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Comment by burnte | Hacker News Reader

Noooooo! When I ehard about backpage being shut down because it was the biggest place for child sex trafficking, I said it was the dumbest move they could make. You have a website with the vast majority of illegal sex traffickers COMING TO YOU, and you close it? Why? Make BP a deal, give the FBI an office to scan everything so they can go after child sex traffickers, and you can stay open. We'd have arrested thousands of them by now.

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Backpage was never popular for child sex trafficking. These are all lies told by various levels of the US government.

Source:

https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-governme...

Those memos are pretty damning and run directly counter to what has been pushed in the media. Worse yet, it suggests that cooperation itself is what damned the organization when someone had to do something.

This adds significantly to the mindset of "do not cooperate with the legal system even if you're trying to help, no good can come of it." And my already ebbing faith in the media has slipped even further.

If I recall correctly, the owners of Backpage we're charged with taking money and working with the traffickers. It may not have been a matter of Backpage accidentally being an exploited market place.

I suspect that changed their willingness to host agents within their walls.

Coverage of the case is here: https://frontpageconfidential.com/category/backpage/

The fed's argument is that there was so much illegal prostitution activity on Backpage that the owners must have been supporting it. The defense is currently occupied with getting access to the servers, presumably to show that the frequency of illegal postings was small compared to the rest of the site and that all reported postings were acted on immediately.

Fun fact, prostitution isn't a federal offense.

There's a federal statute regarding trafficking persons across state lines as I recall. It's not specifically "prostitution" but meets the general description if there's an interstate nexus, which of course can be easily shown for an internet site in many cases.

The Mann Act, a federal law, forbids transport for the purposes of illegal sexual activity. If prostitution is illegal in your state, and you arrange to meet a prostitute online and provide her with a taxicab or Uber, then you have committed a federal crime and are a human trafficker in the eyes of the law. (Though federal LE will probably not get involved unless it crosses state lines.)

Fun fact: Originally the Mann Act was passed to give the government the power to prosecute interracial couples. Kinda like how sex-offender registries were first implemented to allow police in California to track gays.

If you can't speak English to the prostitute or she seems afraid, it would be a suspicious situation.

"child sex traffickers"

I don't know where you get that from.

It was one of the big reasons the gov't claimed they shut it down. https://u.osu.edu/osuhtblog/2018/04/17/backpage-com-and-chil...

Didn't that turn out to be bullshit though?

Probably. But nobody knows for certain, the government destroyed the evidence.

Even so, it's a dumb reason when the alternative is to keep it going as a trap.

It is dumb if you want to protect people.

Not so dumb when the goal is to look tough and win votes...

That's what it's called if the person you are paying for sex with is not an adult.

Reasonable mistake, must happen all the time when people have sex with someone with no breasts, hairless in the pertinent areas, and don't talk at all with them.

"I just thought she was a late bloomer your honor, her manager assured me she was 18 going on 19"

What a creep.

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