Backpage.com shuts adult services section following blistering report from a Senate panel
The operators of the controversial online classified site Backpage.com announced on Monday they have shuttered access to the adult section of their website within the U.S.
The move came hours after the release of a blistering report from a Senate panel charging that Backpage.com systematically edits its escort ads, filtering out words that would suggest the site was promoting the sex trafficking of children.
The report, which was released ahead of a Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing on Tuesday in which Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer and other top company officials are scheduled to testify, is the latest turn in local and federal lawmakers’ effort to press the company to stop publishing certain adult services ads.
Even as Backpage shuttered its adult section, the company said it would continue to wage a legal battle to vindicate its First Amendment rights.
“The decision of Backpage.com today to remove its Adult section in the United States will no doubt be heralded as a victory by those seeking to shutter the site, but it should be understood for what it is: an accumulation of acts of government censorship using extra-legal tactics,” Backpage said in a statement.
Politicians and law enforcement officials charge that the site has provided a cloak of anonymity for pimps and unnecessary ease for their customers who use the site to arrange meetings with sex workers.
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Despite the outrage, efforts to force the Texas-headquartered, Dutch-owned company to permanently shut down its adult advertising have been unsuccessful thus far.
Backpage has effectively argued in federal courts that while some users of its site may engage in criminal activity, it is just the host of content posted on the site and is immune from prosecution under the Communications Decency Act.
In October, California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced pimping charges against Ferrer and charges of conspiracy to commit pimping against shareholders Michael Lacey and James Larkin. A Sacramento County judge tossed out the charges, noting the Communications Decency Act. But Harris, who has since been elected to the Senate, refiled new charges of pimping and money laundering charges.
Larkin and Lacey, the former owners of New York's Village Voice and other publications, say they sold their interest in Backpage two years ago, contradicting the subcommittee's charge that the men continue to be company's "true beneficial owners."
"Today, the censors have prevailed. We get it," Larkin and Lacey said in a joint statement. "But the shut-down of Backpage’s adult classified advertising is an assault on the First Amendment. We maintain hope for a more robust and unbowed Internet in the future."
The subcommittee said in its report, which came after panel staff reviewed hundreds of thousands of pages of internal documents Backpage was forced to hand over to the lawmakers under court order, “that Backpage’s public defense is a fiction.”
“Backpage has maintained a practice of altering ads before publication by deleting words, phrases, and images indicative of criminality, including child sex trafficking,” the report concludes.
Backpage executives began using a feature called “Strip Term From Ad Filter” to help screeners automatically delete hundreds words indicative of sex trafficking — such as “lolita, teenage, amber alert, teen and school girl, according to the Senate report. By Backpage’s own internal estimate, by late-2010, the company was editing 70 to 80% of ads in the adult section either manually or automatically.
The report also charges that Backpage officials know the site facilitates prostitution and child sex trafficking.
“Backpage moderators told the Subcommittee that everyone at the company knew the adult-section ads were for prostitution and that their job was to 'put…lipstick on a pig by sanitizing them,'” the subcommittee alleges in the report.
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The Senate panel, which is led by Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., began its investigation in April 2015.
After refusing to comply with a subpoena to turn over internal documents, the Senate voted to hold Backpage’s CEO in contempt. The subcommittee secured a federal court order in August forcing Backpage to produce the documents.
"Our goal was to get to the truth — and Backpage fought us every step of the way," Portman and McCaskill said in a joint statement. "Yesterday we reported the evidence that Backpage has been far more complicit in online sex trafficking than anyone previously knew. Backpage’s response wasn’t to deny what we said. It was to shut down their site. That’s not 'censorship'—it’s validation of our findings.”
Follow USA TODAY Chicago correspondent Aamer Madhani on Twitter: @AamerISmad