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> if they knowingly facilitated child sex slavery and then tried to cover it up--then it's genuinely fucked up that they can't be prosecuted for it. By adding

> if they knowingly facilitated child sex slavery and then tried to cover it up--then it's genuinely fucked up that they can't be prosecuted for it. By adding a word filter to keywords like rape and amber alert? Okay, lets think about this, your product team happens to be looking at the system logs and sees an uptick in keywords like rape. The company's internal chat goes abuzz with this company wide emergency because some of the people are uncomfortable that their platform is being used for this, after an all hands meeting a simple solution is made to simply programmatically make a word filter. Phew, now the logs won't be polluted anymore and some underrepresented people "in tech" won't go to the NY Times, Washington Post and other esteemed outlets like Twitter about how triggered they were. The whole thing had nothing to do with senators and law enforcement or what people were actually searching for, but this law would connect the dots in a completely different way and say that was criminal intent to cover up sex trafficking. Even in this backpage example, searching with those key words wouldn't have helped anyone use the site? That part of the indictment made no sense thats why it got dismissed, the Senate is being steered by emotions and proposing silly solutions.

falsedan 9y ago
> By adding a word filter to keywords like rape? Yes.
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
> By adding a word filter to keywords like rape and amber alert? Read that section carefully. They didn't make a filter to block ads with words like "rape" and "little girl"; they hid the keywords to make them harder to find while leaving the ads up, and they did not report them to law enforcement. That's not keeping out abusers, that's protecting abusers.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  even though blocking ads is not what I suggested, there were still parts of that section that were unclear were the ads saying "here's the vulnerable child you might have seen in the amber alert, in case you were searching for missing persons to rape" or something along those lines? How did you interpret it, and where could I find the truth of the matter
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    From the article: "Desiree Robinson, a 16-year-old girl who was brutally murdered in a Chicago-area garage last December, was sold through Backpage.com. Her mother, Yvonne Ambrose, testified at the hearing that her daughter was advertised on the website and purchased for sex by a 32-year-old man who killed her when she resisted." In another story, a 13-year-old girl was kidnapped, raped, beaten, drugged, and put up for sale on Backpage, with pictures of her naked and battered. The girl was recovered alive and her kidnapper went to prison, but Backpage repeatedly refused to remove the ad and its pictures unless they were paid to do so. This was also linked directly from the article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/06/backpage-ceo-arrested-sex-ads-forced-prostitution https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/06/backpage-ceo...

falsedan 9y ago

> By adding a word filter to keywords like rape? Yes.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

> By adding a word filter to keywords like rape and amber alert? Read that section carefully. They didn't make a filter to block ads with words like "rape" and "little girl"; they hid the keywords to make them harder to find while leaving the ads up, and they did not report them to law enforcement. That's not keeping out abusers, that's protecting abusers.

ringaroundthetx 9y ago
even though blocking ads is not what I suggested, there were still parts of that section that were unclear were the ads saying "here's the vulnerable child you might have seen in the amber alert, in case you were searching for missing persons to rape" or something along those lines? How did you interpret it, and where could I find the truth of the matter
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  From the article: "Desiree Robinson, a 16-year-old girl who was brutally murdered in a Chicago-area garage last December, was sold through Backpage.com. Her mother, Yvonne Ambrose, testified at the hearing that her daughter was advertised on the website and purchased for sex by a 32-year-old man who killed her when she resisted." In another story, a 13-year-old girl was kidnapped, raped, beaten, drugged, and put up for sale on Backpage, with pictures of her naked and battered. The girl was recovered alive and her kidnapper went to prison, but Backpage repeatedly refused to remove the ad and its pictures unless they were paid to do so. This was also linked directly from the article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/06/backpage-ceo-arrested-sex-ads-forced-prostitution https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/06/backpage-ceo...