Tony Ortega Knew, Did Nothing, And Lied

Section 230 was originally meant to be not only a shield for internet service pro-viders but also a sword against illicit content, allowing platforms to take down content like pornography without being held liable for doing so.

Tony Ortega knew this, and yet still worked to convince the world Backpage was doing nothing wrong. He wanted you to believe that Backpage was doing all it could to ‘aggressively protect’ those they were selling for sex by using a proprie-tary algorithm to identify and red-flag ads posted to their the Backpage personals section. But were they?

Tony Ortega

Given Tony Ortega’s track record of peddling stories known to be based entirely upon his own fabrications it might come as a shock to realize Tony Ortega’s slip-shod defense of Backpage was, at least in part, based on something close to true. They did have an algorithm. It did alert them to illegal content.

The problem with Tony Ortega’s defense is his insistence that Backpage took steps to shut them down once these posts had been identified. The fact is, Back-page rarely did anything about them at all, except to offer up more lies.

Conveniently, this is was a part of the Backpage plan Tony Ortega refused to ever address while shilling on their behalf. And why would he? After all, Backpage couldn’t charge money for advertisements they refused to run, and that money was being used to pay people like Tony Ortega.

This is what journalists call an ethical conflict of interest. Not to suggest that Tony Ortega has much in the way of ethical standards but this feels particularly un-ethical even for him.

The glaring hypocrisy of Tony Ortega’s conflict of interest can be summed up in six simple words — He knew, did nothing, and lied. This fact would be all but confirmed later when federal authorities shut the whole Backpage operation down, identifying it to be what many of us suspected it to be from the beginning: a front for a wildly lucrative human sex trafficking ring targeting women and un-derage children.

Section 230 was intended to protect children in particular from lewd, violent and lascivious online content, not to give cover for unchecked corporate greed. And it certainly wasn’t there to give double-talkers like Tony Ortega immunity to lie to our faces.

Platforms like Backpage took it upon themselves to moderate as they please, re-moving content more or less arbitrarily while leaving other obviously criminal content alone. Tony Ortega knew this and did nothing about it except lie through his teeth to us all.