[mst]

Nice of them to not even bother including any of the sex workers' rights groups who can talk about the facilities for making safer arrangements that backpage provided or about how rare actual child enslavement is and how often they're found because the customers report them because that wasn't what they wanted to pay for.

This is basically a PR piece for the puritan/radfem lobby that hates sex workers on principle and has allied itself with NGOs whose budgets depend on vastly inflating the problem and ignoring the fact that under the current system law enforcement are usually more dangerous to the workers than anybody else :(

[jp_sc]

You clearly have not read the article, specially this part:

   The trafficker was caught and given five years in jail, 
   but the explicit photos of MA remained online. “I called
   Backpage dozens of times asking them to take down those
   photos, that my daughter was just a child and that what
   had been done to her was a crime,” says Kubiiki. “They
   refused and said if I didn’t pay for it, they couldn’t
   take it down. In the end they just stopped returning
   my calls.”

[encoderer]

Possibly my bias as an American, but only 5 years for kidnapping a child into sex slavery?

[charlieflowers]

If there was any sanity in the world, it should be death.

[mst]

I have.

Given the article's blatantly a hit piece, and doesn't offer a second side to the story whatsoever, I'm unwilling to assume that that's a complete and accurate rendition of what happened.

[Pxtl]

There has to be a place to draw the line - if somebody is running a child prostitution ring under your nose on your property, then you've failed in your responsibilities as a business owner.

Too many software companies these days operate as "dumb pipes" and are allowed to wash their hands of their responsibilities as middle-men for unthinkable crimes. Whether it's Amazon selling lead-laden baby-toys (and then blame ephemeral Chinese companies for the problem) or classified pages being a storefront for child-prostitutes, or social media being a vector for harassment and threats:

If you own the venue and you profit off of its use, you have a responsibility to not facilitate crime.

[pyre]

One of the big issues is that as soon as you delve into content-censoring, then the law makes you liable for everything (from child abuse to libel). The law takes an all-or-nothing approach.

For example, think about what YouTube would be like if every video had to be manually vetted by a real person before it was uploaded.

That said, if someone points out illegal things happening on your site (e.g. the mother pointing out the photos of her 13-year-old daughter), and you still do nothing, that is an issue.

[jacquesm]

Easy workaround: don't censor anything but set up an automated tip generator to the authorities if certain keywords are present in the ad.

I had a file upload service for a while (files.ww.com) and in spite of the very clearly worded warning pedophiles would attempt to use the service and a couple of them (and their buddies) found themselves in more trouble than they ever wished they had. I still got sick of it though and shut the whole thing down but it worked just dandy as a honeypot. The guy at the Dutch vice squad that was my contact died, I'm full of respect for people that will step into this junk to combat it, that can't be easy on the senses. He was called in to deal with the case of a childcare center in Amsterdam where a bunch of sub-humans had been abusing children as young as 19 days old (I wish I was making that up) to make videos in order to sell online.

Disgusting doesn't begin to describe it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_sex_crimes_case

Please be warned that this is not a pleasant page to read.

[Bluestrike2]

I read an article a few years ago about some of the people who work to identify child pornography victims. One of the quotes stuck with me when one of the investigators talked about some of their worst cases where they've literally watched these children grow over the course of years through the images of them that's shared online. People talk about maintaining your distance, but I don't know if that's even possible in that kind of situation. The idea of going into work everyday, knowing that there's even the slightest possibility that you'll find new images of a child you haven't been able to identify or save for the bulk of their childhood, is a mental challenge I can't even begin to comprehend.

[DanBC]

They not only did nothing, they went to court to protect their ability to do nothing, and to keep running the ads, and to keep profiting off the kidnap and rape of children.

[DarkKomunalec]

Does this logic apply to ISPs facilitating piracy? Phone networks allowing illegal protests to be organized? Operating system vendors letting criminals hide behind encryption?

Finally, letting child sex traffickers post ads online seems like a very easy way for the police to find them. Why are we ignoring the fact that, by doing nothing, Backpage would have made the rescue of the kids easier?

[pyre]

This logic falls down:

1. If the police catch every child sex trafficker selling on Backpage, then there won't be anymore posting to Backpage. The ones left will either get more savvy, or already more savvy and weren't using Backpage.

2. If they don't catch a large enough percentage of the traffickers, then the ease and reach/audience that Backpage provides will still entice people to use it.

Sure, you can use it while it exists (to find and catch traffickers), but it either won't exist for long, or continuing to operate will still allow some amount of trafficking to successfully happen.

[qb45]

Backpage is not only child traffickers though, I've heard that it's used by lots of American prostitutes too (prostitution being illegal in the US, though).

Which is why you have comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695515#14696098

[MichaelBurge]

I imagine child sex traffickers aren't very smart people. There will be some organized crime that avoids it, but also some lazy opportunistic perverts that are really really stupid.

