Backpage.com’s Founders Speak for the First Time

It's always dangerous to make generalisations about feminism, especially across different countries where the various splits evolved quite differently. The sex-positive version of feminism seems pretty dominant in the US but that's really not the case in the UK. The mainstream feminist voices you will hear in the UK media are almost exclusively not the sex-positive type that dominates in the US, other than a few younger writers. It's still very much dominated by what people call SWERF (sex worker exclusionary radical feminists) and TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) types of feminist. That's especially true of the liberal media like the Guardian and New Statesman. (Grassroots organisations aren't dominated in the same way as far as I can tell, and neither is academia, although I think you are still going to find far more 2nd wave type voices than in the US).

This stuff has been in the news fairly recently here because of an attempt by some feminist MPs to criminalise prostitution organised over the internet (and there are groups that have been pushing for it, some of them with links to the kind of evangelical US funds that you mention). There has been considerable backlash from sex workers and various grass roots feminist movements against this.

If you want an example a country where the sex industry has been regulated very differently then look at Norway and Sweden (if you start reading about this stuff you will quickly find people referring to the 'Nordic Model'). There's a huge amount of discussion of the topic academically and elsewhere. The results have not been what you are hoping for though (assuming your interest is reducing violence and exploitation).

It is so shielded from criticism that it is legal and people are open about their participation; and the workers and customers are given proper legal protection and recourse. /s

I think it's probably always been this way. It's just now, with the internet, we can find out.

For instance Ernesto Miranda of "Miranda rights" was retried with his confession marked as not admissible, and was still convicted of kidnapping and rape.

When it went down, they started creating their own low cost advertising platforms or moving to Locanto that’s based in Germany.

Even before this, there were better designed, sex worker specific ad platforms run by sex workers in Australia.

So you haven’t stopped anything.

Now, if prostitutes were legalized, licensed, and regulated, and sites like Backpage were required to retain identification and registration records for all their advertisers, it would be easy to distinguish between a service that protects sex workers and a service that collaborates with human traffickers. But we can't have that, so instead we have gray market actors like Backpage, and a bunch of investigators and prosecutors who have to decide (based upon much fuzzier and less complete evidence!) whether they're just protecting sex workers or outright collaborating with human traffickers.

Maybe the investigators and prosecutors made a bad call. But combining unreasonably strict laws with bizarrely lax and discretionary enforcement is a really shitty way to handle these problems in the first place.

If that is, in fact, what was happening, it's kind of shame that some Congresspeople with bad strategic reasoning upset that apple cart; that'd be a superior state of affairs to one where both the prostitution and the child sex trafficking happen in the dark, beyond the reach of LEO intervention.

If they really just edited out those words, then that’s pretty f’d up. The ads were very clearly for prostitutes, all with very obvious photos. If someone looks very underage, and advertises as underage, then they should do the right thing and notify the authorities themselves. To profit from that is extremely unethical.

That's not what happened. Backpage knew children were being kidnapped, drugged, and advertised for sex on their site. They had some choices: cooperate with law enforcement to help stop it happening; do nothing; or cooperate with the kidnappers to earn more money. They chose to cooperate with the traffickers.

> At the direction of CEO Carl Ferrer, the company programmed this electronic filter to “strip” —that is, delete—hundreds of words indicative of sex trafficking ( including child sex trafficking) or prostitution from ads before their publication. The terms that Backpage has automatically deleted from ads before publication include “lolita,” “teenage,” “rape,” “young,” “amber alert,” “little girl,” “teen,” “fresh,” “innocent,” and “school girl.” When a user submitted an adult ad containing one of these “stripped” words, Backpage’s Strip Term From Ad filter would immediately delete the discrete word and the remainder of the ad would be published. While the Strip Term From Ad filter changed nothing about the true nature of the advertised transaction or the real age of the person being sold for sex, thanks to the filter, Backpage’s adult ads looked “cleaner than ever.” Manual editing entailed the deletion of language similar to the words and phrases that the Strip Term From Ad filter automatically deleted—including terms indicative of criminality

If Backpage were truly cooperating with law enforcement they would have reported these ads before stripping the wordds, rather than stripping the words and then deleting the original ad.

> When I worked for kink.com a decade ago

Commercial "underage" content can get away with it because they always have the 2257 records to back it up. That's as much a certification of its fictional status as one can get.

There are no 2257 records for prostitutes. And prostitution itself is illegal. When you're at the point where you're setting up filters to govern the facilitation (not prohibition!) of an already illegal trade, obscuring the fact that ad subjects for non-fictional services may also be underage doesn't buy you any deniability.

Once you demonstrate knowledge, it's game over. That company selling encrypted phones to cartels, the guy building smuggling compartments in cars, Ross Ulbricht, and now Backpage...all demonstrated that they knew what business they were in and did it anyway. Hell, pre-legalization, the stoners at your local bong shop had better OPSEC than most of these clowns-- you mention marijuana in their store and they'd kick you out and refuse to do business with you, since they didn't want to be caught admitting they were selling drug paraphernalia, just "tobacco pipes, man."

make the ad buyers use BAT token and store everyone on IPFS?

Except neither of the criminal actions have had that as a central premise. That's been prominent in some of the PR, especially related to the State prosecution and to the federal legislative efforts the case was used as part of the (mostly dishonest) pretext for, but neither the state nor federal criminal prosecutions were centrally about that, they were about facilitating and profiting from anfd concealing the origin of profits from prostitution.

I support the social safety net. I would disagree vehemently at the current implementation of the social safety net and people who want to expand it in at current form, especially without raising taxes to pay for it.

Both sides want more government support but no one wants to pay for it.

Thanks for this response. The score on my comment above is oscillating around '0' - I wonder how many votes it's actually gotten.

I have lots of anecdotes; only a few have made it into blog posts. Maybe one day I'll mine my notes for a book.

A group of three men on a business trip were going to a strip club. One of them had just gotten divorced, iirc. The newly-divorced man didn't actually want to go, but his compatriots insisted.

A few passengers invited me to come into their strip clubs with them. I found those to be rather depressing experiences. My theory is that normal human males have an "imagination" that allows them to "fantasize" about getting with their dancer. My imagination is disabled ("aphantasia" [0]), so I choose to spend my own money on other activities.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

> Look who's at the bottom at Hacker News!

The comment was relatively successful, in spite of its low ranking, in that a good number of people visited my links, and I got some nice feedback from a few people.

> What I find interesting about the discussion surrounding prostitution is the wide but not nearly universal agreement that it's bad.

I think it's sub-optimal, but understand why it persists. I think more of an effort needs to be made to help young women be more assertive about the types of relationships they want. As I said in the comment I linked above, some sort of financial support for young people would be helpful.

> One can't predict people's view on prostitution from labels like religious, feminist or humanist.

There's a saying in medicine about how an accurate diagnosis is 50% of the cure... IMHO, the need for "prostitution" would be lessened if society had a better understanding for why the phenomenon exists. I think most people would agree that no matter what label one prefers, it's better to minimize the monetization of an activity that is best done freely.

There are a lot of people who are intentionally conflating consensual sex work with sex trafficking and rape. (From your other posts, you appear to be one of those people, claiming that the "vast majority of women" doing sex work are doing so out of coercion or are being trafficked).