Some high-profile activists in the anti-trafficking community have teamed up with over forty state attorneys general in a bid to shut down online advertising service. Ruvolo began with the metaphor of the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge is a magnet for jumpers, but its administrators refuse to put up barriers to deter them.
No one disputes that some fraction of the thousands adult services ads that appear on the online classifed service are selling the coerced services of trafficked women and girls. However, the illicit ads account for a small fraction of the adiult ads on Backpage.
The Voice argues that it is already building barriers and safety nets to keep those bad ads from slipping through. The Voice claims that it is using filtering software, requiring a credit card number to place an ad, and hiring human inspectors to weed out questionable content. Assuming the Voice is telling the truth, and that its methods are reasonably effective, erecting barriers seems like a far more reasonable solution than shuttering Backpage.
In order to earn our trust, the Voice will need to keep up a high level of transparency regarding its screening procedures. The Voice predicts, quite reasonably, that if Backpage were shut down, the bad ads would be scattered across more websites, where they would be more difficult to monitor. If justifies shutting down the entire service, Ruvalo asked, what happens when traffickers start posing as lonely singles on AdultFriendfinder or college coeds in search of sugar daddies on Seeking Arrangements, or people who want to sell their couches on Craigslist?
Traffickers already use an elaborate and shifting array of codewords to indiciate to interested buyers what they are really selling. Will we have to shut those sites down, too? Skip to content. Lindsay Beyerstein is an award-winning investigative journalist and In These Times staff writer who writes the blog Duly Noted.
