Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the thru-line of this Wired story. It effectively concedes the government's case: Backpage built a system that coached users to post trafficking ads without setting off its controls. If you posted an ad containing “lolita,” “rape,” “fresh,” or “little girl” (the article's examples), the system would alert the user so they could use different terms, and then accept their new ad.

There's lots not to like about SESTA, but the Backpage people weren't (AFAIK) charged under SESTA.

Why am I meant to care about the Backpage owner's colorful history? Isn't the important thing I actually need to know to understand what happened here buried towards the bottom of this story, in a couple paragraphs discussing what they were actually charged with? Agree or disagree with the prosecution, but that's the story.

I feel like people on message boards are sold on a narrative about how child sex trafficking never happens, which is easy when it's an abstraction. But it does happen.

A middle aged man I briefly worked with, and that a friend of mine worked for --- Peter Privateeer, the former CEO of a company called Reflex Security --- just finished serving 12 years in prison for buying a 14 year old girl. The pimp who sold her had been holding her at gunpoint and forcing her to "service" his customers. Where did the pimp meet the CEO? On Backpage. The girl cost $600.

The ads for teenaged children Backpage was handling were real. Not all of them, I'm sure. But it was really happening. And Backpage helped it happen.

Should a safe online market for sex workers exist? Perhaps. But we should be able to at least agree that the people who operate it should take their responsibility as a steward of the public safety seriously. That's not Backpage. Backpage did did at least as much to set back the cause of safeguarding sex workers than any misguided lawmaker.

Thank you for stating this so clearly. Something always seemed off to me about the argument that punishing Backpage was going to backfire because all it would do drive exploitation and child abuse more underground. This claim would have merit if Backpage hadn’t been explicitly enabling a market for this terrible stuff via those keyword suggestions. I’m not going to shed any tears for the poor site owners having to face penalties for this.

To provide a little more context. They built out a "strip words from ad" feature that relied on a large list of words provided by the moderators to strip out terms. Most of these words were related to prostitution and only a few related to anything underage.

But there's also this.

> Similarly, in a June 7, 2011 email, Ferrer told a Texas law enforcement official that a word found in one Backpage ad, “amber alert,” “is either a horrible marketing ploy or some kind of bizarre new code word for an under aged person.”142 He told the official that he would “forbid[]” that phrase—without explaining that, inside Backpage, this meant filters would simply conceal the phrase through automatic deletion.143 Ferrer forwarded the same email chain to Padilla and noted that he had instructed a staff member to “add [amber alert] to strip out.”144 A June 11, 2012 version of the filter word list indicates that “amber alert” was indeed deleted by the Strip Term From Ad filter.145 In short, Backpage added such terms with full awareness of their implications for child exploitation.

You'd imagine a normal person would think "we should ban this user, or report this to the authorities" instead of "we should definitely filter out that phrase".

At least according to the article it was a keyword ban, not keyword suggestions. To my reading the intent of the ban is to (1) avoid the appearance of carrying advertisements of sex with children and (2) discourage such advertisements.

The critical view is that this is intended to help child traffickers write clandestine ads so they can continue using the platform however that seems unlikely. The problem with any keyword-based filter is false-positives such as kink content. Such filters operating opaquely and dropping bans in other contexts such as banking and copyright draw deserved criticism. We should be no less critical here.

I need to dig up my original source, but my understanding from when this news first broke has been that the implementation was somewhat less innocent than a simple keyword ban and involved some kind of suggestions or workarounds for banned keywords. I’ll try to find something concrete to back this up.

> Should a safe online market for sex workers exist? Perhaps.

Indeed! Online listings are associated with less violence & other exploitive harms, compared to other ways such sex work is arranged when such listings have been shut down.

>But we should be able to at least agree that the people who operate it should take their responsibility as a steward of the public safety seriously.

That's a hand-wavy, euphemistic political line like one might hear from a grandstanding Attorney-General or Senator, who really just wants to ban every kind of "safe online market for sex workers", by holding them to murky and unattainable standards.

So how, specifically, would you suggest a "safe online market for sex workers" could police their listings, other than the ways Backpage tried?

Backpage tried multiple content-based strategies for banning or discouraging advertisements for odious and exploitative practices. Terms linked to problematic practices either led to ads being blocked or bowdlerized to become less-effective. I see these as genuine ways to drive both buyers and sellers of harmful practices away from the service, by making such practices impossible (or at least much more difficult) to advertise. And yet, each of Backpage's attempts to limit bad-actors is now being portrayed as evidence of sinister intent.

Backpage isn't a law enforcement agency. It lacks the same investigative or arrest/prosecution powers of the state. Backpage had to guess what the shifting legal standards of competing jurisdictions might require of them.

The likely best policy for a listing-service, if police & politicians wouldn't crucify them for it, would be to allow all kinds of ads, but also give local enforcement agencies the most-advanced kinds of notifications and "standing searches" that any of the service's power-users or customer-support personnel have.

Then, the actually legally-empowered experts – police – could do their job, and catch & punish the worst criminals, who have conveniently described exactly their crimes in public ads with contact information! That is, the police would not just scatter criminals to other channels with half-measures while prosecuting tangentially-related middlemen.

> Backpage did did at least as much to set back the cause of safeguarding sex workers than any misguided lawmaker.

Both actual sex workers & studies of the effects of Backpage-like ad-boards disagree with your assertion here.

"Sex workers 'devastated,' look to alternatives after Backpage closure": https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investiga...

Both sex worker advocates & police report increased trafficking & abuse in San Francisco after Backpage shutdown: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/The-Scanner-Sex-wo...

"'People are going to die': Sex workers devastated after Backpage shutdown" : https://www.newsweek.com/people-are-going-die-sex-workers-de...

"7 Sex Workers on What It Means to Lose Backpage": https://www.thecut.com/2018/04/7-sex-workers-on-what-it-mean...

Craigslist's similar-to-Backpage "erotic services" listings, which Craigslist was pressured into discontinuing in 2010, had measurably reduced female homicide rates wherever introduced: http://scunning.com/craigslist110.pdf

That's because actual sex workers were unaware of what Backpage was doing, and what the consequences were. By knowingly running an online market for child sex trafficking harmed the entire enterprise of safe sex work.

>>Isn't the important thing I actually need to know to understand what happened here buried towards the bottom of this story

This is the major reason I unsubscribed from Wired, most articles from them are unnecessary long yet convey only a few major points, while coloring other minor points with too many unrelated facts.

I guess there are readers who enjoys that writing style but for a case like this, I just don't understand the motives.

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