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"Anyone who has her visibility on an issue such as Backpage.com and is not signed onto the bill—people are just puzzled, and it doesn’t look good for her," Lisa Thompson, vice president of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, told the Washington Free Beacon.
Other activists and backers of the bill say Harris is having a hard time squaring her prior crusade against Backpage.com with her job representing Google, Facebook and other powerful Silicon Valley forces as a senator from California. Google, Facebook, and other sites are vehemently against the Portman-Blumenthal bill and another version wending its way through the House.
"Harris has a bit of a split personality," said Jamie Court, president of the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog. "She really was a dogged advocate for these families of victims when she was attorney general."
It is easy to go after the owners of Backpage.com, whom Court described as three millionaires who have profited from "despicable acts on the Internet."
"It’s a whole different thing to go up against a company that you can't avoid on the Internet who also are formidable Democratic donors whose politics, other than this, probably largely match your own," he said.
A Free Beacon analysis of Federal Election Commission fundraising records for Harris's Senate race, found a total of $71,500 in donations from 54 different employees of either Google, or its parent company, Alphabet, Inc.
The donations include five from top Alphabet Inc. executives, including Eric Schmidt, the company’s executive chairman.
Harris received a total of $213,341 from the tech sector, ranking her No. 4 in highest donations after only Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, (D., N.Y.), according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The Internet sector doled out more than $4 million for Clinton's failed presidential run, demonstrating the powerful role it plays in Democratic presidential primary politics.
Harris's office did not return a request for comment for the story.
Proponents of the bill point to an elaborate, deep-pocketed Google-funded campaign against the SESTA bill. Two Google-funded groups, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), have aggressively fought the bill.
Prosecutors and individuals should not be allowed to sue websites for users' activity on it, opponents of the bill argue. In several cases, including Harris's prosecutions of Backpage.com, judges have thrown out "pimping" and other charges against the owners, citing federal communications law.
Senators invited Google officials to testify at a September Commerce Committee hearing, but company representatives declined. Instead, former Rep. Susan Molinari, (R., N.Y.), who now serves as the search engine's vice president of public policy, issued a statement on the topic.
Google emailed a statement to the Free Beacon on Friday in response to a question on whether its executives would continue donating to Harris if she signs onto the bill.
"We have a long-standing commitment to eradicating human trafficking and have proposed language amending section 230 that would give victims and survivors the right to civil litigation and enable prosecutors to hold bad actors accountable for their crimes," Molinari said in the statement.
"This proposal has received a lot of support, and we’ll continue to engage members of Congress, anti-trafficking groups and the industry to try to get a resolution," she added.
The families of trafficking victims and states have lost nearly two dozen cases against Backpage.com over the last several years.
The SESTA bill aims to change that by altering a clause in the 1996 Communications Decency act, which provides website operators partial immunity from lawsuits involving solely the activity of users, not the owners of the websites themselves.
Portman, Blumenthal, and other advocates argue Backpage.com’s owners should have some liability, and have accused the owners of the website of hiring a company located in the Philippines to lure advertisers and customers looking for sex.
https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/news-story/activists-question-sen-kamala-harriss-silence-sex-trafficking-bill-despite-previous