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The social service organization known as FAIR girls released an ad campaign this week aimed at convincing Village Voice Media to remove the adult ads on their website, Backpage.com. According to MediaPost, the ad campaign went online today, and features an actress portraying the life experience of a 13-year-old sex trafficking victim. The ad campaign also asks people to sign an online petition to stop Village Voice Media from accepting adult ads. The 30-second video will air on Sunday during “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” and on cable next week.
Many critics of Backpage.com say that the listings site assists the victimization of young girls, while the website argues that it works accordingly with the law to identify and prosecute human traffickers. The ad campaign from FAIR girls was debuted while Backpage.com is in the midst of litigation issues over its adult ads.
Backpage.com is challenging the laws in both Washington and Texas, which make the act of posting such adult ads a felony in Washington and a crime in Texas. Backpage.com is arguing that these state laws run counter to part of the Communications Decency Act, which states that Web sites aren’t responsible for illegal posts by users. The Internet Archive, which monitors records of more than 150 billion old Web pages, joined Backpage.com to fight the Washington law in court. Internet Archive has suggested that the law is too broad and can therefore be applied to a vast majority of Web sites.
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Why arent these groups and corporations posting actual arrest cases of these underage sex trafficking rings? Why arent stats being posted? We keeping hearing from these corporate owned media companies and politicians acting on behalf of the corporations, that underage sex trafficking is so huge on Backpage, in the United States, with arrests being made everyday.
So who are the people running these rings? Are they from here or another country? Are they generating millions of dollars? Are they smuggling children from other countries or kidnapping US children? Who are the customers? Any arrests of the customers? Is there any data at all about these huge networks of sex trafficking rings operating on Backpage, besides media hearsay??
Finding an ad for a minor or victim of sex trafficking on Backpage.com is a needle in a haystack problem. 99% – and possibly as much as 99.95% – of the ads are for male and female escorts, strippers and other sex services.
This does not diminish the seriousness of the problem; it informs how we should go about solving it.
eBay had to figure out how to weed out counterfeit luxury bag sellers.
YouTube has to figure out how to detect copyrighted content out of many millions of video uploads.
Match.com has to figure out how to keep sex offenders off the site.
And Facebook sorts through 250 million photo uploads PER DAY to look for child porn, using a technology Microsoft developed called PhotoDNA.
Nobody is calling for Facebook, eBay, YouTube or Match.com to shut down; these companies are all applying technology in new ways to find the needle in a haystack.
Nor would anyone argue that shutting down Facebook would stop child porn, or shutting down Match.com would stop date rape.
It isn’t easy to see who’s a sex worker and who might be a victim of sex trafficking just by looking at an ad. So Village Voice Media manually reviews all adult ads twice before publishing them on Backpage.com, requires a credit card that can be subpoenaed by law enforcement, and reports suspicious ads immediately to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. That’s a start, but there’s a lot more we can do.
Shutting down Backpage, however, avoids the hard work and pushes the problem off. What happens after Backpage?
personaldemocracy.com/media/other-problem-sex-trafficking