On Friday, users of Backpage.com—the second largest classified ads site after Craigslist—noticed that the website was acting a little weird. First they could only pay in cryptocurrency. Then they couldn’t post anything on the site at all. Finally, suddenly, everything was gone and a banner was put in its place: the federal government had officially shut Backpage down.
Local station 3TV/CBS 5 writes:
Seven people have been indicted on 93 counts of several different crimes related to the classifieds website, Backpage.com. The crimes include money laundering and running a website to facilitate prostitution.
The FBI confirmed Friday that agents raided the Sedona home of Michael Lacey, the founder of Backpage.com.
It is not clear how many have been arrested in the investigation.
The website has been seized and shut down by the FBI. Backpage.com is a classifieds website that has been under investigation for years for claims that the site facilitates sex trafficking on their adult ads page.
Backpage had shut down its adult services section in 2017, but many sex workers just shifted to other sections of the site, mainly “massage” and “women seeking men.”
While all of this is happening soon after Congress passed FOSTA/SESTA, it is not yet law. It’s likely that this recent seize has been years in the making. Technology think tank TechFreedom says Backpage’s shutdown shows that FOSTA/SESTA was an unnecessary, overreaching law.
“The argument for SESTA was a sham all along,” said Berin Szóka, President of TechFreedom. “The bill’s sponsors insisted that Congress had to pass new legislation so that Backpage could be brought to justice. First, they claimed they needed a new criminal law. But today’s domain seizure makes clear that law enforcement agencies didn’t need a new law to shut down Backpage; they had plenty of legal tools and just needed to make it a priority. Second, SESTA’s sponsors claimed that Section 230 effectively made it impossible for sex trafficking victims to recover damages in court. But last week, a district court judge ruled that a victim’s lawsuit could proceed, because the Jane Doe plaintiff had satisfied her initial burden of proof to show that Backpage had helped to create sex trafficking ads, and thus lost its Section 230 immunity. In short, existing law is working.”
Sex worker rights advocates say shutting down Backpage in the name of ending sex trafficking actually does more harm than good.
We’re still awaiting more details; the Justice Department’s banner says more information would be available at 6 PM ET, but as of this writing, none has been released.