> But all evidence shows that Lacey and Larkin did everything they could to stop or limit child sex trafficking on BackPage.com.
No, it really doesn't. They were going out of their way to reduce reports to law enforcement:
> The record also contains substantial evidence that, as a matter of policy, Backpage often chose to err against reporting potential child exploitation. As the Subcommittee reported in connection with its November 2015 hearing, in June 2012 Backpage instructed its outsourced third-party moderators only to delete suspected child-sex advertisements “IF YOU REALLY VERY SURE THE PERSON IS UNDERAGE.” In a similar email, a Backpage supervisor instructed internal moderation staff: “Young ads do not get deleted unless they are clearly a child.”
> In a similar exchange dated July 11, 2013, Vaught took issue with a moderator’s decision to report an ad to NCMEC due to “inappropriate content” and the moderator’s belief that the person in the ad “look[ed] young.” Vaught explained that she “probably wouldn’t have reported this one.” 268 The moderator responded that the girl or woman in the ad “looked drugged and has bruises”— obvious indications of trafficking—which led her to send the report. Vaught replied that the person in the ad did not look under 18 years old, adding that “[t]hese are the kind of reports the cops question us about. I find them all the time, it’s just usually you who sends them [(to NCMEC)].” Basing reporting on the appearance of the individual advertised, alone, may result in underreporting, however; as 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.”
And they were ignoring requests from trafficked children to take down ads featuring photographs of those children:
> And in February 2010, a detective emailed Backpage to alert the company that a 17-year-old girl who tried to get Backpage to take down an advertisement of herself had been rebuffed: According to the detective, the girl “tried asking for [the ads] to be removed but was told they couldnt [sic] be until enough people reported her as potentially underage.”
And then there's the word stripping. People are clearly misunderstanding what happened there. An advertiser would try to palce an ad. Backpage's algorithm would respond "Whoops, you can't use that word", and ask the submitter to drop it. The submitter would change the word and resubmit the ad. Backpage would then delete any reference to the orginal ad. This means when law enforcement comes with a warrant Backpage can say "we don't have any ads for lolita, and we have no information about advertisers using the word lolita" -- because backpage had destroyed that evidence.