WASHINGTON _ A new Senate report says the online advertising site Backpage automatically filters out words in online advertising that could indicate that the site was offering sex with children, undermining the controversial web site's First Amendment defenses.
That act and others changing the wording of prospective advertisements on the site undermine the company's free-speech defense that it is simply a host for other ad buyers' content, and therefore protected under federal law, the new report by Sens. Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., alleges.
The report, entitled "Backpage.com's knowing facilitation of online sex trafficking," was released late Monday on the eve of a Tuesday hearing by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
Company documents reviewed by Senate investigators "conclusively show that Backpage's public defense is a fiction," the report alleges. "Backpage has maintained a practice of altering ads before publication by deleting words, phrases, and images indicative of criminality, including child sex trafficking. Backpage has avoided revealing this information."
Backpage lawyer Liz McDougall, who is listed as a witness for the hearing, had no comment on Monday. In the past, she has argued that McCaskill and Portman are attacking the wrong people, and that Backpage was a potentially powerful ally to federal and state law enforcement officials trying to crack down on sex trafficking because it is where purveyors place their ads.
A former St. Louis resident is expected to testify that her daughter, then 14, was trafficked for sex through Backpage ads while she was living in the city in 2010, and that she had a hard time getting the website to take the ad down.
"I called Backpage numerous times and explained that I was the mother of the child pictured in these sexually explicit ads," Kubiiki Pride said, in remarks prepared for delivery and released by the committee Monday evening.
"I explained that my child had been horribly sexually, physically, and emotionally abused by being trafficked on Backpage through these ads. I begged Backpage to remove the explicit photos of my daughter. Eventually the ads were no longer posted, but Backpage did not remove them immediately after I called."
She said she found little support in the St. Louis region after her daughter was rescued from the sex trade and came home in 2010.
"Our community did not understand the exploitation she had suffered," Pride said in her prepared remarks. "The news reports of the arrest and trial of my daughter's trafficker, further publicized the trauma."
Backpage President Carl Ferrer has been called to testify before the committee, but may assert his Fifth Amendment right protections against self-incrimination.
Ferrer was arrested in Houston in October on California charges of pimping and sex trafficking. But in December, a federal judge in Sacramento threw out the charges, saying that the 1996 Communications Decency Act "struck a balance in favor of free speech" by protecting internet service providers.
The Portman-McCaskill report says investigators went through 1.1 million pages of documents supplied by the company and found evidence that its employees were changing some ads' content, and that Ferrer knew about it. That discovery undermines the company's arguments that it is merely a host for other people's content, according to the report.
After Ferrer refused to appear before the committee in 2015, McCaskill and Portman last year helped push through the first contempt of the Senate declaration in 20 years to force him to appear and produce documents. Backpage fought the Senate's contempt citation but lost in federal court.
