This line is particularly condemning:
> It was involved in 73 percent of all child trafficking cases reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
So I don't view the statement particularly condemning RELATIVE TO (note the emphasis!) non-Backpage child trafficking cases. Furthermore, the age distribution of victims between Backpage vs non-Backpage victims probably differs considerably.
This is like shutting down piratebay. No one really cares except the owners.
As if you would shut down your very profitable human trafficking business because backpage.com is down. You already have your dungeons and people or whatever is entailed in this sick shit. You would just go to another site.
Any time you increase the cost of doing something by a non-trivial amount you are almost certain to decrease the amount that thing is done. The assumptions you make that you lead you to your conclusion aren't clearly based in fact:
1) It is effectively costless to move to a new service 2) Any new service has equivalent demand 3) The profits are significant (your very profitable human trafficking business)
The first is clearly false. You'll need to move all your workflows to a new platform, learn the new platform, understand how to market on it, etc.
The second is also clearly false. These are marketplaces meaning there are strong network effects. Backpage was likely the best marketplace meaning it had very large portions of both the supply side and demand side. Now, how do you what service to move to when no service is dominant yet? You don't. You almost certainly see decreased marketplace effects in the "100 other sites doing this".
For the third, is there any reason at all to believe the human trafficking business is "very profitable"? It seems like a very small market with very high costs.
Of course, a further effect here is the deterrent that shutting down such a website will be to developers who may wish to replace backpage.
A further example of what I will call "the fallacy of costless transfer" is in suicide prevention. Removing access to easy means of suicide, prevents the likelihood of committing suicide. Hence why there is to be a net around the golden gate bridge to catch jumpers.
That's not the case here. Coercion and violence are component to human trafficking. Taking down Backpage and similar websites isn't "prohibition" any more than laws against murder are.
The fact that you use murder here is a perfect example.
Prohibition measures are all about restricting the availability of something to curb the desire of it.
With the sole exception of the Quaalude, it has never worked. A single government had to convince a global industry to stop its production entirely. There were only like 7 or 9 labs making it though. Oh and with designer drug labs in China, you can actually get ludes made now if you're clever.
Human trafficking, coercion and violence is a side-effect of a desire creating a market. Driving that market underground will not eliminate the market, you have to eliminate peoples' desire for that thing.
You can't globally stop the production of human beings to curtail this market like they did with Quaaludes...
Murder is just about the freest, easiest thing you can do if that's your desire. Murder rates are on the decline because it's just something not that many people want to do anymore.
They're torture, life imprisonment or the death penalty. Apples to Oranges.
> Human trafficking, coercion and violence is a side-effect of a desire creating a market.
But this will never be a legitimate market. We're talking about money being exchanged for sex with children. That is inherently violent, and has absolutely nothing to do with whatever market may or may not exist.
The argument against prohibition is that making the thing illegal is more harmful than regulating it. That's not the case with murder, and it's not the case with human trafficking — any occurrence of it is harmful, regardless of how you regulate it.
You think if a child trafficker posts a single ad on Hacker News...that the entire site should be shut down?
No this was heavy handed and a huge step towards censoring the web as we know it.
I’d add that if you actually care about broader issues of censorship, you could not be doing a worse and more counterproductive job of promulgating those beliefs if you tried.
What about if the admins wanted to take a week off?
There's no doubt this gives the govt massive censorship power and forces a beauracratic burden on sites to hire more admins.
You're cool with throwing away our liberties and free internet all over something so statistically miniscule in comparison to the rest of the web.
This isn’t prohibition against adults choosing to smoke some pot or have a drink after all, and trying to parlay the semantics of that prohibition to this discussion is grossly inappropriate.
I'm not saying make it legal and I'd happily throw the switch on any human trafficker or child rapist myself.
The point is not to take people who are already in a desperate situation and put them in the way of more harm. That's what this does. It's an easy win for whatever politician is pushing this but does next to nothing to combat the real problem.
Prohibition measures are all about restricting the availability of something to curb the desire of it.
No one thinks that you’re reducing demand for raping children by cracking down on child rapists. People think that they can reduce the rates of child rape by arresting people who rape children, and facilitate the rape of children. They also think that it’s worth saving some people from being raped, even if it’s a given that you can’t save everyone.
Murder is just about the freest, easiest thing you can do if that's your desire. Murder rates are on the decline because it's just something not that many people want to do anymore.
