That's not what their system is accused of doing.
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.