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Backpage Raided, CEO Arrested on Sex-Trafficking Charges

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Re: Backpage Raided, CEO Arrested on Sex-Trafficking Charges

#241

Post by cwillu »

dhimes wrote: post #148
cft wrote: post #46

This was no more a prostitution website than Craigslist, before Craigslist struck a deal with attorney generals of several states to shut down its Adult Classifieds section [1]. In fact, given Craigslist scale it had many more prostitution (and probably child prostitution) ads. The question is: why Craig and this CEO were given such disparate treatment? Because the times have changed, or because Craigslist was much b…

I was wondering about this too. Specifically, I thought websites were held harmless for the content they carry. If somebody posts a threat to the President or something else illegal on a website, is the website liable? If something slanderous shows up in Google, is Google liable for slander? How does that work?

My unverified impression masquerading as understanding is that your liability scales with the level of editorial oversight you provide: that the laws implement something resembling "if you moderate comments about drugs and movie downloads, but never seem to notice prostitution adverts, then you're probably doing that on purpose".

Re: Backpage Raided, CEO Arrested on Sex-Trafficking Charges

#242

Post by danielweber »

jmulho wrote: post #151
Buge wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of Wells Fargo's income was not coming from these fake accounts.

It is fine to steal as long as it is only a small percentage of your income?

When the threshold is to prove in court beyond a reasonable standard of doubt, it's going to be hard to prove that some horrible scheme that was never going to generate money (open a bunch of accounts customers don't know about and won't use, aside from some small amount of fees that will annoy customers) was undertaken deliberately, especially when it would only be a small part of the enterprise.

Re: Backpage Raided, CEO Arrested on Sex-Trafficking Charges

#243

Post by pkinsky »

empthought wrote: post #135
throwanem wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you? The past few years have seen a spate of "high-class call girl" memoirs. Unless you want to make the novel claim they're all fabricated, or try somehow to argue they are negligible, that would seem to suggest that your second claim here is not accurate.

http://www.salon.com/2015/09/19/my_lessons_in_prostitution_h... "People who see prostitution as something which exists on a number of different, exclusive and distinct class-related levels are people who do not understand the interrelated nature of it, and some of the people ignorant of the shifting nature of prostitution are actually prostitutes and prostitutors themselves."

>some of the people ignorant of the shifting nature of prostitution are actually prostitutes and prostitutors themselves

Sounds awful paternalistic. Have you considered the possibility that people who make choices you disagree with have agency?

Re: Backpage Raided, CEO Arrested on Sex-Trafficking Charges

#245

Post by feklar »

Instagram, Snapchat and Tumblr are full of escort ads, so is 'fetlife' which is basically a prositution social media site for people in that scene. Then there's all the porn sites with escorts uploading videos of themselves like XVideos and shilling their services. Nobody is going after Instagram's CEO for allowing #gfe or #(city)escort hashtags.

Backpages seemed like a good police tool in that they could entrap politically connected people with fake prostitution ads, and they could identify organized prositution more easily. For example here it was simple to find the gangster listings running microbrothels, these are condos rented by street gangs who import girls from Asia, seize their passports and pimp them out. These gangs were also well known to rob each other's micros, and there are plenty of stories on all those escort review forums of armed gangsters kicking down the door and jacking the place since police won't be called.

Selective law enforcement again happening here so the Backpages CEO guy must have made political statements advocating for legalization or was politically active in some other way. It's my main theory why Redbook was shutdown, because they entertained very loud activists in their forums calling for legalization who often called out city and state politicians directly. Reminder if you want to run an illegal business don't be politically active and you can operate under the radar like Fetlife with it's thousands of escort ads.

Re: Backpage Raided, CEO Arrested on Sex-Trafficking Charges

#246

Post by AJ007 »

seibelj wrote: post #5

Even if you are morally opposed to prostitution, is there really any benefit to authorities when you remove a centralized location and move it to the street or many different websites? If you really want to manage the prostitution "problem", having it all on a single website seems like a benefit for managing and researching the issue.

The worst case scenario will be a website where it is very hard to impossible for law enforcement to scrape or retrieve phone numbers from and prostitution is blended in with normal activity. Turns out it already exists: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.

Re: Backpage Raided, CEO Arrested on Sex-Trafficking Charges

#247

Post by dragonwriter »

1024core wrote: post #21

Why is it that in such cases, the government reaches for the CEO right away; but when Wells Fargo employees open millions of fraudulent accounts, it's not the CEO's fault? If I were to commit identity theft (which is basically what the WF employees did), then I would be facing jail time; why hasn't anyone in WF been charged with criminal fraud yet? Why not the CEO?

