Goverment Shuts down BP Adult Section

[Hugh G. Rexion]

You can call me a genius if you want....but can't they just mirror the site offshore and restart but this time not edit any of the ads?

That's what got them in trouble the first time. They needed to flat out reject illegal ads instead of helping the person placing the illegal ad by changing the wording of the ad.

I think another website will eventually step in to their place. I did see a lot of new registrations on HX yesterday I don't know if its good or bad.

[asiansam]

Like Obsessive, I would hope the "adult" section of BP will return, but it may well turn out that what's left of BP's management will decide they have had enough of government harassment and just cut their losses and leave it as is. Even without evidence necessary for prosecution, the government has unlimited resources and can make life very unpleasant for those whom they target. Just ask any AMP owner who is "inspected" once a week and ticketed for no paper towels in the bathroom dispenser, etc.

It's all pointless after all. As Hugh G., said, if not BP, then another site will pick up the slack. The same "adult" advertisers are now just posting in the therapeutic massage and women-for-men personals sections, so what has the government accomplished? Just publicity and what that publicity brings. It's all money and politics every time.

[Richard Boinkwell]

Also the ads are now in the "Dating" section. So if the government let's that stand I don't know what they've accomplished.

[Libertine]

Backpage Shutters 'Adult' Ads Section Following Years of Government Bullying

"It's a sad day for America's children victimized by prostitution," said victims services advocate Lois Lee.

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
Jan. 10, 2017


Like Craigslist before it, Backpage.com has shut down the "Adult" section of its classified-ad website, amid a seemingly endless stream of government pressure. In both cases, state and federal authorities have maintained that the mere presence of open forums for user-generated adult advertising creates a market for child sex-trafficking.

Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer and his associates have been subject to lawsuits, criminal charges, economic bullying, and Congressional hearings—the latest of which will take place today, January 10, before the U.S. Senate's permanent subcommittee on investigations—in an attempt to thwart this supposed sex trade. But after proclaiming innocence and pushing back and for several years, Backpage will now—"as the direct result of unconstitutional government censorship," its lawyers said in a statement—comply with demands to end its adult-ad section.

Last fall, government officials tried to convict Ferrer and former Backpage.com heads Michael Lacey and James Larkin (founders of Village Voice media) of pimping and conspiracy to commit pimping. A judge threw out the charges, saying they were unconstitutional and violated federal law, which specifies—under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—that third-party publishers can't be held criminally liable for the content of user-generated posts. Section 230 doesn't just stop sites like Craigslist and Backpage from getting in trouble if someone posts a prostitution ad there but allows Reddit to exist without its CEO getting charged for every credible user threat, keeps Facebook from being shut down after some 20-year-old picks up a 17-year-old girl there, prevents Craigslist from being found guilty every time someone rips someone off over a used washer, and stops the feds from coming after Reason.com when the comments section contains unsavory content.

But despite Section 230's alleged protections, government officials have again and again gone after Backpage for allowing adult ads, even though these ads do not directly reference illegal activity and any illegal activity that results from folks finding each other via Backpage takes place far outside of its owners or operators' purview. How should Backpage operators know whether a woman offering dominatrix services or a "full-body sensual massage" on the site is really offering dominatrix services or a full-body sensual massage, and not simply having sex for money? How can they know if the poster who says she's 18 is actually a few months shy of it? There's no way they can, and yet this lack of omnipotence and pre-cognition apparently won't do. As Backpage, and Craigslist before it, have shown, websites are more than welcome to offer open forums for user posts without government interference so long as none of the posts have anything to do with sexuality. Yet the moment "adult" work comes into play, all free-speech protections and anti-censorship agendas dissipate. Lawmakers, prosecutors, and the media who fellate them start saying things like, "If it saves only one child..."

