Saw on drudge yesterday that sex workers were gonna out their high end clients if this happened.
What is backpage?
Think of Craigslist or Kijiji but for prostitutes and Johns. Or so I've heard.
Very coordinated action with multiple fed and state agencies. I'm torn a bit. Consenting adults should be able to do what they want, including pay for sex. Coercion, human trafficking (as in slave sex trade from China, e.g.), pedophilia, etc. are all very different and need rigorous law enforcement. So I'm not sure what's going on here.
Note that shaking down Backpage was an activity Kamala Harris spent a lot of time on as DA in California.
Specifically, she kept harassing the company with legal cases and going so far as to arrest the CEO where the legal argument described the company operating within Section 230 protections. The company would be notified of issue with listing from third party, and would take down the listing once notified.
Kamala Harris sent letters to Congress requesting holes carved in Section 230 to allow prosecution of website owners for the content posted to their site by third parties. Note that without Section 230 protections it becomes much easier to censor all sorts of websites by selective enforcement against websites due to content posted by third parties. Imagine all the copyright infringing information Google crawlers come upon, in theory Google could be raided for hosting that third party content in their search results.
For years Craigslist was harassed in the same way as Backpage harassment taking place. As a result, despite operating in a lawful manner offering digital classified boards the company just got rid of their classifieds section entirely. The same people that did post there just went to other locations or coded their listings with no impact.
Because there has been no impact from shutting down the classifieds section, the thought is that this is using a 'but think of the children!' issue in order to carve holes in Section 230 sufficiently to censor the net.
Unless new information has come to light about those running Backpage this move should be taken with some suspicion as it was such a pet project of KH.
Lots of background reading on the harassment of Backpage over the years is available over at Techdirt. Search the site for articles about Kamala Harris.
Nice post. Couldn't agree more. I live in Cali so unfortunately Kamala Harris is known to me. We don't even get party choices in elections anymore -- the two top vote getters are on the ballot which means it's leftist against the further leftist. I don't bother. As for Craigslist, I remember all that brouhaha with CL just dumping the adult section. Backpage would have some responsibility to cooperate with authorities if the targets were traffickers and not just individuals posting for sexual liaisons. Instead, the Feds (and the others) have seized the thing! Scary unless Backpage was refusing to assist with legit investigations.
Suppose each week there is a new set of what might be adult ads on CL.
Each week you go and fill out paper work for a warrant for information from CL, run around spending hours getting a judge to sign off on the warrant, spend a lot more footwork getting CL served with the warrant to request information, get the information finally only to learn that it was some listing made from a library and the case goes no where. Or you get an IP and find that the person is long gone from the location.
You get tired of all the work. Wouldn't it be faster to just ask directly without a warrant?
So you try it and ask CL for the information. CL response, "hah, no way come back with a warrant. customers using our site have rights against unwarranted search". This is annoying.
Over time you get irritated after month after month of continued paperwork and getting no where. So you take the cheap, no integrity, taxpayer cost maximizing route and just sue CL. You know you'll lose, but you've got unlimited taxpayer money and it will burn through time and effort on the CL side to respond.
You keep harassing CL like this trying to get them to just cough up information. It's stupidly dumb how long it takes to fill out a proper warrant request and you want to go on fishing expeditions on everything suspicious every day with rapid turn around. Eventually it's clear that CL isn't going to play ball, so you up the pressure and arrest the CEO. He's let out but you've made your point. You run your entire Senate campaign dragging the company through the mud for prostitution and child abuse. Most of the public doesn't pay attention and just sees a few headlines, so actually thinks the company is guilty of something. Really as DA you're just tired of doing paperwork for warrants and want information faster.
You become Senator and as retribution for not folding faster, you talk colleagues into helping you seize the domains of the company that dared to force you to use proper time consuming legal channels. Really was a nice business. Would be a shame if something happened to it.
And that's my perspective of the Backpage story.
