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Small ads sex trafficking: the battle against Backpage
- mst 9y agoNice 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 :(
- charlieflowers 9y agoBULLSHIT. A 13 year old child was kidnapped, abused and sold. she was not a sex worker.
- umanwizard 9y agoYou 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Pxtl 9y agoThere 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- DarkKomunalec 9y agoDoes 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?
- pyre 9y agoThis 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.
- qb45 9y agoBackpage 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695515#14696098
- MichaelBurge 9y agoI 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.
- ivanbakel 9y agoI 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.
- pyre 9y ago> 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).
- DanBC 9y agoThis 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.
- rayiner 9y agoThe 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.
- empath75 9y agoWhat do you feel is a reasonable amount of children to be raped and sold on a website before shutting it down?
- hackinthebochs 9y agoHow 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)
- jp_sc 9y agoYou 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.”
- encoderer 9y agoPossibly my bias as an American, but only 5 years for kidnapping a child into sex slavery?
- charlieflowers 9y agoIf there was any sanity in the world, it should be death.
- mst 9y agoI 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.
- moomin 9y agoMate, 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.
- mst 9y agoThis 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-adult-classifieds-sex-workers-danger-trafficking https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/10/backpage-adu... where opinions are divided and https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/backpage-sex-workers-can-find-safety-in-online-marketplace/article35181699/ 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- catdoghorse 9y agoYep, 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/2015/07/02/are-there-hundreds-of-thousands-of-sex-trafficked-runaways-in-the-united-states/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/... https://www.villagevoice.com/2011/06/29/real-men-get-their-facts-straight/ https://www.villagevoice.com/2011/06/29/real-men-get-their-f... http://www.politifact.com/ohio/statements/2016/jun/10/joyce-beatty/thousand-child-sex-trafficking-victims-yearly-ohio/ http://www.politifact.com/ohio/statements/2016/jun/10/joyce-... (edited for formatting)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Pxtl 9y ago> 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?
- mootothemax 9y agoBackpage 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)
- Pxtl 9y agoOof. 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.
- jacquesm 9y agoOr 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.
- DanBC 9y agoWhen 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.
- jacquesm 9y agoYes, 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.
- mcguire 9y agoMary 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.
- pyre 9y agoMaybe she was confusing "radical libertarians" with "radical liberals?"
- matt4077 9y agoDo you really think someone could spend two years on a documentary without realising such a mistake?
- nuklearwanze 9y agoa radical libertarian would basically be an entrepreneurial anarchist - but what would a radical liberal look like.
- nyolfen 9y agojohn brown
- samscully 9y agoA 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.
- pcthrowaway 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- MichaelBurge 9y ago> “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.
- gommm 9y agoYes, 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.
- thriftwy 9y agoShould 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.
- tunetine 9y agoI 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.
- thriftwy 9y agoI 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.
- KirinDave 9y agoStaffing issues exist, but in general police don't prioritize pimps over johns or girls. Especially if they can get drug convictions.
- nickthemagicman 9y agoThis 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.
- thriftwy 9y agoSo 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.
- nickthemagicman 9y agoGuys we need to look past sensationalist journalism linking ALL prostitution with frickin sex slavery...and think..should voluntary prostitution be illegal?
- matt4077 9y agoGuys we need to read the article first, before someone thinks we're stupid when we seem to suggest a 13-year old, abducted and drugged girl may have voluntarily decided to prostitute herself...
- nickthemagicman 9y agoThe issue is not prostitution. It's an underage sex. If the same girl was 21 I would say it's absolutely ok.
- ljf 9y agoAbsolutely OK that she was raped, drugged and held captive?
- nickthemagicman 9y agoNote: every one of those things you just said is what's wrong. Not the prostitution.
- ljf 9y agoI agree, but you seemed to be missing the point of the article. The article was not prostitution is bad, it is look at these people profiting of the abuse of children, people who had every reason to believe abuse was occurring but who turned the other way and allowed it to happen as they were making money. So your comments seems to be ignoring the article entitling and instead picking a different battle, a battle that was not bring waged.
- rayiner 9y ago> 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.
- shams93 9y agoReally 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.
- ljf 9y agoDid you read the article? They were editing posts that were obviously offering minors, and then allowing them, so as to profit from the post.
- verroq 9y agoWill someone please think of the children!
- ljf 9y agoPlease don't make light of something so depressing. Did you read the article?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- valuearb 9y agoChild sex slavery is a direct result of laws making prostitution illegal.
- ljf 9y agoReally? So there is no child sexual slavery in countries or even states where prostitution is legal? Have anything to back that statement up?
- valuearb 9y agoof course there is, just less of it. Illegal prostitution is a crime that because its illegal is very lucrative for pimps to promote. If caught, a pimp is going to jail whether the hooker is 20 years or 14 years old, pimps have little incentive to not recruit underaged participants. And for same reason, they also have little reason to not beat and force them to work. Legalized prostitution is far safer for all participants. It's more affordable for clients, yet also more lucrative for prostitutes without pimps taking most of the money. Even with the cut bordello owners take. But mainly it can be licensed, which virtually eliminates under-age participants. No bordello owner wants to lose their lucrative legal business or go to jail. Very few customers want to risk jail either when they can easily do it legally. The truth about "child sex trade" is the vast majority is teenage girls who often enter prostitution voluntarily. Often convinced by a skeezy boyfriend, who turns into their pimp. And sometimes beaten, and not allowed to stop by same. Legalized prostitution takes away most of the customers, and the money, and is the most effective way to get these girls out of the business. At least till they turn 18.
- ljf 9y agoYou really believe that the 'vast majority' of the child sexual slavery trade is voluntary? Again, any studies or stats to back that up? Back to the article, these were adverts that were explicit in the fact that they were suppling children (Amber alert etc) do you really think that men who answer such adverts accidentally find themselves with children?
- excalibur 9y agoThe 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.
- mnm1 9y agoHow is this different from torrent sites that are constantly being shut down and prosecuted? The core issue is the same. Ironically, the rulings are very consistent: it's fine to profit off of others' misery and pain. The courts are saying that child kidnapping, rape, prostitution, and slavery are all acceptable in the name of profit. Sick.
- rhizome 9y ago>How is this different from torrent sites that are constantly being shut down and prosecuted Torrent sites are shut down over copyright infringement and Backpage is being sued & prosecuted for facilitating sex crimes.
- mnm1 9y agoRight but none of the material on torrent sites actually violates copyright so I ask again how are the two cases different? In the case of torrent sites the judge sees no problem with applying a law despite that law not being directly violated. Why isn't that done here?
- rhizome 9y agoBecause within the context of copyright law, current legal practice recognizes "contributory infringement." That aiding and abetting felonies, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and so on, is not a part of their current charges is likely a lack of evidence necessary within the completely separate set of legalities under which they're being prosecuted and sued.
- jacquesm 9y agoEverything 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.
- smokeyj 9y agoBP 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.
- jacquesm 9y ago> 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.
- kachurovskiy 9y agoBackpage 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.