Tony Ortega
There are not many who would disagree with the notion that Tony Ortega has changed journalism for the worse. Of course he was not the first tabloid hack to try and cash in on selling lies for personal profit and a perceived measure of ‘clout’ from his fellow conspiracy theorists in the blogosphere, but he was among the more brazen failures in his endeavors.
Ortega’s former employers at Backpage, too, changed the world for the worse.
Tony Ortega
In recent posts we’ve been examining how Backpage blatantly abused the system set in place by federal laws regarding human trafficking broadly and the victimization of children in related online sex trafficking more specifically. And throughout it all we’ve been witness to Tony Ortega’s indifference to so much human suffering.
Lost in the shuffle of this continuing conversation, however, are the voices of brave elected officials who stood up to would-be bullies like Tony Ortega.
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.
If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, chances are you’ve seen us discuss a bit of federal legislation passed more than 20 years ago called Section 230. Given our examination this week of the latest sex trafficking lawsuit to rock the social media world, we thought we’d offer a quick refresher to remind us all exactly how sites like Backpage and Twitter have so long gotten off scott-free whenever they are exposed trafficking in sexually explicit material involving children.
As we here at the blog were first to anticipate earlier this week, the initial shockwaves surrounding the recent lawsuit filed against Twitter for not removing sexually explicit content depicting a minor are suddenly beginning to be felt within the legal world.
Call it the lesson no one learned from Backpage, namely: that corporate media companies — no matter who they are — must be held accountable for illicit content posted on their platforms.
Tony Ortega
More information following our reporting on the developing bombshell Twitter child sex trafficking case we first told our readers about yesterday.
Indeed, the more we learn about the particulars of this case the clearer and more alarming we see the criminal pattern between the exploitation of minors on the Twitter platform and what was done to victimize the underage youth during Tony Ortega’s deceitful tenure as craven outspoken mouthpiece for the corporate pimps of Backpage.
Hot on the heels of a former trafficked child sold and raped by Backpage and its accomplices, we have news of yet another still darker account of a new underage victim which further erodes Tony Ortega’s fraudulent Backpage defense.
As we have seen, the gist of Tony Ortega’s faulty argument that ‘Backpage and companies like it have guaranteed First Amendment protection to traffic individuals for sex’ falls apart when it is set against real world examples of exactly the sort of horrors that went on within the sordid pages of Backpage’s highly lucrative ‘personals ad section’.
At the end of last year we began digging still further into Tony Ortega’s dirty history, shilling for Backpage and disparaging anyone with the courage to speak up against the vile criminality of selling underage girls to internet perverts. We noted how through all the public backlash Tony Ortega continued spreading his lies unchecked, allowing Backpage to do even more damage.
Today we’d like to explore some of the reasons Tony Ortega made such devious to help keep this digital pimp syndicate afloat.
It has been a tumultuous week for the pro-human sex trafficking camp. Tony Ortega may no longer be the cheerleader he once was for the vile exploitation of women and underage girls during his days as a talking head for the Backpage crime syndicate, but as we’ve reported to our readers previously the dark reverberations of his disgusting rhetoric continues to infect the thinking of a dangerous number of new online enterprises.
Terrific news announced Friday, as Mastercard and Visa have vowed to join the fight against those using Tony Ortega’s rehashed pro-sex trafficking rhetoric.
The two largest credit card companies in America have made it abundantly clear that the old arguments Tony Ortega used to defend his child sex-trafficking pals over at Backpage are no longer fooling anyone and any hopes the pro-sex trafficking crowd had of gaining a foothold in the exploitative war against young women and girls is dead-on-arrival.
Recently we reported to our readers about the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof article. Today, it seems the bombshell ripple effect it’s created has just about everyone talking.
We compared the subject of Kristof’s article, Pornhub, to the sex trafficking clearinghouse Tony Ortega shilled for and suggested the argumentation now being used by Pornhub and its defenders runs along the same lines as the bogus lies Ortega was peddling in order to whitewash Backpage’s rampant criminality.
Cyntoia Brown
The scourge of human sex trafficking Backpage unleashed on an unsuspecting world has yet to be resolved.
Though Tony Ortega’s child sex selling pals may have been apprehended and forced to await judgement for the part they played in the largest illegal prostitution racket this country has ever seen, the lasting impact of the full extent of their crimes – the ones Tony Ortega worked so hard to help them sanitize in the press – still continue to cause incalculable human suffering.
Aaron Drumheller
Fresh developments on the story we first reported to you in our last post in which we laid out the damning ways in which the rising Backpage body count draws a straight line to the criminal bosses who ran the show and the sycophantic lap Tony Ortega who helped them.
Previously we reported to you about a Virginia man who had been sentenced last week to 40 years in federal prison for robbing and killing people he’d connected with using the ‘escort’ section of Backpage – the very section which Tony Ortega insisted you’d be crazy to believe was anything less than impeccably legitimate.
Aaron Drumheller
Ortega continues his petulant silence on the subject as further evidence of Backpage’s bloody history continues to surface.
We’ve been saying this for so long now it’s starting to sound like a broken record. But then, Tony Ortega is not an individual known for having a varied history of creativity. He is, as the saying goes, a one track pony. And, disturbingly, much of his track seems to revolve around the ‘sex-for-cash with at-risk women and underage girls’ portal known as Backpage.
Tony Ortega Backpage Apologist
The more we read about Tony Ortega, the more urgent we feel about authorities stepping in to do something. We felt this way when we first learned about the crackpot theories he was peddling to trashy alt publications.
And while we don’t wish to underplay the seriousness of Tony Ortega’s famously toxic relationship with telling the truth – as we’ve been seeing over the years – it’s the company Ortega keeps that has us wondering if it isn’t time for law enforcement to do something about it.
The people of Texas have spoken and spoken loudly. Tony Ortega and his kind are no longer welcome in their communities. Dallas may have once been the national headquarters for Backpage, the illicit website Tony Ortega proudly shilled for, but my how things have changed in the past few years!
Amateur “hack journalist” and professional sell-out Tony Ortega once sang Backpage’s praises from coast to coast, trying to gloss over the inescapable fact that women and underage girls were daily being sold for sex.
In our last blog post we took a look back on the events of a single day four years ago which marked the beginning of the end for Backpage and the dime-store hype-men like Tony Ortega, paid to keep the public in the dark about the sex trafficking scheme they were running.
Zero hour began at first light on Oct 6 with the arrest of the Backpage Chief Executive Officer Carl Ferrer on a slew of felony charges from pimping minors to conspiracy.
Over the course of this week, we’ve been watching how the events over the course of a single day in October of 2016 would be the death knell for Backpage, signaling the end of its rampant under-age sex trafficking empire and the shameless cocoon of lies Tony Ortega spun in their defense.
Now that fateful Thursday was drawing to a close and the curtain was about to fall on the entire Backpage pimping syndicate.
Four years ago this month, way back in October of 2016, the wheels of justice began to turn for the pimps, sex traffickers and shameless conmen apologists behind the largest child sex ring this country has ever seen — Backpage.
In honor of this four year anniversary we thought today we might take a look back at the timeline that saw the beginning of the end for the criminals that for too long cheated the system, abused countless victims, and profited from the pain they caused to the tune of half a billion dollars.
It was not yet noon on October 6th 2016 when we last we looked in on the unraveling of Backpage. Its CEO, Carl Ferrer had been arrested. Backpage corporate offices in Texas and California were being scoured for evidence of sex trafficking, and officials were hauling it out by the box-load.
To say it was a bad day for Tony Ortega’s bosses would be the understatement of year. And, as we alluded to in our article recently, by the end of the day things would be even worse.
