A system Backpage claims to have put in place to suppress child sex trafficking was actually used to groom child sex trafficking ads (and, presumably, others) for mainstream acceptance.
You build a form that allows ads to be submitted. It refuses to allow certain illicit keywords. People resubmit a few times until they get the form to accept the ad.
Prosecution: You built a tool to help child sex traffickers groom their ads!
You build a form that allows ads to be submitted. It strips out certain keywords.
I read the indictment. It's pages and pages about the evils of prostitution, with just a few bits like - gasp - stripping out the word lolita to make them sound unsympathetic. I'm not impressed. I'm honestly surprised that you are.
I was in the industry when the word "lolita" suddenly went from common porn advertising (just like "teen") to forbidden. The content didn't change one bit; something changed in the legal landscape and the industry just did a global search and replace of their marketing content. They stripped out the keywords.
Further, the indictment I'm reading doesn't simply talk about them filtering out the word "lolita", but a variety of keywords, and has examples of instances where they had known problematic ads with human review and stripped out problematic photos manually before running the ads.
Starting with page 42, they list these ads. They somewhat hilariously call the subject of every ad "victim 1", "victim 2", despite there being no evidence, or indeed reason to believe, that they are or were.
I am reading this as someone who's thinking like the author of the reason article: A website running prostitution ads should legally be allowed to exist. You claim to be open to that position. Read like this, ignoring everything that presumes such a thing is in itself wrong, there are maybe 15 or 20 points out of the 156 that could even be considered relevant.
Which, incidentally, wasn't a crime until March 2018, when Congress passed a law that not only made it a crime, but retroactively criminalized it for Backpage.
This is absurdly unconstitutional, of course[0], and the bill's author (Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut) should know that, since he was the Attorney General for Connecticut before.
Of course, Blumenthal does know this, because he's been waging a personal war against prostitution for the past decade. He's the reason that Craigslist shut down the "erotic services" section about ten years ago, which meant that sex workers had to start posting in the personals section. (Of course, this gave them cause to write FOSTA/SESTA, at which point Craigslist had to shut down the entire personals section as well.)
[0] https://medium.com/@TechFreedom/yes-sesta-is-probably-uncons...
The prosecution (also apparently you) is/are trying to convince us that these guys are knowingly facilitating child sex trafficking, which is something we can agree on is bad. So let's throw out all the points in the indictment that aren't child-specific?
It just doesn't seem to leave much, unless you believe that every mention of the word "teen" is a case of child sex trafficking. I considered adding a variety of NSFW links here to the official "teen" category of popular porn tube sites, but I'm sure folks can find them on their own. And as I'm sure you know, it's not real.
You make a lot out of the "max 500 reports per month" item, but given that it's likely a laborious manual process, how many do you want to report? There are thousands of ads from fake "lolitas" and "teens", none of which are any more credible than the porn tubes. The NCMEC doesn't want a bunch of spam either.
If you'd like to call out any specific #s in the indictment for special attention, I'm happy to engage in an honest dialogue.
Please point out to me the #s that you find damning.
Chapter #61 discusses this scheme. It's ridiculous to claim that any of the words used in the indictment strongly suggest child prostitution.
>array of terms that are suggestive of child prostitution (e.g., "lolita," fresh," "high school," "tight," "young")
> 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.”
Should Backpage have allowed anyone to take down their competitors ads by sending an email claiming that the competitor is underage?
Backpage didn't dispute the identity of the children.
Please read the documents.
What a wonderful strawman.
>that child contacts you to ask for that photograph to be taken down, you should probably do a bit more than say "no",
How do you tell that a specific person is in a photo? How do you tell that said person is a child?
>you should probably try and see if you are hosting images of child sexual abuse
How would you propose they do that?
>Backpage didn't dispute the identity of the children.
>Please read the documents.
Did you read the chapter following the your quote?
Now, the government may create laws that oblige a distributor of pornography to be in possession of such records, and someone how is not may be in violation of those laws.
It also doesn't matter if the material is advertised as "teen" or not.
Similarly, you may argue that a site like Backpage should be legal, as long as they verify the age of the advertisers. It's a rather strange argument, after all, they can't verify that the person they verify is the person that turns up at the appointment. But that is not the law.
