[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.