Backpage.com has removed its Adult content section

[HOBO]

Washington, D.C. - As the direct result of unconstitutional government censorship, Backpage.com has removed its Adult content section from the highly popular classified website, effective immediately. For years, the legal system protecting freedom of speech prevailed, but new government tactics, including pressuring credit card companies to cease doing business with Backpage, have left the company with no other choice but to remove the content in the United States.

As federal appeals court Judge Richard Posner has described, the goal is either to “suffocate” Backpage out of existence or use the awesome powers of the government to force Backpage to follow in the footsteps of Craigslist and abandon its Adult advertising section. Judge Posner described such tactics as “a formula for permitting unauthorized, unregulated, foolproof, lawless government coercion.”

“It's a sad day for America's children victimized by prostitution,” said Dr. Lois Lee, Founder and President, Children of the Night, a leading national hotline and shelter program for victims of sex trafficking based in Los Angeles. “Backpage.com was a critical investigative tool depended on by America's vice detectives and agents in the field to locate and recover missing children and to arrest and successfully prosecute the pimps who prostitute children.” She added, “The ability to search for and track potentially exploited children on a website and have the website bend over backwards to help and cooperate with police the way Backpage did was totally unique. It not only made law enforcement's job easier, it made them much more effective at rescuing kids and convicting pimps.”

Backpage.com was created thirteen years ago by Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey, through their newspaper company, New Times Media, to compete with Craigslist, the nation’s largest online classified ad platform. Larkin and Lacey were pioneers in independent journalism, establishing Village Voice Media in 1970 to provide alternative news coverage of the Vietnam war and later served as editor and publisher of twenty weekly newspapers.

As The Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have observed, the Senate subcommittee has engaged in an “invasive, burdensome inquiry into Backpage.com’s editorial practices [that] creates an intense chilling effect, not only for Backpage but for any website operator seeking to define their own editorial viewpoint and moderation procedures for the third-party content they host.”

This will not end the fight for online freedom of speech. Backpage.com will continue to pursue its efforts in court to vindicate its First Amendment rights and those of other online platforms for third party expression.

 

[Legit]

Canadians, consider yourself lucky.

 

[cristycurves]

Sad day for sure. The only way to get into bp now is to google Halifax escorts, or Toronto escorts, etc. Yet I noticed that the massage section is still active, I suspect it'll now be swamped with all the ads. As far as the Canadian adult sections, still active, but I'm sure it too will be "censored". We can all take a stance by posting #FREESPEECH on social media sites. That is important to do since this type of censorship can also be implemented on sites like HUBGFE!!

 

[User-E]

BACKPAGE.COM REMOVES ADULT ADS HOURS BEFORE SENATE HEARING

The classifieds website Backpage.com removed on Monday adult advertisements from its website, a move that lawmakers and sex trafficking victims’ advocates have demanded for years. The removal happened shortly after a Senate subcommittee released findings from an investigation into the site, and hours before the site’s executive and founders were set to appear before the subcommittee.

A message on the adult services section of the website appeared late Monday that says, “The government has unconstitutionally censored this content.” In a press release, the site said it removed the adult ads “as the direct result of unconstitutional government censorship.” The press release continued, “For years, the legal system protecting freedom of speech prevailed, but new government tactics, including pressuring credit card companies to cease doing business with Backpage, have left the company with no other choice but to remove the content in the United States.”

The website, which is similar to Craigslist, was founded in 2004 and operates in cities around the world. While Craigslist removed its adult section in 2010, Backpage kept it, despite opponents who say it enabled sex trafficking, which involves any minor who sells sex or an adult forced to do so. “This is a concerted effort to build a business enterprise around the trafficking of human beings,” Yiota Souras, general counsel for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, told Newsweek last October. The Center has identified more than 420 cases of missing children who wound up in Backpage ads. A separate team led by Arizona State University researchers has found more than 150 Backpage ads that feature minors.

In recent years, Backpage has several faced lawsuits by young women who say they were trafficked through the site and calls from lawmakers to cease its adult operations. Last October, California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced charges against the website’s chief executive officer, Carl Ferrer, and its founders, James Larkin and Michael Lacey. A judge dismissed those charges in December, and around two weeks later, Harris announced new charges against the men.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has also investigated the website, and a Senate hearing involving the site is scheduled for Tuesday. Ferrer, Lacey and Larkin were expected to attend. On Monday, shortly before Backpage announced it had removed its adult ads, the subcommitee published a 53-page report of the findings of its investigation. “The company has long claimed that it is a mere host of content created by others and therefore immune from liability,” the report said. “The internal company documents obtained by the Subcommittee conclusively show that Backpage’s public defense is a fiction.” The report went on to say that Backpage had “concealed evidence of criminality” by editing ads, that it had acknowledged its role in facilitating sex trafficking and that Ferrer, Lacey and Larkin continued to own the website even though they had claimed to have distanced themselves from it.

