to which you refer don't support that dismissal.
In that survey, 50% of Dems supported legalisation/decriminalisation (which you'll notice is not quite a majority, or is a narrow one if you ignore the undecideds) and 34% of Republicans supported it.
So it's a 16 percentage point difference. Yes there's more support among Democrats, but not so much so that you can dismiss it as a partisan issue.
Anecdotally, here in Australia, someone I know very well works in a government policy role administering sex work, and some of the most strident campaigning in favour of re-criminalisation comes from the left. In this state it was a conservative government that legalised it in the early 90s, in the first year they came to power after 10 years of social-democratic government. There's no campaign from the conservative side to re-criminalise it here.
Similar reason why allowing everyone firearms works in Scandinavian countries but is an issue in the US
Finland has a very high number of (hunting) weapons. It is significantly harder to get a pistol or a semi-automatic weapon.
Switzerland, I think, allows semi-automatic firearms for almost everybody, and has more liberal gun laws in general.
Why isn't there any app where you can just pay to have guaranteed safe sex in a government audited establishments without any drama?
Right now, many play a game of courting a potential mate. Sometimes, feelings are hurt due to unpredictable nature of this game. It results in manipulation, lies and faking. It might make people who repeatedly fail to get any sex, a criminal.
When was the last time your date showed up without makeup? This reeks dishonesty, ambush and manipulation.
Efficiency of this market can cure many issues like sexual harassment, end scam market of pickup artist and many other crimes of passion.
Chasing other sex should be outlawed unless they've subscribed to the app and the application for sex goes through the government devised route.
If I've unsubscribed then no one should offer me drinks for the purpose of getting sex. This is good for everyone's sanity.
Why not just have an app and bet sums of money there, then everyone will be motivated to acquire more money instead of playing other games.
Blame is on society for making the act of paying for sex through sweat/blood a stigma.
Without sex we would have gone extinct by now and yet sex is not considered as the primary need of humans.
I know a lot tech workers who were promised sex in return of favours - training, jobs, finanical help using signals and later got sexual harassment charges when they successfully delivered.
Humans are seflish. They want something in return of something.
I'm not sure if it's too linked with pair bonding to be its own thing, but that's certainly something to consider.
Still very much in the camp of legalization myself. If only because I can't fathom why the State gives itself the mandate to ban the exchange of this particular service in principle.
that's exactly what religious conservatives of all sorts say when they want to prosecute extramarital sex
Is the even a country with the likes of such a "sex market"? Is it worse or better than others?
If you're not doing this bit in a standup routine, you should be. "It's not cheating honey! It's just the commodification of sex!"
Backpage is about children who were kidnapped, drugged, and sold to be raped being advertised on Backpage. This happened with the knowledge, and support, of Backpage staff, including the owners of the company.
Even if we legalise prostitution between consenting adults who have the freedom to make the choice, we're never ever going to say it's legal to kidnap a child, drug her, and sell her to be raped.
Please read this. https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...
The courts and the congress have a very strange interpretation of this, for example in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich
(note: I am not saying I disagree with a decision to outlaw discrimination, just pointing out the absurdity that the Commerce Clause was 'interpreted' as being the only way to do this [which ultimately resulted in government limiting free speech])
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
In hand-wavy terms... in this case the commerce clause was used to prevent a farmer from growing wheat on his own land for use in feeding his own livestock. The federal government had established limits on wheat production at the time as part of the "New Deal".
The "time of war" argument is completely bogus. The word "war" doesn't appear anywhere in the decision itself nor are its consequences limited to wartime in any way. The law in question was a 1938 law that was trying to increase government management of agriculture economic activity. While progressive are happy to use any crisis that comes along to further this sort of overreach into economic activity, including war, one could equally say that the courts decision was probably at least as influenced by the fact that Roosevelt had appointed 8 of the Justices that heard the case and the court was ideologically aligned with him... since the 1938 law was part of his disastrous economic program (http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-D...), it's little wonder they sided with the government.
And wheat absolutely was a national, not a local, product in 1930, which made it well within the textual scope of the commerce clause. Whether or not they should have implemented wheat controls is separate from the fact that they had the power to do so.
The whole reason this power was given to Congress was so that no one state could unfairly regulate economic activity in another state. The idea being that it was better to have one set of relatively neutral rules than dozens.
As for your study: the two authors of the study are noted neoconservatives who claim that the economy only recovered when unions lost their power, completely at odds with actual history, in which the height of the American economy coincided with the rise of union power.
They're not arguing that they have the right to publish ads for illegal services. They're saying they're not liable for what 3rd parties post on their site.
They're saying they're more like journalists, simply reporting what other people are saying (which happens to be promoting illegal services). While it sounds like they are pro-decriminalizing sex work, no one is arguing that it's legal to advertise criminal behavior (selling drugs, weapons, sex, etc.). They're just telling the courts to go after those advertisers individually rather than Backpage.
They clearly wanted to profit off of the sex industry in places where it was still illegal to do so.