The government is instead alleging that there is a law that makes Backpage-like advertising of prostitution illegal, regardless of whether the ages were verified or not.
All of them?
Should every ad containing the word "tight" go to the NCMEC?
Backpage have already admitted a lot of this stuff was happening.
Are you missing the bits where children who were advertised on Backpage contacted backpage to get these ads removed, and backpage refused to do so?
We have testimony from children.
We know Backpage applied energy towards changing a Backpage operated system that had the first-order effect of facilitating child sex trafficking. The speculation is about Backpage's intent, and for the intents of this discussion, that gets determined in court.
>You build a form that allows ads to be submitted. It refuses to allow certain illicit keywords. People resubmit a few times until they get the form to accept the ad.
to see where the claim is being made that the company was helping to craft ads to avoid detection.
2) Backpage claimed to be helping law enforcement.
If that were true when someone submits an ad for "15 year old lolita" the form would keep the details, ask the submitter to change the words, and then Backpage could either submit those details to law enforcement or wait for LE to turn up with a warrant.
What actually happened was Backpage said "Whoops, you can't use that word", and then allow the submitter to resubmit, and then the system would delete all trace of the orginal ad. So, when LE turned up with warrants asking for all the advertisers who'd tried to use the phrase "15 year old lolita" Backpage could say "we don't have that information".
I run some online chat rooms, and the chats auto block some bad words by default and others words I added to the censor filter, I would hate to think someone would one day post that I tell spammers how to send spam by blocking one word and not blocking shorturlDotcom/M$a$k$eMoney$from$Home
The game of block this, spammers find work around, share with other spammers, add those to the block list, repeat; is not intending to teach scammers how to scam better.
re 2) from what I read long ago, for years BP did send notices to law enforcement when they felt that there were under age pictures used, is this not true or did this practice stop?
I have also read that just by being the main watering hole for this kind of thing, many agencies used it to look for abuse and trafficking victims, with some jurisdictions letting the self promoting adults go. I've also read where some cops were setting up fake ads to catch people looking for sex,
So it has always appeared to me that BP was helping law enforcement in several ways all over the country.
I understand some people think the best way to help is to shut down naughty ads completely, I myself think that is short sighted. I guess some people think things they did helped the dark side (in any way) / gave any comfort to the enemy and therefor they should be destroyed.
You say "what actually happened..." Is there an article somewhere saying that LE got a warrant looking for this phrase you mention? Sounds outrageous to me.
Beyond that, they had a bad word filter to help moderate the site. To make themselves look better, yes. They didn't want a bunch of ads on there using the word "lolita". They could have blocked ads with that word, thus guiding "traffickers" in how to write ads. They chose apparently to delete these words. Both of them would have been used against them. In either case, they must have had tens of thousands of ads matching, with the actual underage persons involved being in all likelyhood a small minority.
#51: NCMEC claims in front of Backpage that "many" of the ads feature children, and either this, or posting prostitution ads in general, is illegal. Ok. Nothing here about Backpage not deleting ads involving underage people.
#54: Backpage asked NCMEC what kind of prostitution ads would be acceptable. NCMEC declines the answer. Backpage says "Adult prostitution is none of your business". The indictment mentions this proudly - because why? Because the indictment is 100% presupposed on the idea that Backpage advertising adult prostitution is a crime.
#63: NCMEC tells them, quote "a large portion of the ads on Backpage were blatant prostitution ads". No mention of underage persons.
#80. A mention of an email in which a limit on the reports to NCMEC is suggested. No details as to why, if maybe NCMEC asked for less reports, or if any such limit was ever implemented.
#96. NCMEC sends a letter, suggesting: verify the age and identify of submitters, verify the age and identity of individuals in photographs, do not accept prepaid credit cards, require users to use verified email addresses and phone numbers (not sure how). Backpage ignored those suggestions.
Now, if you, like NCMEC, believe that sex trafficking is a huge issue in the US, then you may find those suggestions to be sensible. If you, like me, believe in policies that protect marginalized people who engage in sex work, you might find them to only intended to create barriers for people who do not need this kind of help. In either case, this does not mean that Backpage condoned or otherwise supported sex traffickers.
That is all the mentions of NCMEC in the indictment as far as I can see.
