The men behind controversial website Backpage edited prostitution advertisements to remove indications of wrongdoing and promote sexual trafficking of underage girls, a U.S. Senate report released Monday alleged.
After the release of the report, Backpage removed “adult” ads from its U.S. web pages, replacing them with messages claiming it was the victim of “unconstitutional” government censorship.
“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,” the company said in a press release late Monday evening.
UPDATE (Jan. 12, 2016): Ads for sexual services on Backpage appear to have migrated from the closed Adult section to the “Dating” section, which carries an advisory that, “This section contains sexual content, including pictorial nudity and adult language.” Ads in the section feature scantily clad women posing suggestively and offering companionship.
Backpage, last valued at more than $500 million according to the Senate report, used an automatic filter to hide the true purpose of the ads, the report alleged.
“At the direction of CEO Carl Ferrer, the company programmed this electronic filter to … delete … hundreds of words indicative of sex trafficking (including child sex trafficking) or prostitution from ads before their publication,” the report said. “The terms that Backpage has automatically deleted from ads before publication include ‘lolita,’ ‘teenage,’ ‘rape,’ ‘young,’ ‘amber alert,’ ‘little girl,’ ‘teen,’ ‘fresh,’ ‘innocent,’ and ‘school girl.'”
Once the problem words were stripped out, the ad would run, said the report, which contains allegations unproven in court.
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Lawsuits and prosecutions against Backpage, including charges of pimping by California Attorney General Kamala Harris, have failed in the past because the firm has been deemed protected from liability under the Communications Decency Act. The cases have been closely watched in Silicon Valley, because technology firms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter also rely on the Act to shield them from liability over content posted by others.
In December, after a California judge threw out pimping charges against Backpage, Harris filed more pimping charges along with charges of money laundering. A spokeswoman for Harris said late Monday that the Attorney General’s office would “continue to litigate the criminal charges in court.”
As far back as 2006, Backpage was editing ads to conceal criminal activity, the report said. The company then imposed a more formal process of manual and automatic editing, according to the report, which was based largely on internal company documents obtained by a court order.
“Over time, Backpage reprogrammed its electronic filters to reject an ad in its
entirety if it contained certain egregious words suggestive of sex trafficking,” the report said. “But the company implemented this change by coaching its customers on how to post ‘clean’ ads for illegal transactions.
“For example, in 2012, a user advertising sex with a ‘teen’ would get the error message: ‘Sorry, “teen” is a banned term.’ Through simply redrafting the ad, the user would be permitted to post a sanitized offer. Documents from as recently as 2014 confirm the continued use of these same error messages,” the report said.
The 18-month investigation also revealed that the two Backpage owners, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, who reportedly sold the business to a Dutch firm, retained ownership through a web of shell companies, the report claimed. Lacey, Larkin and Ferrer are “the true beneficial owners of the company,” according to the report.
The report quoted a federal appeals court ruling that said a website operator who edits user-created content retains immunity from liability if the edits are unrelated to illegality, but loses immunity if they edit in a way that contributes to the illegality.
With regard to Backpage’s alleged deletions of words suggestive of illegality, Santa Clara University School of Law professor Eric Goldman pointed out that the judge who ruled in Backpage’s favor on the original California pimping charges said in his ruling that by weeding out illegal content, Backpage had acted in accordance with the “Good Samaritan” that the Communications Decency Act encouraged.
On Monday night, the U.S. senators responsible for the Backpage report issued a statement about the website’s shut-down of U.S. escort ads. “Backpage’s response wasn’t to deny what we said. It was to shut down their site,” said Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO). “That’s not ‘censorship’ — it’s validation of our findings.”
The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations announced earlier that it would hold a hearing into Backpage on Tuesday. Scheduled to appear are Ferrer, Lacey and Larkin; Backpage lawyer Elizabeth McDougall; company chief operations officer Andrew Padilla; and three parents of alleged victims.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let stand a lower court ruling that held Backpage to be protected from liability for content posted by third parties.
Three women who claimed they were forced into prostitution at age 15 had sued Backpage, arguing that their pimps had advertised them as “escorts” on the website.
But the Supreme Court declined to revisit the March 2016 ruling by a federal appeals court that dismissed their case on the basis that Backpage was protected by third-party-content provisions of the Communications Decency Act.
