Zakiyyah Myers, the founder of Innclusive and AirBnB alternative wrote this morning in a Facebook post (that I’ve now been banned from) that shutting down Backpage.com for promoting underage sex trafficking is “legislating morality.”
She is not only wrong, but it concerns me that her company and her followers are not only promoting something completely wrong, but that many of them showed support of child and teen sex trafficking as a “choice.” They claimed that shutting it down would hurt “legit businesses” of some sort, that I’ve yet to understand.
Ms. Myers: a new U.S. Senate report says a website dealing with commercial sex advertising edited ads aimed at child sex trafficking to conceal their true content from investigators and the public. They are actively engaging in helping sex traffickers.
The report, the product of an 18-month investigation by a Senate subcommittee chaired by Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, appears to undercut claims by the website — known as Backpage.com — that it screens advertising posts that involve illegal activities, such as child sex trafficking.
Instead, the report accuses Backpage of publishing the ads after deleting certain words and content that suggests it involves a child.
The effort served to sanitize the ads, while allowing them to be posted on the website, according to the report.
“Backpage has maintained a practice of altering ads before publication by deleting words, phrases, and images indicative of criminality, including child sex trafficking,” the report concluded.
“Those practices served to sanitize the content of innumerable advertisements for illegal transactions — even as Backpage represented to the public and the courts that it merely hosted content others had created,” according to the report.
Supporting Sex Trafficking of Minors is Wrong. Really makes me wonder what your company “Innclusive” is Really doing? I can’t prove anything of course, but my thoughts are that if you have 100’s of people agreeing that Backpage shouldn’t be stopped, that you’re promoting something else? I’d love your reply.