Referring to the findings, Senator Claire McCaskill said Monday on Twitter, “It pays to never give up. Congressional investigations matter.” It was not immediately clear how Backpage’s removing its adult ads would affect the hearing. A documentary on the fight against Backpage, I am Jane Doe, is set to premiere in select cities in February.

The removal of the adult ads will likely receive criticism from sex workers and their advocates, who have said that posting ads on the website is essential to their work, and to doing it safely. Anastasia Kent, the pen name of a sex worker and blogger, told Newsweek in October that everyone she knows who sells sex has advertised on Backpage. “It might be all that’s keeping them from working on the street,” she said.

This article has been updated to include details from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations​ report on Backpage.

https://www.newsweek.com/backpage-adult-section-shut-down-540774

 

[User-E]

Here's a link to the 53 page report prepared by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's investigations subcommittee entitled "BACKPAGE.COM’S KNOWING FACILITATION OF ONLINE SEX TRAFFICKING"

 

[God]

Here's a link to the 53 page report prepared by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's investigations subcommittee entitled "BACKPAGE.COM’S KNOWING FACILITATION OF ONLINE SEX TRAFFICKING"

Cole notes please.

 

[User-E]

Cole notes please.

This report contains three principal findings.

First
Backpage has knowingly concealed evidence of criminality by systematically editing its “adult” ads.

Second
Backpage knows that it facilitates prostitution and child sex trafficking.

Third
Despite the reported sale of Backpage to an undisclosed foreign company in 2014, the true beneficial owners of the company are James Larkin, Michael Lacey, and Carl Ferrer.

 

[cristycurves]

This report contains three principal findings.

First
Backpage has knowingly concealed evidence of criminality by systematically editing its “adult” ads.

Second
Backpage knows that it facilitates prostitution and child sex trafficking.

Third
Despite the reported sale of Backpage to an undisclosed foreign company in 2014, the true beneficial owners of the company are James Larkin, Michael Lacey, and Carl Ferrer.

Then all adult websites that changed their platform post c36 and who allow "adult advertising" are also guilty? So it would appear.

 

[Madman]

It's a sad day when the abolitionists using inflated trafficking issues have won in the US.

Hopefully Donald Trump puts a stop to this madness and erosion of free speech. Lord knows he thrives on going against the establishment.

 

[Fuggedabouditt]

This report contains three principal findings.

First
Backpage has knowingly concealed evidence of criminality by systematically editing its “adult” ads.

Second
Backpage knows that it facilitates prostitution and child sex trafficking.

Third
Despite the reported sale of Backpage to an undisclosed foreign company in 2014, the true beneficial owners of the company are James Larkin, Michael Lacey, and Carl Ferrer.

Then all adult websites that changed their platform post c36 and who allow "adult advertising" are also guilty? So it would appear.

It's a sad day when the abolitionists using inflated trafficking issues have won in the US.

Hopefully Donald Trump puts a stop to this madness and erosion of free speech. Lord knows he thrives on going against the establishment.

I agree; so every publication that let's user advertise for sex work is guilty of knowingly participating in child sex trafficking? How can they prove this? Does that mean law enforcement fails? Here's an idea, decriminalize prostitution and you won't have this issue in the great numbers they claim.

Trump has probably gotten a few of his sexy fun time off of BP....

 

[cristycurves]

quote-Trump has probably gotten a few of his sexy fun time off of BP....

I doubt it, no paid lady would put up with a pussy grabbing a pussy

 

[Inmydreams]

Then all adult websites that changed their platform post c36 and who allow "adult advertising" are also guilty? So it would appear.

No, only those that knowingly knew about it.

 

[Janelle@Sassys]

Human trafficking existed before backpage and it will continue to exist without it. It would have been far more beneficial if the govt spent the time they have spent trying to shut down backpage on looking up ads where girls appear to be underage or pimped and going to investigate them.

But then again there's areas like 427/Dundas that are known pimp hotspots that never shut down...

Surely there will be a replacement soon, just as after Craigslist, backpage came into existence.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Canada-Man]

Canadian Backpage still have escort adult ads

 

[cristycurves]

Whether the business is legal or illegal, there will be pimps and other nefarious and dangerous activity within the industry. Fact is there are some established "players", clients and sp's that work with or know of pimps and do nothing or say nothing about them. Because they gain from them. Some sp's work for them, and also pretend to be indies, some are partners of, have kids with, some clients see their girls, etc, etc. As long as some get the money they need, the service they want, they don't care and nothing is said, that is......unless one is considered competition, or another threatens their lively hood. Then mouths start flapping and fingers start pointing:-Cool/"

 

[User-E]

Mother who found missing daughter's pictures on Backpage speaks out

Dr. Lois Lee is the founder of Children of the Night, a group fighting child sex trafficking.

