Backpage founders targeted: Arizona’s senators introduce a bill that cracks down on sex trafficking.
Bill targets owners of sites facilitating sex trafficking
U.S. Sens. Jeff Flake and John McCain joined 18 other senators this week to introduce a bill that would make it easier to prosecute publishers of websites hosting advertisements that facilitate sex trafficking.
In a joint news release on the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, Flake and McCain said the bill is intended to hold accountable Backpage.com, a website accused of knowingly accepting ads offering sex with underage girls.
Backpage founders Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin have argued federal law gives them immunity as long as they did not actually create or develop the classified ads on the website. Lacey and Larkin’s attorneys have said they expect indictments against the men from a federal grand jury reviewing their business.
If passed, the bill would amend section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 to clarify it does not prohibit enforcement against interactive computer services of federal, state criminal and civil law relating to sex trafficking.
“Sex trafficking is a deplorable crime and companies like Backpage.com that knowingly facilitate it are reprehensible,” Flake said in a written statement. “Congress needs to act to hold these criminal actors liable for their victimization of innocent women and girls. I thank my colleagues for working together to introduce this important legislation, and I look forward to its swift passage.”
The bill comes after a two-year investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into Backpage. The investigation concluded that the founders of the website knowingly facilitated criminal sex trafficking of women and girls, then hid the evidence in order to increase profits. The legislation emerged from the investigation.
McCain said the legislation would eliminate legal protections and ensure companies like Backpage are brought to justice for violating the rights of the victims.
“For years, Backpage.com has knowingly facilitated online sex trafficking and child exploitation, destroying the lives of innocent young women and girls,” McCain said in a written statement. “It is disgraceful that the law as written has protected Backpage from being held liable for enabling these horrific crimes.”
But Eric Goldman, law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, said the bill could have impact far beyond sex trafficking. Goldman said a doomsday scenario would have every website screening content before it’s published out of fear it may promote sex trafficking.
“If every piece of content had to be pre-screened, there is no Twitter,” he said. “It just doesn’t exist. The whole point of Twitter is that it’s unfiltered. So the law has the potential to reshape the way the internet works, in ways that we can’t fully predict or understand. But all of us might feel the consequences if Congress miscalibrates the regulation and services change fundamentally how they provide communication tools to users.”
The bill has been endorsed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a non-profit that provides assistance to prevent child abductions, recover mission children and combat child exploitation including online child sex trafficking.
John F. Clark, the non-profit’s president and CEO, wrote a letter to seven of the senators supporting the bill to note that the organization has long supported the Senate’s work to investigate Backpage’s activities.
“Now is the time to move forward on a legislative solution to resolve key issues raised by the investigation so that many of the child survivors, their families, and their attorneys who NCMEC has worked with for years will have access to justice,” Clark wrote.