Backpage.com’s Founders Speak for the First Time
I understand why Reason would want to make a cause célèbre out of Backpage --- libertarian founders prosecuted for a case combining the First Amendment with hysteria over prostitution! How can they resist! But I think they&#x27;ve been bamboozled by their subject.<p>Surely, months after Lacey and Larkin&#x27;s arrest, in writing a feature story built on interviews with the founders of Backpage, Elizabeth Nolan Brown would have taken the time to read the actual indictment against them. But if she has, she sure doesn&#x27;t expect you to, because she doesn&#x27;t expend the slightest effort in rebutting the claims it makes.<p>Take referrals to NCMEC, which Brown mentions 5 times in this piece. The indictment mentions it too, right before quoting an email by Backpage staff saying that referrals to NCMEC are to be capped at 500 per month or 16 per day. The obvious concern here would be that Backpage was not in fact reliably forwarding things to NCMEC; only slightly less obvious a concern is that they had so many problematic ads that they had to manage the volume of stuff they were sending to NCMEC, which takes some of the bite out of Brown&#x27;s argument that child exploitation simply isn&#x27;t a major problem in the adult services industry.<p>Rather infamously at this point, Backpage is accused not only of running ads for child sex traffickers, but of doing so <i>knowingly</i>: for years, under Lacey and Larkin&#x27;s management, their policy --- as Brown writes --- was to check ads for suspicious keywords. What Brown doesn&#x27;t tell you is that their software then <i>stripped the keywords out of the ads and ran them anyways</i>.<p>Nowhere in Brown&#x27;s piece does she address or even mention the allegations that Larkin and Lacey and Backpage&#x27;s whole staff took pains to conceal what they were doing, for years had a policy of denying knowledge of any prostitution on their site at all, or structured transactions and laundered money to conceal their proceeds. That doesn&#x27;t fit in to her story, so you don&#x27;t need to know about it.<p>I&#x27;m not arguing that the indictment is any more a reliable source than Brown is. I&#x27;m simply observing that there is a lot of misinformation out there about Backpage, mostly from people who have read neither side carefully, and you&#x27;d be well-served (if you care about this stuff) to read both sides.