“This is just so misdirected to a resource that’s really helping law enforcement, helping the children directly,” Lee said. She supports Backpage, which she says has become a tool for law enforcement in catching predators.

“They could call Backpage and get that detailed information of who was running the ad, the credit card information. They’ve been very, very active in law enforcement,” Lee said.

Lee also said Backpage has donated close to $1 million to her organization. In a statement, the site called the Senate investigation an attack on its First Amendment rights. It also said censoring the site will do nothing to change the problem of human trafficking.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/backpa...llegal-transactions-underage-sex-trafficking/

 

[Leo]

Mother who found missing daughter's pictures on Backpage speaks out

Dr. Lois Lee is the founder of Children of the Night, a group fighting child sex trafficking.

“This is just so misdirected to a resource that’s really helping law enforcement, helping the children directly,” Lee said. She supports Backpage, which she says has become a tool for law enforcement in catching predators.

“They could call Backpage and get that detailed information of who was running the ad, the credit card information. They’ve been very, very active in law enforcement,” Lee said.

Lee also said Backpage has donated close to $1 million to her organization. In a statement, the site called the Senate investigation an attack on its First Amendment rights. It also said censoring the site will do nothing to change the problem of human trafficking.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/backpa...llegal-transactions-underage-sex-trafficking/

Didn't know that, thanks for posting it.

 

[User-E]

When Backpage.com Peddles Schoolgirls for Sex

As a 16-year-old high school sophomore living in Boston, Asia Graves was sold on the internet “like a pizza,” she recalls, handed over to be raped by strange men every day.

Along with thousands of other girls, she was sold through what amounts to an online brothel called Backpage. It dominates the online sex trade and is implicated in almost three-quarters of the reports of child trafficking in the United States.

Yet this week offers a moment to celebrate. Under political and legal pressure, Backpage on Monday closed its “adult” advertising section, used to peddle women and children for sex. There’s also an overdue effort to hold its executives criminally and civilly liable.

“There’s been a lot of progress,” notes Graves, who eventually escaped her pimp — but only after he gouged her face with a potato peeler and stomped on her, breaking her jaw. She was cheering this week as a Senate subcommittee held hearings on Backpage and discussed tightening the law on websites like it.

I’ve been writing about sex trafficking since the 1990s, because at its worst it’s an echo of slavery. It’s also a topic rife with hypocrisy. We denounced the Catholic Church and Penn State for tolerating child sexual abuse, but we have collectively tolerated websites like Backpage that sell children for sex.

That has steadily been changing. Credit card companies stopped processing payments for ads in Backpage, undermining its business model. Kamala Harris, then California’s attorney general and now its new senator, filed criminal charges in December against Backpage executives, with arraignment scheduled for this month. Civil suits in Washington State against Backpage are proceeding. A film about trafficking, “I Am Jane Doe,” opens in theaters next month and shines a light on Backpage as “the Walmart of human trafficking.”

Most important, a Senate subcommittee, led by Rob Portman, a Republican, and Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, has done outstanding work investigating Backpage and showing how it achieved a valuation of more than half a billion dollars by working with human traffickers.

A devastating new subcommittee report shows that the company protects pimps from their carelessness by deleting hints that a girl is underage. For example, if a pimp tries to post an ad for a “Lolita,” “little girl,” “school girl” or “amber alert,” those terms are automatically stripped from the ad — but it is still posted, so the girl will still be sold for sex.

One Backpage document indicated that by 2010, more than 70 percent of its ads in the adult section were being edited like that, suggesting that the company was far more involved in manipulating content than it ever let on.

Sure, some people selling sex are adults acting on their own to make money, and that’s not a concern of mine. If Backpage carefully verified names and ages, I’d be fine with that. But Backpage has more stringent rules for selling a dog than for selling a kid.

I’ve written repeatedly about Backpage over the years because the stories haunt me. My first column about Backpage involved a 13-year-old girl whom I called Baby Face. Her pimp had kicked her down a stairwell for trying to flee, and she was hurting and bleeding and couldn’t bear another rape, but her pimp sold her on Backpage anyway. He took her to an apartment building and waited outside after telling her which apartment to go to.

Terrified and desperate, Baby Face instead pounded on the door of a different apartment. When a surprised woman answered, Baby Face asked for a phone and called her mom and then 911. Her pimp went to prison, but Backpage simply profited from the sale, as it always has.

Look, human trafficking is a complicated issue. If Backpage is put out of business, other websites may fill the void, and indeed, when Backpage closed its adult section, ads selling sex immediately moved over to the site’s dating section.

