Backpage Grand Jury Indictment – Finger on the Scales of Justice –

Tony Ortega

Last week a copy of the recently unsealed Grand Jury indictment found its way to our desks here at the blog. As we make our way through the document this week, we will be sharing with our readers a number of the more spectacular highlights which, as we’ve seen so far, are making a very damning case against Backpage.

So far we seen how many of the ads published on Backpage depicted children who were victims of sex trafficking. Once again, however, these new documents show that although Backpage had sought to create the perception that it was diligently attempting to prevent the publication of such ads, the reality is that Backpage allowed such ads to be published while declining for financial reasons to take necessary steps to address the problem.

Consider the following example as cited in the complaint:

“For several years, Backpage’s official policy, when presented with an ad featuring the prostitution of a child, was to delete the particular words in the ad denoting the child’s age and then publish a revised version of the ad. Such editing, of course, did nothing to change the fact the ad featured the prostitution of a child- it only created a veneer of deniability and helped Backpage’s customers (i.e., pimps trafficking children) evade detection.”

Backpage also contributed to the proliferation of ads featuring the prostitution of children in other ways. For example, an anti-sex trafficking organization once suggested that Backpage provide an automatic warning message whenever a customer searched for particular terms indicative of the prostitution of a child.

In response to this, prosecutors argue that, Carl Ferrer acknowledged the proposal was a good one but declined to adopt it because Backpage would not derive any public-relations benefit from doing so, saying:

“This is a good idea but it is not visible to AGs [state attorneys general] so it has little PR value. It is a low priority.”

Furthermore, Backpage claimed it did everything in its power to alert the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (“NCMEC”) whenever it became aware that a child was being advertised on its website.

However, the Backpage defendants routinely implemented policies to artificially limit such referrals.

In fact, in one damning email, Andrew Padilla instructed his assistant Operations Manager, Joye Vaught, that “ if we don’t want to blow past 500 [referrals to NMCEC] this month, we shouldn’t be doing more than 16 per day.”

In another training document, moderators were instructed not to send emergency alerts to NCMEC in response to complaints filed by the grandparents and other extended family members of children being advertised on the website: “Neice [sic], nephew, grandchild, cousin, etc. doesn’t count.”

We don’t know how Tony Ortega might choose to spin that unsurprising revelation that, but to us here at the blog is sure sounds like Backpage had its finger on the scale.