Senate holds Backpage execs in contempt after they skip hearing

The U.S. Senate voted unanimously last week to hold executives with the classified ad website Backpage.com in contempt after the company refused to comply with a subpoena to appear before a congressional committee. Backpage, which sells ads in 431 U.S. cities and another 444 worldwide, stands accused of making huge profits by assisting traffickers who advertise minors for sex.

In November, Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer ignored a Senate subpoena and two other Backpage employees pleaded their Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. The company maintains the First Amendment protects its records from government inspection.

The Senate has been investigating online human trafficking since April 2015, when the Department of Justice reported more than half of U.S. sex trafficking victims are 17 years old or younger. Yiota G. Souras, senior vice president for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), told senators her organization saw an 846 percent increase in reports of suspected child trafficking “directly correlated with the increased use of the internet to sell children for sex.” According to NCMEC, 71 percent of all reports of suspected child sex trafficking have a link to Backpage.

The website’s domination of the sex ad business made its profit margins balloon. Senators learned in 2014 that Backpage had an operating profitability margin of 82 percent, compared with an average of 9.3 percent for other online businesses.

“Backpage’s facilitation of sex trafficking and prostitution is equivalent to the East India Company’s facilitation of the African slave trade,” said Dawn Hawkins, executive director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. “The website typically posts around 1 million ads for sex a day.”

But the Senate investigation stalled at the company’s closed door.

“Without them, we can’t really evaluate how sex trafficking has proliferated in these online marketplaces,” Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who co-chairs the committee investigating Backpage, said on March 17 in urging his colleagues to support the contempt vote.

Backpage insists the company’s “market-leading” screening practices prevent trafficking on its site. Company executives call Backpage an “invaluable tool” for law enforcement.

In response to those claims, Portman described one ad on Backpage, which advertised sex with a minor and actually included her missing child poster.

“That poster had the child’s real name on it, real age, real picture, and the date that she went missing. The other pictures in the ad included topless photos,” Portman said. “We’d certainly like to know what supposedly market-leading screening and moderation procedures missed that one.”

While ads for children go unnoticed, sting ads placed by police often get removed, several people testified. And when Backpage reports an ad to the NCMEC over suspicions of sex trafficking, it isn’t always removed, center representatives said.

Victims’ rights groups claim Backpage guides traffickers through the process of editing ads to conceal their payment source and evade law enforcement. They also accuse the company of schooling traffickers on code words that avoid police scrutiny while informing johns of the availability of children for sex. Untraceable “sponsored” ads increase the number of times a child could be sold for sex, while enabling johns to shop for children from the privacy of their home or hotel room with assurance of anonymity.

Routinely, Backpage receives requests from anguished parents requesting the removal of ads featuring their daughters. The “report ad” button elicits this automated response: “If you accidentally reported this ad, do not worry. It takes multiple reports from multiple people for an ad to be removed.”

When news of the contempt vote and likely legal battle reached Backpage, the company seemed to welcome the legal challenge, stating “consideration of First Amendment constitutional issues” is what it asked for all along.

The courtroom is Backpage’s preferred battleground. There the company has defeated nearly every challenge brought so far. Backpage cites in defense a small section in the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which says online intermediaries that host or republish speech aren’t responsible for what their customers say and do. The company also insists holding it responsible for its customers’ postings would “chill free speech” online. Most state judges have sided with Backpage.

But Eliza Reock, director of programs for victim advocacy group Shared Hope, said the Senate investigation has delved into Backpage’s alleged criminal history in greater detail than any of the previous court appearances. She told me Backpage cannot claim to simply be a forum for placing ads when it helps traffickers craft them. And Backpage has yet to face criminal charges in federal court, Reock noted.

“They won’t be able to hide behind the CDA in federal court,” she predicted.