We need Congress to amend the Communications Decency Act to clarify that companies like Backpage don’t get protections when they permit pimps to sell kids on their websites. There is a mounting bipartisan effort to pass such an amendment, and I hope President-elect Donald Trump will show leadership on this as well. We also need local police departments and prosecutors to go after pimps and johns, rather than sometimes targeting the children who are the victims.

One mom, Nacole (she didn’t want her full name used to protect her family’s privacy), told me how her 15-year-old daughter was sold for more than three months on Backpage.

“How could such a horrific, morally bankrupt business model find success in America?” she asked at the Senate hearing. She said her daughter had been advertised on the website as a ‘Weekend Special.’”

It’s too late to protect that girl, who is still struggling to recuperate. But when children are sold for sex online as weekend specials, they’re not the ones who should be ashamed. We all should be.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/opinion/when-backpagecom-peddles-schoolgirls-for-sex.html?_r=0

 

[User-E]

Mixed feelings among Canadian police over Backpage.com's adult section

Some law enforcement officials say the advertising website Backpage.com should shut down its "adult" sections in Canada, following allegations in the U.S. that the company systematically edited adult ads to remove words that indicate sex trafficking.

But others argue the site is a useful tool that helps Canadian authorities track potential victims, search for missing women and monitor prostitution services.

Backpage, which hosts everything from child care to real estate ads, shuttered all adult sections in the U.S. on Monday, hours before a U.S. Senate committee released a report alleging the site has created a lucrative marketplace that makes child sex trafficking easier. The report cited internal documents showing that up to 80 per cent of the site's ads are edited to conceal the true nature of the underlying transaction.

The company has denied the report's allegations and accused the U.S. government of "unconstitutional" censorship. Four top executives told the Senate subcommittee they were invoking their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

Several police forces in Canada said the site was one of many they monitor as part of their fight against human trafficking.

The head of the Toronto police's human-trafficking enforcement team said the benefits Backpage can provide law enforcement officers in their fight against crime are outweighed by the damage the site can cause. "They are essentially enabling pimps to do their work," said Det.-Sgt. Nunzio Tramontozzi, who would like to see the adult pages shut down. "Almost 98, 99 per cent of all the people that we deal with, all the pimps use Backpage.com to advertise for the girls that they're running," he alleged.

Backpage could not immediately be reached for comment on the police allegations.

Det. Paul Rubner, of the Calgary police's counter exploitation unit, said he had mixed feeling about the shutdown of the site's adult pages. "On the one hand, Backpage, in all their sites -- and there is over 900 North America wide -- provided a very easily accessible vehicle for offenders or exploiters to locate potential victims, so from that perspective I see it as a positive," he said. "On the other hand, we do as law enforcement regularly receive information from Backpage through their filtering process about the existence of potential victims, both of human trafficking and of youth sexual exploitation, that we might not otherwise be aware of."

Backpage has an internal filtering system identifying ads "of questionable nature" that might indicate a potential victim of human trafficking, or an underage person being advertised, Rubner explained. The website then notifies the RCMP's Human Trafficking National Co-ordination Centre, which in turn contacts the appropriate local police force, Rubner said.

Calgary police also use Backpage to identify women they are trying to contact to offer them an exit from the sex trade, he said.

Tramontozzi said sites like Backpage have made human trafficking in the Toronto region "explode." "The traditional tracks here in Toronto where girls were on street corners are no longer there, they don't exist because pimps now just advertise these girls online," he said."They make more money doing it that way and the pimps are hidden, so it's a great tool for them to ply their trade without being caught."

In Ottawa, Sgt. Jeff LeBlanc, who is in charge of the force's human trafficking unit, said there's no doubt Backpage is the most widely used method of advertising sexual services in major cities, with police seeing a jump in the number of daily adult ads posted over the last two years.

But the website itself co-operates fully with law enforcement when issues arise, LeBlanc said, and can remove ads of concern when asked to do so by police. "It is a useful tool," he said. "There have been others that come and go and do get some degree of popularity, but it seems that Backpage is still the most widely used for advertisement anyway at this point."

LeBlanc also noted that Craigslist, another advertising website, used to have adult classifieds and shut down that service, first in the U.S. and later in Canada years ago, but the advertisements simply shifted to Backpage. "I think there will continue to be a demand for advertisement anyway. To shut down one website, and to have another one open up, I'm not sure how much that would necessarily help us or reduce the demand," he said.

To combat the situation, police have increased outreach efforts to groups that deal directly with victims to build relationships that allow victims to easily approach police. "We're not there to raid places and arrest sex trade workers," said LeBlanc. "We're there to detect and to remove the people that are doing it against their will or that are doing it while being underage."

https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/canad...e-over-backpage-com-s-adult-section-1.3238641