Shutting down Backpage won't save even one child, though, or one adult, or anybody. Backpage.com is a neutral publishing platform, albeit one that's become popular among sex workers ranging from strippers and erotic masseuses to people who offer sex for a fee. Without its adult section, sex workers of all ages will have to find some other way to advertise—perhaps simply by moving to a more discreet section of the site, as was done on Craigslist (anyone who thinks ridding Craigslist of its adult-services section actually thwarted commercial-sex advertising there should check out the site's "Casual Encounters" section now); perhaps by advertising elsewhere online (the internet is a vast place); or perhaps by returning to older client-gathering methods, like word-of-mouth or walking the streets. But what doesn't happen in all but the most fervent prohibitionist imaginations is that people whose livelihoods depend on prostitution or more legal forms of erotic work simply stop doing said work because one website won't take their ads anymore.

And authorities know this. In the criminal complaint against Ferrer, Larkin, and Lacey, officials noted that many of the women they spoke with who were now advertising services on Backpage had previously advertised on Cragislist's adult section, on MyRedbook.com (shut down by the feds in 2014), and on other websites and escorting forums which had since been banned.

The only way officials are going to stop online ads for prostitution is by ramping up their already intensive efforts hundreds-fold and going after any and all websites that allow user-generated content. I'm beginning to think they might try.

"As federal appeals court Judge Richard Posner has described, the goal is either to 'suffocate' Backpage out of existence or use the awesome powers of the government to force Backpage to follow in the footsteps of Craigslist and abandon its Adult advertising section," Backpage attorneys said in a Monday statement. "Posner described such tactics as 'a formula for permitting unauthorized, unregulated, foolproof, lawless government coercion.'"

Sadly, these hammer-handed attempts actually hurt most the people they claim to help: young people forced or coerced into prostitution. Backpage has helped law-enforcement in hundreds of investigations into missing minors and potential sex-trafficking victims by turning over their contact and financial info (or that of those who posted their ads) to authorities when such ads are discovered, as well as flagging ads that contain images of suspiciously young individuals. And because Backpage operates across the country, authorities searching for victim or perpetrators on the move could sometimes trace their movements via Backpage ads.

"It's a sad day for America's children victimized by prostitution," Lois Lee, founder and president of sex-trafficking victim organizaiton Children of the Night, said Monday. "Backpage.com was a critical investigative tool depended on by America's vice detectives and agents in the field to locate and recover missing children and to arrest and successfully prosecute the pimps who prostitute children. The ability to search for and track potentially exploited children on a website and have the website bend over backwards to help and cooperate with police the way Backpage did was totally unique."

"I have worked in this field my entire adult life," Lee added. "Child prostitution existed long before Backpage or the Internet. Backpage is not the cause or even a cause. Backpage was an opportunity to better attack the problem."

[ExecutiveVIP]

All they need to do is play whatever offshore hosting cat and mouse game ThePirateBay plays. Everytime one government or another raids the server rooms of ThePirateBay, it takes them no more than 12-48 hours to restart in a new datacenter/domain/country.

I think they've even extradited the founders of the piratebay from Cambodia and Thailand back to Sweden to face trials, and they still cant stop them. I'm pretty sure the piratebay founders are major mongers too, since they were living full time as expats in monger heaven countries.

[DMan5000]

Looks like all the providers and AMPs that advertise on BP to the advice of Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge: Improvise, adapt, overcome.

[Obsessive]

This article covers what I was talking about as to what the real downfall of BP was:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-ol...110-story.html

To those who don't feel like reading it, the point is that BP would not have been touchable had LE not been able to determine that ads were edited by BP staff to hide a problem. Had they just outright rejected problem ads, they would not be held liable for the content.

This is a lesson to anyone who operates a web site. If you allow anyone to post anything and it's possible they will post about something criminal, then you should either have to have a total hands-off approach or you auto-reject and manually reject items of concern. Also if someone reports a problem post, you make sure your system automatically sends a message to the person reporting the issue something like, "Thanks for the report, we can't guarantee this will be looked at in time as we don't have enough staff to review every report sent to us." Then if you do look at the reported post, do not edit it. Just reject it if needed. As for people making posts, if you have an internal system auto-check for potential issues, just reject or approve a post through automation. Don't edit the ad and don't allow any internal communication about the ad - simply approve or reject. Make sure it's an auto-approval, because if it can be shown you allow staff to manually approve of ads with blatant illegal content then that's almost as bad as editing the content. You want to take hands-off automation as absolute as possible and when there is any question or gray area that you have to make a decision on, always reject.