5 ms·

Nice 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 pr

by mst 9y ago

Nice 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 ago
BULLSHIT. A 13 year old child was kidnapped, abused and sold. she was not a sex worker.
- umanwizard 9y ago
  You 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 ago
There 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 ago
  Does 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 ago
    This 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 ago
      Backpage 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 ago
      I 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 ago
I 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 ago
This 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 ago
The 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 ago
What do you feel is a reasonable amount of children to be raped and sold on a website before shutting it down?
- hackinthebochs 9y ago
  How 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 ago
You 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 ago
  Possibly my bias as an American, but only 5 years for kidnapping a child into sex slavery?
  - charlieflowers 9y ago
    If there was any sanity in the world, it should be death.
- mst 9y ago
  I 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 ago
Mate, 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 ago
  This 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 ago
Yep, 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]

by mst 9y ago

charlieflowers 9y ago

BULLSHIT. A 13 year old child was kidnapped, abused and sold. she was not a sex worker.

umanwizard 9y ago
You 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 ago

There 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 ago
Does 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 ago
  This 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 ago
    Backpage 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 ago
    I 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 ago

I 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 ago

This 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 ago

The 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 ago

What do you feel is a reasonable amount of children to be raped and sold on a website before shutting it down?

hackinthebochs 9y ago
How 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 ago

You 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 ago
Possibly my bias as an American, but only 5 years for kidnapping a child into sex slavery?
- charlieflowers 9y ago
  If there was any sanity in the world, it should be death.
mst 9y ago
I 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 ago

Mate, 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 ago
This 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 ago

Yep, 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]