
Backpage.com’s Founders Speak for the First Time - danso
https://reason.com/archives/2018/08/21/backpage-founders-larkin-and-lacey-speak
======
tptacek
I understand why Reason would want to make a cause célèbre out of Backpage ---
libertarian founders prosecuted for a case combining the First Amendment with
hysteria over prostitution! How can they resist! But I think they've been
bamboozled by their subject.

Surely, months after Lacey and Larkin's arrest, in writing a feature story
built on interviews with the founders of Backpage, Elizabeth Nolan Brown would
have taken the time to read the actual indictment against them. But if she
has, she sure doesn't expect you to, because she doesn't expend the slightest
effort in rebutting the claims it makes.

Take referrals to NCMEC, which Brown mentions 5 times in this piece. The
indictment mentions it too, right before quoting an email by Backpage staff
saying that referrals to NCMEC are to be capped at 500 per month or 16 per
day. The obvious concern here would be that Backpage was not in fact reliably
forwarding things to NCMEC; only slightly less obvious a concern is that they
had so many problematic ads that they had to manage the volume of stuff they
were sending to NCMEC, which takes some of the bite out of Brown's argument
that child exploitation simply isn't a major problem in the adult services
industry.

Rather infamously at this point, Backpage is accused not only of running ads
for child sex traffickers, but of doing so _knowingly_ : for years, under
Lacey and Larkin's management, their policy --- as Brown writes --- was to
check ads for suspicious keywords. What Brown doesn't tell you is that their
software then _stripped the keywords out of the ads and ran them anyways_.

Nowhere in Brown's piece does she address or even mention the allegations that
Larkin and Lacey and Backpage's whole staff took pains to conceal what they
were doing, for years had a policy of denying knowledge of any prostitution on
their site at all, or structured transactions and laundered money to conceal
their proceeds. That doesn't fit in to her story, so you don't need to know
about it.

I'm not arguing that the indictment is any more a reliable source than Brown
is. I'm simply observing that there is a lot of misinformation out there about
Backpage, mostly from people who have read neither side carefully, and you'd
be well-served (if you care about this stuff) to read both sides.

~~~
stickfigure
_stripped the keywords out of the ads and ran them anyways_

I don't see why this is particularly damning. Visit any porn tube site right
now and you will notice that "teen", "stepsister", and a few other young-
sounding keywords are incredibly popular. The actresses are quite obviously
NOT underage.

When I worked for kink.com a decade ago, we had a policy to avoid these words
because they made our credit card processors nervous. They already had a
difficult enough time with fetish content. All our content was produced in-
house (with meticulous 2257 records), but if we _had_ put user-generated
content on the site, we absolutely would have stripped out keywords that were
too edgy.

Sex workers and pornographers habitually sell the fantasy of barely legal. Not
even the customers really believe this fantasy. I wouldn't necessarily assume
a suggestive ad actually represents child abuse, and editing out misleading
keyword stuffing seems pretty reasonable.

~~~
DanBC
>I don't see why this is particularly damning. Visit any porn tube site right
now and you will notice that "teen", "stepsister", and a few other young-
sounding keywords are incredibly popular. The actresses are quite obviously
NOT underage.

That's not what happened. Backpage knew children were being kidnapped,
drugged, and advertised for sex on their site. They had some choices:
cooperate with law enforcement to help stop it happening; do nothing; or
cooperate with the kidnappers to earn more money. They chose to cooperate with
the traffickers.

> At the direction of CEO Carl Ferrer, the company programmed this electronic
> filter to “strip” —that is, delete—hundreds of words indicative of sex
> trafficking ( including child sex trafficking) or prostitution from ads
> before their publication. 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.” When a user submitted an adult ad containing one of these “stripped”
> words, Backpage’s Strip Term From Ad filter would immediately delete the
> discrete word and the remainder of the ad would be published. While the
> Strip Term From Ad filter changed nothing about the true nature of the
> advertised transaction or the real age of the person being sold for sex,
> thanks to the filter, Backpage’s adult ads looked “cleaner than ever.”
> Manual editing entailed the deletion of language similar to the words and
> phrases that the Strip Term From Ad filter automatically deleted—including
> terms indicative of criminality

If Backpage were truly cooperating with law enforcement they would have
reported these ads before stripping the wordds, rather than stripping the
words and then deleting the original ad.

~~~
ryanlol
>cooperate with law enforcement to help stop it happening; do nothing; or
cooperate with the kidnappers to earn more money. They chose to cooperate with
the traffickers.

This is ludicrous on its face. Backpage _obviously_ wasn't earning any
meaningful amounts of money from child prostitution.

~~~
tptacek
I too am a little mystified by why they chose to do what they did because I
agree with you that there just can't be that much money in child trafficking.
But the indictment has a lot of details, some of it supported by quotes in
emails; it seems pretty likely that they _did do stuff_. Why? Maybe just
ideology?

