Backpage ads targeted
Congress passes a bill aiming to alter a law that has long helped shield the website Backpage against allegations its escort ads enable sex trafficking.
The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill Wednesday aimed at altering a law that has long helped shield the website Backpage against allegations its classified escort ads enabled sex trafficking.
The sponsors of the bill, which passed the House in February, made no secret that its target was Backpage, the classified advertising website started in Phoenix by the former executives of the weekly tabloid newspaper New New Times. Times.
The bill, which cleared the Senate with only two votes against it, makes it illegal for someone to use a website “with the intent to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person . ... ”
The measure was meant to close a loophole in a 1996 law that protected websites from user-posted content, such as negative reviews, and allowed websites to edit such content without facing liability claims.
Backpage had cited that law, called the Communications Decency Act, to argue that it wasn’t responsible for the content of its ads. Backpage has since taken down its “escorts” section.
Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona voted for it. Sen. John McCain, whose wife, Cindy, has been active in support of measures to fight sex trafficking, was absent from the chamber as he has been since December while battling a rare form of brain cancer.
Cindy McCain, in a phone interview
Wednesday, said she and her husband watched the proceedings and both were glad to see it pass.
“I couldn’t be happier,” Cindy McCain said. “It makes me cry.”
McCain said the bill was narrowly tailored enough to focus on websites that knowingly or intentionally promote sex trafficking.
“Websites like Craigslist and Backpage should not be able to sell children online and hide behind this law,” she said.
She said she expected the law would discourage any future websites from mimicking the past practices of those websites.
“This is an awakening,” she said. “It’s a new beginning for all of this. The communities of America will not take this anymore.”
The measure passed the House in February on a vote of 388 to 25. It now heads to the White House and awaits the signature of President Donald Trump, who has endorsed it.
Backpage started as the literal back page of the New
Times, filled with classified ads. Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, the former New Times executives who sold off the newspaper chain in 2012, retained the lucrative interest in the Backpage website.
The site became dominated by adult-oriented advertising that police, prosecutors and advocates said were thinly-veiled solicitations for prostitution. The adult ads were among the few the website charged users to post.
A U.S. Senate report released in January 2017 contained internal e-mails from the company that showed its operators edited ads and created a list of disallowed terms that seemed indicative of prostitution. The Senate report concluded such actions showed Backpage knew its website was used to facilitate prostitution.
Backpage shut down its adult section the day the report was released, just as Lacey and Larkin appeared, under subpoena, to testify before the Senate committee. Both men refused to answer questions.
Advocates and prosecutors have alleged that Backpage was used to sell underage girls and that women sold through the ads were coerced into acts of prostitution, elevating the crime from prostitution to the federal crime of sex trafficking.
In a floor speech Wednesday, Sen. Ron Wyden, DOre., said he feared the measure was overly broad and would have unintended consequences. He also said it would move the online sex trafficking trade to the “dark web,” where police and prosecutors could not track it.
“I believe this bill, which will clearly pass,” he said shortly before the vote, “will be something that the United States Senate will come to deeply regret.”
The bill, in a provision flagged as unconstitutional by the Justice Department, also allows prosecution if the conduct occurred before the enactment of the bill.
In a brief sent to the House Judiciary Committee in February as it was considering the bill, an assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, working for the Justice Department on the issue, Stephen Boyd, wrote that the language “raises a serious constitutional concern.”
According to the Senate report and court documents, Backpage staked out its opportunity to dominate the market for adult ads after competitor Craigslist stopped taking those ads under pressure from the government and activists.
The legislation clarifies that a 1996 law that allowed websites to edit or moderate user content without making them liable for it could not also be used as a shield against facilitating prostitution.
That law, the Communications Decency Act, has been used by attorneys for Backpage to successfully assert that the website is not liable for words produced by users.
The law’s original intent was to protect websites from liability claims for postings made by others, such as a negative restaurant review or a defamatory comment on a news website.
Website operators had feared that if they began pulling down selected offensive ads, they would be responsible for everything else that remained on their website and be open to libel suits.
Backpage used that law — designed to clean up the Internet — to assert that it was not responsible for the ads on its website because it didn’t write them.
Judges in various states agreed that the law provided such immunity.
The bill aims to remove that interpretation. It contains an introductory section that explains that the 1996 law was “never intended to provide legal protection to websites that unlawfully promote and facilitate prostitution.”
It would impose a maximum 25-year sentence for the operators of a website that promoted the prostitution of five or more persons or showed a “reckless disregard” that its website facilitated sex trafficking.
The Senate subcommittee report concluded in January 2017 that the operators of Backpage knowingly allowed prostitution on its website.
That report, relying chiefly on internal emails, concluded the website’s managers actively edited ads in its adult section, becoming more or less permissive in language allowed depending on what it thought was the law enforcement atmosphere.
E-mails showed that moderators were given lists of terms that would be allowed on the site. The word “cheerleader” was not allowed, but “dirty slut” was. Prices could be listed so long as they didn’t accompany brief time periods.
One person employed as a moderator for Backpage told a subcommittee investigator that the policing of language was designed to allow prostitution ads without being obvious. The employee likened it to putting “lipstick on a pig,” the Senate report said.
Backpage has taken down its “adult” section, though similar ads began appearing on its dating section. Those ads cost $7, one of the few types of ads that Backpage charges to post.
The Senate subcommittee report said the e-mails it obtained would provide a roadmap for potential criminal prosecution of the website’s operators.
Lacey and Larkin, according to a filing by their attorney in a civil case, are the targets of a grand jury investigation in Arizona.