Since the effect of the law that got BP closed down, I am keeping an eye on one of the bigger review sites (for the US). Because of these developments US IP adresses are blocked on that site, so everyone is using VPNs to get there.
It seems many of the women are being hit hard by these measures. Some have had their websites shut down because the host is afraid of being held liable (content is being deleted as well). Some are requesting contact information of clients or prospective clients and a few are already noticing a drop in communications from clients.
Obviously all this is illegal anyway, but is this really an improvement? To have all these women that chose this profession (for whatever reason), and do their best to be as safe as possible, suddenly confronted with their livelihood falling away. That seems to be a recipe for bad decisions and risky choices.
As I understand it, a similar case against the founders of Backpage was thrown out last year because a judge agreed that Backpage could not be responsible for what users posted.
But since then there has been evidence found that Backpage employees modified or cleaned up ads that used words that signal illegal (human trafficing, child abuse, etc.) activity, and then accepted the ads. The contention is that Backpage knew or should have known that the cleaned up ads were really ads for illegal activity that should have been reported and not cleaned up and posted. There may be some internal emails supporting the claim.
"Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, the chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said in his opening statement that documents the committee obtained showed Backpage edited ads to mask illegal activity.
Portman said Backpage employees looked for phrases like “Lolita,” “cheerleader” and “Amber alert” that signaled an underage girl was being offered for sexual activity on the site. People employed as “moderators,” he said, would delete those words from the ads.
Portman said employees would then post the edited ads in the adult services section of the website, rather than turn over the unedited version to law enforcement. That step, he said, would have aided officers in tracking down people who were possibly offering minors for sexual activity.
I dated a lot from the Craigslist personals over the last several years. It was far from useless and nowhere near 99.9% scammers. I met an awesome beautiful woman on there just last August and we dated for four months. I posted an ad a week or so before the personals went dark and from it went on one date that was meh and am still corresponding with one woman from there who I will meet as soon as our schedules align. I am really dismayed by this because while okcupid and fetlife are marginally ok to me, Craigslist was that perfect place between the two.
Backpage is a totally different story. Craigslist voluntarily shut down one section of their page. Backpage was straight up prostitution and was seized by the Feds.
This poorly conceived law is bullshit and goes too far. And it’s here to stay because who wants to be perceived as being in favor of the sex trafficking of infants?
Whatever. The greater Craigslist community has started to figure out a way around the ban for legit dating.
The main issue is that evangelicals want to seem like they’re against other things besides gays and abortion. So, they are now opposed to ‘sex trafficking’ thus this stupid new law.
This. Even after I met my current GF, we’d use Craiglist to find couples, and it was at least 90%+ real people.
Craiglist was the ONLY sizeable dating venue where you can actually specify you are MW looking for MW (or other configurations), and that had it’s own section for couples looking for couples or singletons where you don’t need to spam ads for (ostensibly) single folk with a couples ad.
There are other sites, but they’re all awful, and don’t work well if you’re traveling / on vacation and wanted to meet other couples (which CL was actually good at, being geographically oriented and having time-sensitive posts so you know they’re recent).
I’m sure the fascist puritan a-holes who passed this will just see eliminating that ability to connect couples as an additional feather in their cap.
Oh, random pervs (who happen to be 100% consenting, tax-paying adults) can’t find each other thanks to our law? Goody! They were just one tiny notch above human traffickers! We can’t let them enjoy themselves now, can we?
I can understand that different people have different views on prostitution, but it is perfectly clear that the vast majority of posters in this thread do not know what the new law does.
The law provides that should a person use or operate a website “with the intent to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person and… acts in reckless disregard of the fact that such conduct contributed to sex trafficking” then they are subject to civil and criminal penalties that are quite stiff.
The text of this law clearly indicates that the degree of wrongdoing is quite high in order to be punished under this act. In this case, craigslist would have to be proven to be operated with the intent to promote or facilitate prostitution… but even that isn’t enough. On top of that, craigslist would also have to be proven to have acted in reckless disregard with respect to posts that would indicate sex trafficking. Simply having posts indicating sex trafficking and failing to remove them, which could be a case of ordinary negligence, is not reckless disregard. Reckless disregard is generally along the lines of being aware of a problem, knowning that it could cause serious harm, and saying, “Fuck those people if they get hurt; I have better things to do.”
If craigslist believes that it cannot comply with such minimal standards of ethical behavior, then craigslist has much, much bigger problems as an institution.
Firstly, I think we all have a reasonable grasp on the law. So does Craig’s. They just don’t want to deal with the bullshit of an overzealous prosecutor in some podunk shithole going after them. It’s not worth the potential hassle for something that doesn’t give them any revenue.
I disagree. Go back to the previous page and see how many times people commented that craigslist would be held to account for what someone else did on their site. That is a grossly misleading, and almost certainly uninformed, description of the law. As I related, any website has to engage in pretty shitty behavior - both running a website for the purposes of prostitution and acting in a very reckless manner with respect to sex slavery and/or child sexual abuse, in order to have done something wrong.
It is a new law so I think it would be very reasonable if websites took a lot of caution to figure out what the law requires, and more importantly, if some minions were actually doing bad things without managements knowledge. Then maybe they bring it back when they know what they are doing.
Like to go back to the gun analogy, let’s say Congress banner assault weapons, and one sporting goods chain stops all gun sales. Does that mean it was wrong to ban assault weapons, because one chain (and not others) took an exceedingly cautious approach, even though they could easily comply with the law?
I don’t think so.
The fact that there’s an awful lot of dating websites that do not seem to share Craigslist’s concerns indicates to me that the issue is probably with craigslist, not the law.
As of today, the “therapeutic services” category on Craigslist seems to be gone. Unlike the personal ads removal, there is no explanation and the link from the main page has been deleted.
I can’t say I’m surprised at this. Although there were occasional ads for licensed massage therapists, in my city the vast majority of the ads in that category were for “Asian” massage businesses operating out of strip malls.