There's a lot in the indictment to suggest that they don't take child sex
trafficking seriously as a problem. They joke about it ("entrapment.com").
They take meetings and disregard the information they're given. They're on the
record declining to adopt things they say are "good ideas" because they don't
have enough "P.R. value". I think the balance of information we have strongly
suggests that Lacey and Larking just DGAF.

This is the problem I have with the Standard Internet Discussion on
Backpage.com. It invariably focuses on the harm reduction argument. I'm
prepared to buy the harm reduction argument! But someone responsible needs to
run that site; the people who actually ran it belong in prison.

~~~
stickfigure
You keep asserting this, yet despite repeated requests from myself and others
you still have not pointed out the parts of the indictment that are presumably
so convincing.

If it's so clearcut, give us the article numbers and let's talk about
specifics. The indictment is easy enough to read.

This whole subthread is starting to sound like the McMartin Preschool case.

~~~
tptacek
"Article numbers"?

------
seibelj
Prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. Preventing a woman from
consenting to sell sex services is immoral and paternalistic. Arguing you
should do so because it might cause an increase in abuse or harm to minors is
the same logical argument as banning alcohol because it could increase
domestic violence and car accidents.

Reason magazine and the Reason podcast are important journalistic
institutions. They do not parrot right or left ideology. They have a
libertarian philosophy.

It is a classic truism that if you put 1000 libertarians in a room you will
get 1000 definitions of what libertarianism is. In my opinion it is
essentially a belief in the individual over the collective and that permeates
all ideas, such as a distrust and dislike for the government for many
different reasons.

Libertarianism is easy to criticize in broad strokes. Many people hear such
criticism and assume whatever evil things they want about it. I am used to the
criticism and accept that as being neither the stereotype of conservative or
liberal my views are easily criticized by people who follow mainstream dogma.

If this philosophy is appealing I highly recommend the Reason Podcast. The
latest episode on Elizabeth Warren’s plans for corporations is a good summary
of libertarian views on populist rhetoric whether it comes from the right or
left.

~~~
tptacek
Except the case against Larkin and Lacey isn't premised on "preventing a woman
from consenting to sell sex services", but rather on what they did to enable
and surreptitiously profit from child sex trafficking. Again, I feel like
people with strong opinions about this case generally haven't read either side
of it carefully.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Except the case against Larkin and Lacey isn't premised on "preventing a
> woman from consenting to sell sex services", but rather on what they did to
> enable and surreptitiously profit from child sex trafficking.

Except neither of the criminal actions have had that as a central premise.
That's been prominent in some of the PR, especially related to the State
prosecution and to the federal legislative efforts the case was used as part
of the (mostly dishonest) pretext for, but neither the state nor federal
criminal prosecutions were centrally about that, they were about facilitating
and profiting from anfd concealing the origin of profits from prostitution.

~~~
tptacek
I agree that most of the indictment was about concealing and laundering funds.

------
gcb0
these threads really make me miss the friend/foe system on slashdot. This
thread highlights very well all the bigots, rigth wing political shills, that
I would love to mark as foe and never have to read again when they are back to
maskerading their ways on more technical subjects.

------
ur-whale
A Reason article made it to HN's frontpage?

Amazing ... today must be bizarro Dienstag, but I'm not complaining.

------
taxicabjesus
I have a friend who used to advertise on backpage. She just did handjobs, not
full-service... She was sort-of traumatized by the experience, but learned a
lot at the same time.

One of my early taxi passengers was certainly a "working girl" [1]. I picked
her up at a hotel early in the morning. I called the provided number, asked
the hotel operator to give me the room number, and told the man who answered
that I was at the lobby. When the passenger came out it was not a dude. She
didn't seem like she enjoyed herself very much.

[1] [https://www.taxiwars.org/2012/03/day-12-working-
girl.html](https://www.taxiwars.org/2012/03/day-12-working-girl.html)

Over my 3.5 years in the cab, I had several female passengers who helped me
understand more about female attraction. One got in the cab and was speaking
German into her phone, so I asked "Sprechen sie deutsch?" My German is not
that good, but she insisted in conducting the taxi ride in German. She clearly
found me to be intriguing, wondered "what are you doing _driving a cab? ",_
and gave me a kiss at the end of the ride. I never heard from her again.

Another woman going home from the bar would've been interested in a date and
said, "you have my number." Things were complicated at the time, so I never
called her back.

I told another female passenger about my relationship drama. She concluded
that ride saying, "well I was about to ask you to make out...", and commented
on how I had a sort of magnetism about me that she found most men lacked.

Men frequently have no idea what makes them annoying to women. Even though I'm
not taxi driving anymore, I still practice my people skills. The female staff
at my fitness club are interesting: some have decided that I'm "safe", while
others have their shields up and clearly aren't interested in talking to me
about anything that's not work related.

