Lies, Panic, And Politics: The Targeted Takedown Of Backpage

The case against Backpage was built on lies, innuendo, and a willful misunderstanding of how the internet works. But that didn’t stop the government from destroying the company and its founders’ lives.

Over the last few years, we’ve written about how the entire case against Backpage was a travesty of justice. The company actually worked closely with the feds (and even received commendations) to stop any actual human trafficking on their platform, but refused to help the feds go after consenting adult sex work. After that happened, a bunch of government actors turned on the company and falsely painted it as knowingly helping sex trafficking.

A number of different criminal and civil cases were brought against the company and its owners, one of whom, Jim Larkin, died by suicide last year. Over and over again, politicians and the media painted Backpage as being a truly evil player in the space. However, the more you looked at the details, the more it seemed like they were convenient political scapegoats in a war against a free internet.

So much of our own coverage was building on the incredible work of Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown. She recently completed a new 45-minute documentary about the railroading of Backpage and its founders, which you can watch on YouTube:

There’s also a big article that discusses much of what’s in the video as well (at the link above) which is also worth reading. Here’s just a snippet:

In 2004, Lacey and Larkin launched the website Backpage as an extension of the classified ads that had always run in the back of their newspapers (and most other newspapers). Backpage.com had all the sections you would find in its print counterparts, including apartments for rent, job openings, and personals and adult services ads, separated by city.

At first, nobody paid much attention to the site. When attorneys general declared war on adult services ads online in the late 2000s, the similar but better-known Craigslist was the platform in their crosshairs.

Though newspapers had for decades published ads for escorts, phone sex lines, and other forms of legal sex work, Craigslist’s online facilitation of these ads coincided with two burgeoning moral panics. The first concerned the rise of user-generated content—platforms such as Craigslist and early social media entities that allowed speech to be published without traditional gatekeepers.

The second panic: sex trafficking. A coalition of Christian activists and radical feminists had been teaming up to push the idea that levels of forced and underage prostitution were suddenly reaching epidemic proportions. To support this narrative, they tended to conflate all prostitution or even any sort of sex work with coerced sex trafficking.

I do appear a bit in the documentary, though most of it focuses (more importantly) on founder Michael Lacey and all he’s been through.

The whole video is worth watching. It shows how an entire government apparatus can be turned around to try to burn down a media operation based on misleading claims of “sex trafficking,” leaving people and a business completely ruined just on the bases of innuendo and rumors.

Learning from what happened to Backpage is that much more important, especially as we’re now entering a new era of attacks on free expression.