What? No. The risks of being caught for murdering someone have increased, so it’s far from free and easy unless you don’t care about losing your freedom or life as a result. The same applies for trafficking children for sex. You reduce activity by increasing the cost in the cost:benefit relationship. While people driven to murder will still do it, you reduce things like casual killing, or murder for hire. While you’re not going to make pedophiles lose their desire to rape kids, you can reduce the willingness of the people supplying them with kids to try and profit from those urges.
Prostitutes were so much safer when they had pimps and had to stand out on the street and hop into peoples' cars, right?
I question both your reasoning and your motives, given that you’re switching between talking about child sex trafficking and prostitution.
Yes, let's put them all back to doing that to pretend to save a handful of kids.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/backpage-ads-sex-traff...
We could make a bigger dent in child prostitution if we dealt with income inequality along racial lines than by closing Backpage, but nobody really gives about giving poorer people the same opportunities they have.
Also the average user of HN probably has zero exposure to sex work, other than maybe as a consumer. I grew up in Times Square, with street hookers on my corner. Some of my friends are/were sex workers. There's a lot of fear and anger around what's going on right now.
Maybe it’s just that you’re not going to get much pushback from many here about the wisdom of legalizing prostitution, so you lean on that crutch when discussing the issues here? The problem is that Backpage was aiding and abetting something that has no relation to “sex work” unless your definition includes kidnapping and rape.
tptacek 20 hours ago [-]
They took ads they knew to be for child sex trafficking --- they had keyword matching for them! --- stripped the incriminating words from the ads, and ran them, pictures and all.
How can you justify that? Put it together with the rest and it’s both illegal and immoral, and again, not about adult sex workers. If you care about the issue of legalizing prostitution, don’t get it tangled up in this mess.
Its like trying to kill a fly with a sledgehammer.
It's like a grocery store being closed because one of the manufacturers products was bad.
Its like burning down a house to kill a mouse.
Its like if someone created ads on Hacker News for prostitution and the government shut down the entire site.
Its like targeting the INTERNET instead of the actual HUMAN TRAFFICKERS....
These sensational news reports are a distraction from SESTA a really freaky law that allows the govt to bring criminal action against a sites owners for content they deem innappropriate...its already affected numerous sites beyond backpage.
Our civil liberties and the internet have been grossly eroded by SESTA and its sad to see the day when the government can shut sites down at their leisure.
Your problems with SESTA may be valid but that's a completely separate question from whether or not shutting backpage down would limit human trafficking. You're arguing from mood affiliation (that SESTA is bad and therefore anything associated with it is bad) and not against the principles.
Backpage was the second largest classifieds ads service on the internet. Thousands+ of ads per week...
It blows my mind that people are fine with destroying the foundation of the free internet for something that's a minor statistical outlier drop in the bucket of activities on these sites no matter how horrible the activity may be.
In related news we've been spending 7.6 billion a year on the TSA after 9.11 to prevent terrorism....
The proportion of that site's activities that are related to illegal activities is completely irrelevant. It may be that 0.001% of the classifieds on Backpage were human trafficking related but if that made up even 10% of human trafficking cases this is a slam dunk success in terms of stopping human trafficking.
In related news we've been spending 7.6 billion a year on the TSA after 9.11 to prevent terrorism....
True and that's a terrible waste of money but completely unrelated to this.
It blows my mind that someone thinks allowing terrible illegal activity in the name of some mysterious concept of internet freedom is a good thing. Certainly you don't seem particularly concerned with the freedom of those being trafficked in the physical world.
However they sound so horrible that people are perfectly willing to sacrifice massive civil liberties to stop them.
They have a 'mood affililation' and will do anything to stop these activities without looking at the principles of what they're doing.
I'm concerned about the freedom of those being trafficked..I just think theres other ways to help them that don't involve eroding the foundation of the free web.
It's not like "targeting the Internet instead of the actual human traffickers"; they are the actual human traffickers.
Also, Backpage wasn't shut down under SESTA; SESTA hadn't yet passed when the site was taken down.
So are we targeting human trafficking or are we targeting prostitution?
To use my grocery store analogy its like if one box of cheerios was bad closing down every single grocery store in the country to prevent people from eating bad cheerios then passing a law saying the govt can shut down any grocery it wants in the future on suspicion of bad cheerios....