For reference: https://www.justice.gov/file/1050276/download
#12 Alleges the age scrubbing behavior tptacek has mentioned.
#13 Discusses their lack of interest in a warning message and cites an email discussing limiting their reporting of incidents because they didn’t want to exceed 500 reports a month to the NCMEC. Far from your claim that the motivation is unclear, it is in fact explicit.
#51 Is actually the second warning Backpage received about the underage issue, the first being a letter from the AG’s as outlined in #39
#61 Is a list of newly banned terms including, “Lolita, fresh, high school, tight and young.”
#67 Adds “amber alert” to the “strip out list” tptacek has mentioned, guided the moderation’s “cleaning” of ads pimping children; ads which were not removed.
#69 Discuss their rejection of using age-verification software because of the ~$.60 cost per query.
#72 Refers to a letter from Seattle PD warning about the prevalence of underage prostitution ads on their site.
#74 A letter from state AG’s alleging multiple counts of human trafficking through their site.
#75 Rejection of an attempt to handle the “underage issue” because it would not provide a PR benefit.
#76 A presentation by their own PR firm warning that of the three major categories of ads on their site, one was “Pimps and Men Looking For Kids.”
#77 Email about underage issue, includes joke that site should be called “entrapment.com”
#78 Padilla admits to editing 76 pages of ads with the word “teen” in them, not removing said ads.
#79 Alleges thst during performance reviews many mods who ignored underage escorts kept their jobs.
#80 Actually states the reason, “If we don’t want to blow past 500 this month, we shouldn’t be doing more than 16 per day.”
#83 Keeping a 17 year old’s ad up despite her attempt to recruit a 15 year old because the 15 year old wasn’t actually in the ad.
#86, and #87, and #88 A mother explains that her drugged, kidnapped daughter is appearing in ads on the site, cites a phone number, and asks for ads to be removed. Response is that since the site in question (Backpagepics.com) isn’t owned by their corporate entity they don’t need to bother.
#93 AZU study showing issue with underage prostitution is shown to BP along with recommendations which are ignored.
#94 Coaching someone posting underage prostitutes on how to clean up the ads while keeping them up.
You didn’t even do a good job of cherry picking, and why bother with that unconvincing attempt at deception when we’re discussing a document we’re all reading?! A document which is quite damning and conforms to tptacek’s version of events rather than your own skewed version.
And you still had the gall to open with You are clearly reading the indictment in the way you choose to. Let's have a look. Look in the mirror.
I looked at some of the points that you mentioned specifically, and I stand by my position. I support Backpage publishing ads for prostitution, and I would draw the line at them in any way supporting underage prostitution or sex trafficking. I don't see anything here that tells me that Backpage did that.
If you would like me to refute any point in particular, let me know.
Just as an example of how I am reading things. You refer to:
#39 - A letter by attorney generals saying Backpage should stop accepting prostitution ads, with the claim that "ads trafficking children" are among them in a subordinate clause. It does even claim that Backpage ignored those ads, or encouraged them.
Things like #61, #67 or #78, re. the word filter: It's obviously controversial, but look, there are thousands of ads using words like "teen" or "lolita". None of them mean that actual children are involved. In fact, NCMEC said, quote "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".
They can filter those words silently, they can block them explicitly ("guiding traffickers about how to write their ads" they will say), or they can have them posted as-is. And they can choose which of those ads warrant a report because they look like actual trafficking, which apparently they did.
I mean, let's say you and me want to run a prostitution ad site like Backpage, you figure you could do it in a way that would not end up with you in the position Backpage is in right now?
#86, and #87, and #88 is interesting: First of all, the ad is deleted once it is pointed out on Backpage.com. And Backpagepics.com may well not be under the control of Backpage, as they say; they might not be able to do anything about it.
Now, reading this I did think that not bothering, on purpose, to respond to a mother who's child has been kidnapped is pretty awful behaviour (though it still doesn't proof they condoned trafficking).
However, the indictment doesn't quote Padilla here, it paraphrases. For all we know, he told the subordinate: Answer the email, but just so you know this, Backpagepics.com is not owned by us, in general we don't have a legal responsibility to deal with them. Or, maybe Padilla showed a gross lack of empathy here.