A month ago I ended a comment here with this line: "Relationship coaching for
men is mostly about teaching them how to be less obnoxious." \-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554503](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554503)

IMHO, our dear leaders would be more productive if they looked at the causes
behind the sex industries (prostitution/porn/backpage advertisements/etc). I'd
suggest they start with my post, "The Difference Between Boys and Girls" [2].
I tell this story to women _all the time_ (when contextually-appropriate), and
they all laugh.

[2] [http://www.taxiwars.org/2016/02/the-difference-between-
boys-...](http://www.taxiwars.org/2016/02/the-difference-between-boys-
girls.html) (tl/dr: female passenger didn't understand her new guy-friend's
problem with her relationship history. I told her about how women choose who
they want to have relationships with, whereas men have to play the numbers
game until they find someone who's interested in them, and how some men never
get 'picked'.)

Sex work is easy money, for women who are wired that way. Like the friend I
mentioned at the top of this post, only a few women can do it as a calling;
most just find themselves in that line of work because they need money.

Another passenger was a stripper that I saw a couple times (randomly assigned
by the taxi company's computer system; she never called me directly). The last
time she told of being followed home from her strip club, that she'd been
beaten up, and that she didn't feel safe at her gated apartment complex
anymore...

If our dear leaders acknowledged that this "oldest profession" exists for a
reason, progress could be made in making 'sex work' safer for women. (I don't
have any insights into the male stripper/sex worker's world, certainly they
have predicaments too...)

~~~
djsumdog
This is actually fascinating and a pretty fascinating view point. I've been
meaning to write something on this topic myself; will check out your blog
posts/comments.

~~~
taxicabjesus
> This is actually fascinating and a pretty fascinating view point.

Thanks for this response. The score on my comment above is oscillating around
'0' \- I wonder how many votes it's actually gotten.

I have lots of anecdotes; only a few have made it into blog posts. Maybe one
day I'll mine my notes for a book.

A group of three men on a business trip were going to a strip club. One of
them had just gotten divorced, iirc. The newly-divorced man didn't actually
want to go, but his compatriots insisted.

A few passengers invited me to come into their strip clubs with them. I found
those to be rather depressing experiences. My theory is that normal human
males have an "imagination" that allows them to "fantasize" about getting with
their dancer. My imagination is disabled ("aphantasia" [0]), so I choose to
spend my own money on other activities.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia)

~~~
gammateam
> Thanks for this response. The score on my comment above is oscillating
> around '0' \- I wonder how many votes it's actually gotten.

There is a habit where people require you to vilify or express a clearer
polarizing opinion about a topic before they determine if you are an
acceptable person to listen to, or not.

Its more like a disclaimer they look for.

If you don't do it, or "forget" to mention how much you don't agree with
something, then people will discard everything you have to say.

I don't like the habit. Downvotes are effectively censorship, which I would be
somewhat okay with if it came from the company itself (hackernews), because
then people could disagree with how the company operates, but currently the
downvote censorship comes from a mixture of the communities and administrators

~~~
taxicabjesus
> There is a habit where people require you to vilify or express a clearer
> polarizing opinion about a topic before they determine if you are an
> acceptable person to listen to, or not.

Hmm... I think you're saying that people don't like to consider nuance if they
already have a strong opinion?

> Downvotes are effectively censorship,

I don't mind downvotes much, as they help me figure out what people care
about. HN downvotes would be much more meaningful if I knew how many total
votes a comment received. For example, my original comment is currently at "2
points", but it was at -1 earlier today, which indicates at least 5 people
thought it worth voting on (2 down, 3 up). If I knew that 99 people actually
voted on that comment, I'd probably develop the line of thinking some more.

Thanks for your feedback.

------
Animats
It's strange. There's a huge anti-sex push from somewhere. Not from the
religious right; that was back in the 1980s. Now Trump's sex life is OK with
the religious right. The anti-sex movement has taken on a life of its own.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church has been revealed as a front for a pedophile
organization.[1]

[1] [https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/grand-jury-report-
abou...](https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/grand-jury-report-about-
catholic-priest-abuse-pennsylvania-shows-church-ncna900906)

~~~
forapurpose
> Not from the religious right; that was back in the 1980s

IIRC, GW Bush's administration in the 2000s made a big anti-porn push, IIRC,
with Attorney General Ashcroft being particularly focused on it.

Regarding supporters of Trump and the Catholic Church: I agree it would be
hypocritical for them to advocate against porn, I don't think that stops
anyone, and I personally don't care - acting against evil (I don't think
porn/sex is evil, but they do) doesn't require you to be a saint, or nobody
would act.

~~~
justin66
This kind of hypocrisy does call into question the sincerity of your belief in
whatever advocacy you're supporting, and whether you're simply supporting it
to conform.

------
Scoping_dindus
If sex work was legal and regulated it would generate a decent amount of tax
revenue and cut down tremendously on human trafficking.