Heavy handed...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-backpage-justice/sex-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_...
[4] https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/11/trump-signs-fosta-sesta-...
It's like backdooring encryption to 'prevent terrorism'.
Read the Backpage indictments: these people ran a criminal conspiracy to profit by knowingly helping child sex traffickers.
It's weird how much backlash there is whenever a certain crowd gets the paranoid narrative of "first they came for X..."
I understand the appeal of that argument. Regulation should be approached with caution, but these people were selling children as sex slaves.
SESTA is huge gov't overreach and everyone's distracted by these sensational news reports.
That is, in fact, exactly what it means.
That's why everyone from sex trafficking survivors to the Department of Justice was telling Congress not to pass the badly-named SESTA/FOSTA bills, because preventing people from conducting (consensual) sex work online makes it much harder to rescue actual victims of sex trafficking.
As I already said, it's a lot easier to find victims of sex trafficking, rescue them, and prosecute the traffickers when sites like Backpage exist. That's literally why prosecutors opposed SESTA/FOSTA in the first place, along with former victims of sex trafficking.
They weren't defending Backpage, they were condemning the power grab in the form of a law that was passed (but has not yet been signed) where they let this whole situation languish to make it easier to "sell" the new powers for the Government.
You are confusing the fight over FOSTA/SESTA/etc. with the fight over Backpage just like the people who pushed those laws intended you to.
It is some sort of new age leftist thing, where the argument is that backpage somehow made things safer for sex workers.
I, for one, did not really research Backpage that much and so was unaware of the reality of the allegations against them. For myself, I chose not to weigh in on the debate, even though I have the belief I stated above, because I didn't feel I had enough background.
We’re all forced to sell our time but what we have to offer varies
You wanna suck dick for a meal? You hiring people without tech skills?
There’s a whole lot of “sucking it up” for a lot of women with little choice but to “suck for survival”
The issue is the effect that it has on trafficking, and that it makes trafficking much more profitable.
[0] https://www.thecut.com/2018/03/sesta-anti-sex-trafficking-bi...
SESTA seems mostly to function as a smokescreen for FOSTA (since it drives all the media attention to it and it's knowing involvement in trafficking requirement).
I don't think anyone was really defending Backpage (the site itself, rather than the broker function) in any real numbers.
That's the argument people were making — not that nothing bad ever happened where Backpage was involved, but that sex workers feel more required to put themselves in bad situations in the absence of something like Backpage.
Maybe sex workers are less safe now that Backpage is gone, and that sucks — but it doesn't mean we let people working with human traffickers slide.
I'm not saying we should let the Backpage people slide, but that the ideas "Backpage was involved in some very messed-up stuff that people should go to jail for" and "Backpage was better than the streets for sex workers on the whole" can both be true simultaneously.
> Backpage altered up to 80 percent of their ads before posting them online “by deleting words, phrases, and images indicative of criminality, including child sex trafficking.”
With less of a signal boost, people will be less incentivized to force people into trafficking in the first place.
IE, that pimp might switch to drug dealing or some other industry, where they can make more money.
It was the big name. It was the only one I'd heard of other than craigslist, and I thought craigslist shut down that section years ago.
> Some of the stories by sex workers talk about using Backpage to network and vet Johns which implies to me that most users were regulars.
It implies most clients of the kind of sex worker who participates in these discussions were regulars. It wouldn't necessarily be the same for trafficked women and children which is the case we're actually trying to stop. And even if it is, presumably there's some level of turnover; making it harder for new people to get into unconsenting sex slaves is still a win even if it does nothing about the existing client population.
> likely end up on another site with even more features and less oversight
Sounds like no oversight would be better than the oversight backpage had, if all that oversight did was hide that ads for children were for children while still letting those ads run.
> operating on TOR
I very much doubt it. Tor is a massive faff to use; maybe some people will move to a hidden site but it will be a big barrier to entry if so.
Also tor is as easy to use as downloading an installer, running it, and then using a modern browser interface. Anyone who is at the level of "installs their own software" is eligible, which may not be every last pedophile sex pervert, but likely the motivated ones.
Here is a good link on this[0]. Here[1] is also a short interview of the author.
[0] https://www.allure.com/story/sesta-sex-trafficking-bill-cele...
Including this week, when someone linked either a troy hunt or krebs post about it.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180409/18423839598/feder...
Given the scale at which Backpage operated, it really is not.