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Thank you for stating this so clearly. Something always seemed off to me about the argument that punishing Backpage was going to backfire because all it would d

Thank you for stating this so clearly. Something always seemed off to me about the argument that punishing Backpage was going to backfire because all it would do drive exploitation and child abuse more underground. This claim would have merit if Backpage hadn’t been explicitly enabling a market for this terrible stuff via those keyword suggestions. I’m not going to shed any tears for the poor site owners having to face penalties for this.

JamesBarney 7y ago
To provide a little more context. They built out a "strip words from ad" feature that relied on a large list of words provided by the moderators to strip out terms. Most of these words were related to prostitution and only a few related to anything underage. But there's also this. > Similarly, in a June 7, 2011 email, Ferrer told a Texas law enforcement official that a word found in one Backpage ad, “amber alert,” “is either a horrible marketing ploy or some kind of bizarre new code word for an under aged person.”142 He told the official that he would “forbid[]” that phrase—without explaining that, inside Backpage, this meant filters would simply conceal the phrase through automatic deletion.143 Ferrer forwarded the same email chain to Padilla and noted that he had instructed a staff member to “add [amber alert] to strip out.”144 A June 11, 2012 version of the filter word list indicates that “amber alert” was indeed deleted by the Strip Term From Ad filter.145 In short, Backpage added such terms with full awareness of their implications for child exploitation. You'd imagine a normal person would think "we should ban this user, or report this to the authorities" instead of "we should definitely filter out that phrase".
adisinom 7y ago
At least according to the article it was a keyword ban, not keyword suggestions. To my reading the intent of the ban is to (1) avoid the appearance of carrying advertisements of sex with children and (2) discourage such advertisements. The critical view is that this is intended to help child traffickers write clandestine ads so they can continue using the platform however that seems unlikely. The problem with any keyword-based filter is false-positives such as kink content. Such filters operating opaquely and dropping bans in other contexts such as banking and copyright draw deserved criticism. We should be no less critical here.
- mindgam3 7y ago
  I need to dig up my original source, but my understanding from when this news first broke has been that the implementation was somewhat less innocent than a simple keyword ban and involved some kind of suggestions or workarounds for banned keywords. I’ll try to find something concrete to back this up.

JamesBarney 7y ago

To provide a little more context. They built out a "strip words from ad" feature that relied on a large list of words provided by the moderators to strip out terms. Most of these words were related to prostitution and only a few related to anything underage. But there's also this. > Similarly, in a June 7, 2011 email, Ferrer told a Texas law enforcement official that a word found in one Backpage ad, “amber alert,” “is either a horrible marketing ploy or some kind of bizarre new code word for an under aged person.”142 He told the official that he would “forbid[]” that phrase—without explaining that, inside Backpage, this meant filters would simply conceal the phrase through automatic deletion.143 Ferrer forwarded the same email chain to Padilla and noted that he had instructed a staff member to “add [amber alert] to strip out.”144 A June 11, 2012 version of the filter word list indicates that “amber alert” was indeed deleted by the Strip Term From Ad filter.145 In short, Backpage added such terms with full awareness of their implications for child exploitation. You'd imagine a normal person would think "we should ban this user, or report this to the authorities" instead of "we should definitely filter out that phrase".

adisinom 7y ago

At least according to the article it was a keyword ban, not keyword suggestions. To my reading the intent of the ban is to (1) avoid the appearance of carrying advertisements of sex with children and (2) discourage such advertisements. The critical view is that this is intended to help child traffickers write clandestine ads so they can continue using the platform however that seems unlikely. The problem with any keyword-based filter is false-positives such as kink content. Such filters operating opaquely and dropping bans in other contexts such as banking and copyright draw deserved criticism. We should be no less critical here.

mindgam3 7y ago
I need to dig up my original source, but my understanding from when this news first broke has been that the implementation was somewhat less innocent than a simple keyword ban and involved some kind of suggestions or workarounds for banned keywords. I’ll try to find something concrete to back this up.