from the weaponization-of-government dept

The case towards Backpage was constructed on lies, innuendo, and a willful misunderstanding of how the web works. However that didn’t cease the federal government from destroying the corporate and its founders’ lives.

Over the previous couple of years, we’ve written about how your entire case against Backpage was a travesty of justice. The corporate really labored intently with the feds (and even obtained commendations) to cease any precise human trafficking on their platform, however refused to assist the feds go after consenting grownup intercourse work. After that occurred, a bunch of presidency actors turned on the corporate and falsely painted it as knowingly serving to intercourse trafficking.

Various completely different felony and civil circumstances have been introduced towards the corporate and its homeowners, one among whom, Jim Larkin, died by suicide final yr. Over and over, politicians and the media painted Backpage as being a really evil participant within the area. Nevertheless, the extra you looked at the details, the extra it appeared like they have been handy political scapegoats in a battle towards a free web.

A lot of our personal protection was constructing on the unbelievable work of Purpose’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown. She not too long ago accomplished a new 45-minute documentary concerning the railroading of Backpage and its founders, which you’ll be able to watch on YouTube:

There’s additionally an enormous article that discusses a lot of what’s within the video as effectively (on the hyperlink above) which can be value studying. Right here’s only a snippet:

In 2004, Lacey and Larkin launched the web site Backpage as an extension of the labeled adverts that had all the time run behind their newspapers (and most different newspapers). Backpage.com had all of the sections you’d discover in its print counterparts, together with residences for lease, job openings, and personals and grownup companies adverts, separated by metropolis.

At first, no person paid a lot consideration to the positioning. When attorneys normal declared battle on grownup companies adverts on-line within the late 2000s, the same however better-known Craigslist was the platform of their crosshairs.

Although newspapers had for many years revealed adverts for escorts, cellphone intercourse traces, and different types of authorized intercourse work, Craigslist’s on-line facilitation of those adverts coincided with two burgeoning ethical panics. The primary involved the rise of user-generated content material—platforms comparable to Craigslist and early social media entities that allowed speech to be revealed with out conventional gatekeepers.

The second panic: intercourse trafficking. A coalition of Christian activists and radical feminists had been teaming as much as push the concept ranges of compelled and underage prostitution have been all of a sudden reaching epidemic proportions. To assist this narrative, they tended to conflate all prostitution and even any type of intercourse work with coerced intercourse trafficking.

I do seem a bit within the documentary, although most of it focuses (extra importantly) on founder Michael Lacey and all he’s been by way of.

The entire video is value watching. It exhibits how a whole authorities equipment will be circled to attempt to burn down a media operation based mostly on deceptive claims of “intercourse trafficking,” leaving individuals and a enterprise utterly ruined simply on the bases of innuendo and rumors.

Studying from what occurred to Backpage is that rather more necessary, particularly as we’re now getting into a brand new period of attacks on free expression.

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Firms: backpage, backpage.com


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