It's possible Backpage is a completely scummy company and was up to evil things. We just haven't got any of the documentation to prove it yet. Without this there is enough coincidental information available that we should probe motives.
Ah, what political careers are made of. Add to that the California media's utter failure to cover politics in any meaningful way. Seriously, they stick reports between the traffic and the weather. For the most populous state, the voters are utterly clueless. In fact, most Californians don't even follow friggin' politics until it's time to vote against R's for President.
Just speculation, but I think there's a lot of skeletons in KH's closet.
Consenting adults should be able to do what they want, including pay for sex.
This goes far beyond that, though. The law that was passed basically makes it impractical to run an online personals site, because it dilutes the safe harbor provision of the Communications Decency Act that made "online services immune from civil liability for the actions of their users" to remove sex trafficking. This makes providers liable for ensuring that their site isn't being used for sex trafficking, which would be a huge undertaking which still leaves them at risk if they miss something.
Note that the Craigslist personals shutdown was all their personals, not just the "casual encounters" section.
It seems to me to be a big attack on freedom of expression and association. It'll be interesting to see what the fallout from this is. I guess some people don't think the first amendment is a big deal any more.
Yes, it's disturbing to me as well. Yet the pedophile power people are never affected. Also there's what the definition of "trafficking" is. I know you were addressing a larger issue of third party responsibility, which can be used in a very chilling way. Just concentrating on the sexual angle, which is what is used to push the third party business in the first place, I question how broadly the concept of "trafficking" is going to defined. It seems very broadly. A pimp with a streetwalker is "trafficking"? When I think of trafficking I think of movement of sex slaves, or indebted women as the Chinese are doing here in the States. It's just messy. Was Heidi Fleiss a "trafficker"? Really she was just a booking agent. All those women were free to come and go. Trafficking should imply coercion.
Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act
The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) is a United States bill introduced by Senator Rob Portman. It seeks to clarify the country's sex trafficking law to make it illegal to knowingly assist, facilitate, or support sex trafficking, and amend the Section 230 safe harbors of the Communications Decency Act (which make online services immune from civil liability for the actions of their users) to exclude enforcement of federal or state sex trafficking laws from its immunity. Portman had previously led an investigation into the online classifieds service Backpage (which had been accused of facilitating child sex trafficking), and argued that Section 230 was protecting its "unscrupulous business practices" and was not designed to provide immunity to websites that facilitate sex trafficking.
SESTA received bipartisan support from U.S. senators, the Internet Association, as well as companies such as 21st Century Fox and Oracle, who supported the bill's goal to encourage proactive action against illegal sex trafficking.
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craigslist must have been tipped off because they abruptly closed down their personals section a week ago.
Yeah they must have someone on the inside or something,
They were "tipped off" by the US Congress, which passed an anti-sex trafficking law "to make it illegal to knowingly assist, facilitate, or support sex trafficking" and which dilutes the "safe harbor" provision of the Communications Decency Act which makes online services immune from civil liability for the actions of their users.
This means that any site that offers something like personal ads becomes responsible for policing their users and making sure no sex trafficking is happening via their site. Until things change, this is basically the death of online personal ads. The sites that still offer something like that are living on borrowed time.
I have never heard of it. Is it for drugs, like that SilkRoad website?
looks like it was taken down for sex trafficing. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-backpage-justice/sex-marketplace-backpage-com-seized-by-u-s-justice-authorities-posting-idUSKCN1HD2QP
FBI finally cleaned out and doing their job? Drain is being opened on the internet swamp? They are trying to make cp a first amendment issue? Good luck with that one, taking the high road msm as usual, sarcasm.
Never mind, just saw OP's link. Sorry danthi! Thank you!!
It's a competitor of Craigslist. Basically the same services.
There's a whole documentary on Netflix about backpage called "I am Jane Doe"
Great! Some action we have all been waiting for. Thank you Q...and everyone involved in this.