> Why is it that in such cases, the government reaches for the CEO right away; but when Wells Fargo employees open millions of fraudulent accounts, it's not the CEO's fault?

Probably because a corporation like Wells Fargo will have extensive documentation of procedures and training that establishes sufficient evidence that there were efforts to constrain employee behavior to lawful acts in pursuit of the metrics which they ended up maximizing through unlawful acts that it will take a lot of digging, at a minimum, to have a viable case of executive criminal culpability.

Re: Backpage Raided, CEO Arrested on Sex-Trafficking Charges

#248

Post by cwillu »

empthought wrote: post #71
suneilp wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds more like a moral judgement. Labor is labor, you don't get to redefine labor just because it involves an action which is very controversial. What really matters is the safety of the person(s) involved. And yet, there are plenty of occupations where safety is in question.

It is precisely a moral judgement. Moral judgements are a human responsibility. The question is whether or not we want to be a society that views people's bodies and sexual access to them as a commodity to be bought and sold. I find it baffling that anyone would laud this condition after giving it a few moments of compassionate reflection.

Consider the possibility that a few moments of compassionate reflection have lead Alice to conclude that when Bob says he loves what he does, it's not because Mallory is forcing him to say that.

It's all well and good to say that it's against your own morals, but as soon as you start defending that on the basis of the consequences, you're conceding the "but it's just morally wrong!" argument. And in general, we (okay, at least I, as I can believe that you wouldn't necessarily agree here) laud societies that have transitioned from deontological to consequentialist ethics.

Re: Backpage Raided, CEO Arrested on Sex-Trafficking Charges

#249

Post by empthought »

tekromancr wrote: post #228
empthought wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it means that if sex were their free choice, they would not need to be paid for sex (they could have it as much or as little as they like). Instead of trying to wordplay this in HN comments, why don't you take a look at https://www.demandabolition.org/resources/evidence-against-l... -- they've done a far better job than I ever could on lining up the different arguments -- and there are many! -- against blithely s…

Just for clarification, your position is that the only class of services that are immoral to exchange currency for are sexualy oriented services. Is that correct? I currently hold very different views from you on this issue, but some of your arguments are certainly giving me some things to think about. They all seem to assume the above point, which I have a really hard time accepting.

> Just for clarification, your position is that the only class of services that are immoral to exchange currency for are sexualy oriented services. Is that correct?

Not at all, it's also immoral to purchase assassinations and many other things both illegal and legal. They're not germane to the question of prostitution though.

Prostitution is qualitatively different than other "services" or even non-prostitution sex work (phone sex operator, erotic fiction writer, even some pornography) because it involves purchasing direct access to and use of the prostituted person's body. That is the problem with prostitution, not the fact that it's about sex per se.

It's simply a matter of the human condition that the (male) sex drive is the most common thing that, when left unexamined and unchecked, results in such a system where people's bodies are reduced to the objects of economic transaction.

I've probably burned enough internet points on this thread, but if you want to read far better-researched and better-stated writing on this subject than mine, http://www.feministcurrent.com/category/prostitution-2/ is a good place to start. It's a shame that religious and social conservative voices are often the only ones being represented and considered on this subject. It's a shame that men on the left and atheist men should feel deeply.

Re: Backpage Raided, CEO Arrested on Sex-Trafficking Charges

#250

Post by dragonwriter »

makomk wrote: post #115
dzdt wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Matt Levine's take on this is right on: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-09/wells-far... . Senior management wanted employees to do REAL cross-selling to make money, but the metrics were set so high that employees turned to fake accounts to meet the standard. The fake accounts did not benefit the bank in any substantial way: So that's about 2.1 million fake deposit and credit-card accounts, of…

Matt Levine just shows that Wells Fargo wanted a paper trail showing that they told employees not to do this. The interesting question is, what happened when whistleblowers told them it was happening anyway? Apparently, the answer is that they fired the whistleblowers. That says everything about what Wells Fargo really wanted, as opposed to what they said to cover their asses. Remember, he's an industry insider with…

> The interesting question is, what happened when whistleblowers told them it was happening anyway? Apparently, the answer is that they fired the whistleblowers. That says everything about what Wells Fargo really wanted

It says everything about what the people in the loop of those decisions wanted, perhaps, but those people (at least, those for whom there is a known paper trail of them being in the loop) are probably several steps removed from the CEO. They also probably also maintained enough of a paper trail of the notional reasons that they were firing the people involved that, while its a reasonable inference from the association between whistleblowing and firing that there was an ulterior motive, it would be far from certain that that could be established to the degree necessary for that to the basis of criminal culpability.

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