Demand for online sex-trafficking has dropped as the operators of smaller sites struggle to stay afloat following the shut down of the largest human-trafficking portal in the United States, according to a new report shared with The Epoch Times by a counter-human trafficking technology company.
In April last year, President Donald Trump signed into law the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or SESTA-FOSTA that stopped the shielding of website operators from state criminal charges or civil liability if they facilitate sex ads or prostitution. Just days later, sex-trafficking website Backpage.com, was shut down by the FBI.
The report by Childsafe.AI—the world’s first artificial intelligence platform for monitoring, graphing, and modeling child exploitation risk on the web—details how the twin acts “dramatically changed” the sex-trafficking online marketplace, specifically the distribution layer that served the underground commercial sex economy.
Now, a year later, the report explains how the industry has since been fragmented across dozens of websites, all competing fiercely for market share. No single dominant site emerged in the past year as the popularity of the online economy “remains volatile and shifts quickly.”
One key finding in the report that is prepared for use by law enforcement agencies across the United States, was that web traffic to advertising websites selling sex drew only 5-8 percent of the unique visitors individually as Backpage did at its height in 2016.
The company’s CEO, Rob Spectre, told The Epoch Times in a phone interview that the underground marketplace is now more like the “the wild west” rather than a “high-quality well-groomed advertising, channel.”
“What we are seeing overall is an evident drop in demand… a number of these operators are struggling to continue operating their services,” he said. “There is also a significant influx of scam advertising.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/online-sex-trafficking-demand-drops-after-backpage-takedown-trump-admin-policies-report_2875865.html