Backpage.com’s Vicious Battle with the Feds
I don&#x27;t understand the thru-line of this Wired story. It effectively concedes the government&#x27;s case: Backpage built a system that coached users to post trafficking ads without setting off its controls. If you posted an ad containing “lolita,” “rape,” “fresh,” or “little girl” (the article&#x27;s examples), the system would <i>alert the user</i> so they could use different terms, and then <i>accept their new ad</i>.<p>There&#x27;s lots not to like about SESTA, but the Backpage people weren&#x27;t (AFAIK) charged under SESTA.<p>Why am I meant to care about the Backpage owner&#x27;s colorful history? Isn&#x27;t the important thing I actually need to know to understand what happened here buried towards the bottom of this story, in a couple paragraphs discussing what they were actually charged with? Agree or disagree with the prosecution, but <i>that&#x27;s the story</i>.<p>I feel like people on message boards are sold on a narrative about how child sex trafficking never happens, which is easy when it&#x27;s an abstraction. But it does happen.<p>A middle aged man I briefly worked with, and that a friend of mine worked <i>for</i> --- Peter Privateeer, the former CEO of a company called Reflex Security --- just finished serving 12 years in prison for buying a 14 year old girl. The pimp who sold her had been holding her at gunpoint and forcing her to &quot;service&quot; his customers. Where did the pimp meet the CEO? On Backpage. The girl cost $600.<p>The ads for teenaged children Backpage was handling were real. Not all of them, I&#x27;m sure. But it was really happening. And Backpage <i>helped it happen</i>.<p>Should a safe online market for sex workers exist? Perhaps. But we should be able to at least agree that the people who operate it should take their responsibility as a steward of the public safety seriously. That&#x27;s not Backpage. Backpage did did at least as much to set back the cause of safeguarding sex workers than any misguided lawmaker.