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Online classfieds: Who is responsible?
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TEXT OF STORY
Kai Ryssdal: It's the rare media company that can afford to give up advertising revenue in this day and age, but that is what's being asked of the Village Voice. Attorneys general from 21 states have asked the Voice's Backpage.com to drop its adult services section. A couple of weeks ago Craigslist closed its adult section. The government's not getting the same kind of cooperation this time.
Marketplace's Jeff Tyler explains.
Village Voice: Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal wants Backpage.com to discontinue classified ads for adult services.
Richard Blumenthal: The adult services sections are little more than online brothels in many instances.
His office estimates that Village Voice Media -- which owns Backpage.com -- makes more than $17 million a year from adult services ads.
Blumenthal: They are big money makers for these sites. And we're asking the sites to put people before profits.
Unlike Craigslist, Backpage.com says it won't stop the ads. In a written response, the company says it's operating legally and assists law enforcement with prosecutions.
Ryan Calo is with the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School.
Ryan Calo: It's pretty clear that the courts have spoken on this issue and there's no legal recourse. A website like Backpage.com will not be held responsible for what users do on the website.
Calo says ending the adult services ads might backfire.
Calo: It may be harder to police, to the extent that it's harder for law enforcement to set up traps, it's harder for the websites themselves to monitor for illegal content. It may make the situation worse.
But critics of the ads point out that they're frequently used in trafficking children for sexual purposes.
Linda Smith is president of the rescue organization Shared Hope International. It did a four-year investigation of the trafficking of children.
Linda Smith: Practically every minor that we dealt with was marketed repeatedly, city by city. It has become the marketplace for these children.
There are no hard numbers for the child sex industry, but Smith estimates it's in the billions.
I'm Jeff Tyler for Marketplace.
There is a new site where the adult service providers are posting their ads called the Global Community. It is a matter of time before these guys become the number one site. Visit http://www.globalcommunity.me and see for yourself.
I found your selection of a string quartet ironically sawing it's way through the Guns 'n' Roses rant "Welcome to the Jungle" to be an exceptionally poor choice of segue music. Please reserve your humor for the Wall Street elite and Washington power brokers; going for humor in a story about the most miserable people in our society, those children and women enslaved and degraded daily in the sex-trade are not appropriate targets for humor.
I find it lamentable that Jeff Tyler failed to ask any questions of those who are trying to curtail free speech rights and freedom of the press. He simply accepted their assertion that “Adult Services†= child sex trafficking. This is not so different from Muslim = terrorist. Have any Backpage.com advertisers been found guilty of child sex trafficking? Wouldn’t this be the first question to ask? And if so, is there an estimate of what percentage of Backpage.com ads might involve minors? How bad does the problem have to be before we censor the media? As a reporter, does Mr. Tyler not see the danger in this? If the people he interviewed have their way, would we not simply end up with less press freedom and little or no change in the problem of minors in the sex trade, which is by its nature already an extremely covert, underground activity? Where did Jeff Tyler receive his training? Fox News?