But think the government wouldn't blatantly misrepresent this email, while also not lying? Think again.
As I said, if you would like me to address a specific point, I am happy to.
Despite your effort to frame the conversation that way, nobody is claiming that every "lolita" Backpage ad was a pimped child. The claim is simply that some were, and that Backpage knew it. It wasn't up to Lacey and Larkin to make a best effort at profiting from illegal prostitution ads while not profiting from child sex abuse: they were repeatedly given ways to mitigate the latter crime, and they repeatedly refused to do anything meaningful about it.
They belong in prison.
Let's roll with that. Since it's impossible to know which pr0n on tube sites is underage, and it's almost certain that some will be, all porn tube sites must be banned.
Since it's impossible to know which email accounts are used for child sex trafficking, and it's almost certain that some will be, all email services must be banned. There's really no limit to how far you can go with this.
Why don't you start right now? Youporn, xhampster, xvideos, there are dozens - they all have "teen" sections. Send them a letter letting them know that their website is used by "child" pornographers (you're unsure which images, of course, it's really hard to tell with 17/18 year olds). That starts Claim #1 "defendant was notified that their site facilities child pornography". Better yet, get a law enforcement agency to do it, that looks better on the indictment. The fact that uploads ban/strip the word 'lolita' (they do, actually) - Claim #2!
The good news for the Backpage guys is that in court, every single one of those points in the indictment are going to have to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. The bad news is it won't matter because what's really going on is that they're being prosecuted for facilitating adult prostitution, and our puritanical society has barely come to grips with the fact that sex toys are now legal (marijuana is still pending).
No matter what you think of Lacey and Larkin, the loss of backpage and craigslist adult is a huge step backwards for female autonomy.
For the nth time, I'm receptive to the harm reduction argument for sites like Backpage. They just need to be run by people who won't try to profit from child prostitution.
Supporters of Backpage can talk tough on message boards in advance of the trial, but those guys are going to lose in court, and lose bad. It's a nightmare indictment. This notion that they're going to prevail at trial seems like it depends on the idea that the jury is going to nullify for two middle aged men who knowingly profited from child sex trafficking. It's not going to happen.
That leaves the moral question.
They were running a board posting prostitution ads. We agree that this is a-ok. The claim is that in some cases, some of the posts were advertising underage prostitution or sex trafficking. The number is disputed, but I think we can also agree it was a minority. I am sure we can further agree that inevitably, since some sex trafficking exists, someone will try to advertise it.
The attorney generals, or NCMEC, argued that Backpage should shutdown it's prostitution section, citing, among other things, sex trafficking. You are open to the idea that in the name of harm reduction, such a section should exist, though. So ok, Backpage doesn't shut it down.
Some suggestions were made how Backpage might otherwise reduce sex trafficking occurring on their website. Those included things like having submitters provide ID documents. It seems that you believe that refusing to do so is what made Backpage evil, when it otherwise would have been ok. That obviously depends on the sensibility of those suggestions. Maybe you think that they were no-brainers, likely to save the lives of thousands of children. I think they were invasive, made in bad faith, not likely to make a difference, yet totally undermining the Backpage as harm reduction argument.
Suffice it to say that I don't want to run a prostitution website with your blessing, but on the mercy of a bunch of attorney generals not being able to convince you that I didn't do "enough" to combat abuse. That seems like a precarious position to be in.
Now maybe if they did require IDs, or implemented other changes, they would have gained your approval. But it is unlikely it would have saved them from an indictment, or from the ire of sex-trafficking hysterics, nor the politicians trying to ride the PR wave.
There are sites that work differently than Backpage. They have advertisers maintain permanent profiles. They have higher barriers to entry and more checks. They may require a login to see any content. This gains them a lower profile, but ultimately does not protect them (see Redbook, Rent Boy, and probably others I do not recall right now).
The majority of sex workers are neither sex trafficking victims, nor high-class escorts with a Twitter profile. A lot of them might be similar to, say, the mother portrayed in the film Florida Project. They don't want to maintain a profile. This is not their full time job. They might post an ad today to earn some money, then delete it tomorrow. Backpage served this clientele. The silver lining here might be that the government is not, now, in the possession of the identities of tens of thousands of these woman.