http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-sex-trafficking-backpage-20170831-story.html
"After a sustained assault from lawmakers, investigators and victims groups, the website Backpage.com agreed early this year to shut down its lucrative adult page, which had become a well-known sex-trafficking hub.
It wasn’t long before the company was back in the headlines.
The adult section was gone, but the sex traffic was not. In May, authorities in Stockton charged 23 people with involvement in a trafficking ring that was using another corner of Backpage to market sex with girls as young as 14. A Chicago teenager allegedly trafficked on Backpage had her throat slit in June.
The resilience of this platform — host to an estimated 70% of online sex trafficking at its peak — is a long-running public relations mess for the tech industry. Internet freedom laws held sacred in Silicon Valley have helped shield Backpage from prosecution and lawsuits by victims of gruesome sex trafficking.
Now the tech industry’s Backpage problem has evolved into a full-blown political crisis. An unexpectedly large coalition of lawmakers is aiming to hold sites like Backpage liable for trafficking, sparking panic in Silicon Valley over the far-reaching consequences for the broader Internet."
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Factfinder2 ago
As weeds-in-the-garden points out, this is definitely is a double-edged sword. Large-scale brainstorming needs to happen to come up with alternatives.
One possibility would be to rely on crowd policing to identify and report potential trafficking ads to the website administrators and then hold the website legally responsible only if they fail to follow up. A federal law would need to be drafted outlining the method for notifying the webite of potential abuse, the steps the website must take in following up, when it must report to authorities, maintaining a list of blocked offenders, etc., etc.
Such a plan would:
1) Allow continued internet freedom.
2) Utilize the power of crowd sourcing to identify potential abusers.
3) Ensure legal repercussions to websites that fail to act when notified of potential abuser.
SoldierofLight ago
I think there might be similar guidelines already in place for web hosting companies. Not sure, but I think that when they're notified that a customer of theirs has a website with illegal content (such as CP) then by law they have to investigate and if the allegations are true they have to notify LE.