Remember, the Dunning-Kruger effect was originally about a guy who robbed a bank without a mask in broad daylight that had cameras. Police showed up at his house the next day and arrested him.

[EGreg]

When I design apps and platforms, I have to deal with this issue all the time. Too much to check and too many slippery slopes. What are the good solutions?

And when you build open source then people can install it and do whatever they want. That's the price of decentralization.

[Quarrelsome]

yes but if we don't permit the dumb pipes in the hands of our companies then won't they just be run by people outside of the countries we have legal jurisdiction making the problem harder to solve? Will we then assume as we can't see the problem that we've fixed it? Is it about actually solving the problem or just that its uncomfortable that its near daylight? That's what I wonder as many of these "solutions" just push the problem away instead of solving it.

[rhizome]

I sympathize, but shirking liability has been a central tenet of Capitalism longer than child sex trafficking has been illegal.

[moomin]

Mate, I have no time for swerfs or "moral majority" puritans. They can all go die in a fire. But people in positions of power who knowingly allow child sex trafficking to go on on their site whilst taking every action to protect _themselves_ but not _the children_? I don't care how rarely they did it, it's like saying you only rarely murdered someone.

And yeah, escorts should be free to advertise their services on the internet and pretty much every law relating to consensual prostitution should just plain be ripped up. But I'm not going to shed a tear over Backpages.

[mst]

This article is entirely written from the POV of the complainants though, and I'd note that backpage's actual shutdown of that section was due to repeated bad faith attacks from law enforcement, not due to the incident in question.

Maybe backpage fumbled handling it, but their track record for helping in such cases is rather better than the article implies. See also, for example, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/10/backpage-adu... where opinions are divided and https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/backpage-sex-workers... which suggests backpage is actually a tool for supporting workers.

Assuming backpage is exactly as bad as a single lawsuit against them claims is not, IMO, a particularly good way to form an opinion.

[rayiner]

The article is about discovery in litigation showing that Backpage pursued specific policies to encourage ads selling children. Taking that evidence at face value, there was obviously enough money in it for backpage to want to facilitate such activity.

I agree with your point in general terms: people who hate freedom will always latch onto this sort of thing to shut down activity that they don't like that isn't harmful. At the same time, people who do like freedom shouldn't defend those who abuse their freedom. There are things, like child prostitution, that society just won't stand for. Chalking it up to "collateral damage" is not a viable response. If we want a society where the Internet is free, we're going to have to accept that when someone does cross the line from providing a neutral platform to actively facilitating unacceptable activity, the there will have to be tremendous consequences.

[catdoghorse]

Yep, unfortunately there is a whole set of non-profits/NGOs that are financially incented (their budget/survival & salaries depend on it) to inflate the problem to ludicrous scale. Yes, there is definitely an child enslavement / underage prostitution problem - and one even one child suffering like this is too many, but when they lie about the scale of the problem, they lose me. Using lies as their platform destroys their credibility. If their motivations are genuine, then they should be transparent and completely honest.

These articles always have some anecdotal stories to tug at our heartstrings (as children suffering should make us sad about how evil some humans can be), but they always blatantly refuse to provide accurate statistics and lead us on to believe that problem is massive.

For example, they give credence to a completely made up number in the article that a responsible journalist would never cite: "Some campaigners believe that up to 100,000 children like MA are exploited for profit across the country every year." - especially when they can find real statistics (see links below).

Read these articles for fact-based reporting on this subject:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/...

https://www.villagevoice.com/2011/06/29/real-men-get-their-f...

http://www.politifact.com/ohio/statements/2016/jun/10/joyce-...

(edited for formatting)

[ivanbakel]

I feel that's missing the point of the article, which is a specific attack on Backpage's policy and approach to sexual content involving children. Nothing is said about sex work generally hosted on the website.

[pyre]

> under the current system law enforcement are usually more dangerous to the workers than anybody else :(

The system forces them underground and to take more risks, but I'm pretty sure that the cops aren't usually the ones abusing them (though this obviously depends on locality, I guess).

[DanBC]

This isn't about stopping sex work. This is pretty much centred on stopping child rapists kidnapping and selling children to be raped by other men, using a variety of codewords to communicate that these are children being sold.

There were tens of thousands of children involved here.

[empath75]

What do you feel is a reasonable amount of children to be raped and sold on a website before shutting it down?

[hackinthebochs]

How many do we let be raped and sold before we shut down the internet? How many children do we let get mutilated in car crashes before we outlaw driving? The answer surely is non-zero for you in both of these cases. There is a usually unarticulated cost to freedom.

(I'm simply pointing out the foolishness of this argument, not offering an opinion on this case)

[charlieflowers]

BULLSHIT. A 13 year old child was kidnapped, abused and sold. she was not a sex worker.

[umanwizard]

You misunderstood GP's comment. They're not suggesting that abusive sex trafficking doesn't exist, but that it's the small minority of what happens on Backpage.