> That's an admission that they don't know the target's age

That's what they start with, but a picture is a pretty good way to figure out if someone is likely to bee underage and they also do significant investigation before turning this over to the police.

> And of course nobody is going to post a picture of a CHILD-child, since that's obviously a huge red flag that will get them caught.

This idea that people never post obvious criminal activity online is kinda silly when we're discussing people getting outed by... posting obvious criminal activity online. You can say it shouldn't be criminal, but there are democratic means to change that and actual locations where prostitution is actually legal, like that county in Nevada.

Nobody in the article seems to dispute that they catch actual child sex slaves, though. The main complaint is the unsubstantiated idea that they're catching mostly adults, but no evidence of this is presented. Instead, you're reading a lot of things between a lot of lines to infer that and claiming these inferences are obvious when they're not.

> Children don't tend to have high school diplomas almost ever. > it's hard for a minor to get a tattoo at all.

Better, but hardly proof. And you can still be trafficked when not a child if you're being held against your will. It's not like adult sex slaves are faring any better or like they don't exist and deserve sympathy.

> The longer you have your license, the more time there is for a picture of it to get posted.

I got mine at 16, posting it is something you're more likely to do when young and dumb.

> So they're handing this stuff over to cops and at best just hoping they won't prosecute any of the people they consider to be victims. That's, um, irresponsibly optimistic.

The DAs have standards about this, they're not going to randomly prosecute someone forced into slavery and the cops are the best people to actually deal with this since it's their literal job in society.

Also I have to note that your solution here is to ignore people being forced into literal slavery because you disagree with a democratically created law and want it changed by fiat instead of trying to actually fix it.

I get that there's a sort of trolley problem, but one might think that maybe they could do something legal or change the law instead of demanding that people ignore child sex slaves being sold online because they might get caught breaking a law they, and you, disagree with.