>It's a grander version of the old trope of an FBI agent posing as a 14 year old girl in a chat room to nab a predator. If it was I wouldn't have a problem wit

>It's a grander version of the old trope of an FBI agent posing as a 14 year old girl in a chat room to nab a predator. If it was I wouldn't have a problem with it. The reality is, by running the sites, they are actively enabling what they consider harmful. Consider other examples of police stings. When doing drugs, they often use actual drugs because the mere presence of drugs at a sting is not an issue. But when dealing with more dangerous material, they use fakes to ensure that people don't get hurt, and the times when they haven't used fakes it has been considered extremely bad and had people push for policies to change it. In this particular case, the sites are not like drugs which are inherently harmless just by being present, but are far more dangerous material which results in significant harm to those the police allow to continue to be victimized. Imagine if police ran a human trafficking front and actually kidnapped people, justifying it by saying they were working to get the guys running the whole thing. Would that be acceptable? I think not.