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US House Passes Bill To Penalize Websites For Sex Trafficking (trust.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Thomson Reuters Foundation News: The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed legislation to make it easier to penalize operators of websites that facilitate online sex trafficking, chipping away at a bedrock legal shield for the technology industry. The bill's passage marks one of the most concrete actions in recent years from the U.S. Congress to tighten regulation of internet firms, which have drawn heavy scrutiny from lawmakers in both parties over the past year due to an array of concerns regarding the size and influence of their platforms. The House passed the measure 388-25. It still needs to pass the U.S. Senate, where similar legislation has already gained substantial support, and then be signed by President Donald Trump before it can become law.
Several major internet companies, including Alphabet Inc's Google and Facebook Inc, had been reluctant to support any congressional effort to dent what is known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a decades-old law that protects them from liability for the activities of their users. But facing political pressure, the internet industry slowly warmed to a proposal that gained traction in the Senate last year, and eventually endorsed it after it gained sizable bipartisan support. The legislation is a result of years of law-enforcement lobbying for a crackdown on the online classified site backpage.com, which is used for sex advertising. It would make it easier for states and sex-trafficking victims to sue social media networks, advertisers and others that fail to keep exploitative material off their platforms.
Several major internet companies, including Alphabet Inc's Google and Facebook Inc, had been reluctant to support any congressional effort to dent what is known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a decades-old law that protects them from liability for the activities of their users. But facing political pressure, the internet industry slowly warmed to a proposal that gained traction in the Senate last year, and eventually endorsed it after it gained sizable bipartisan support. The legislation is a result of years of law-enforcement lobbying for a crackdown on the online classified site backpage.com, which is used for sex advertising. It would make it easier for states and sex-trafficking victims to sue social media networks, advertisers and others that fail to keep exploitative material off their platforms.
Nothing you quoted in that reply says anything about "running an underage prostitution ring" so that claim remains unfounded. The only uses of the word "underage" are in your own text and the text you quoted from my question. Referencing youth is not the same thing as "underage." If you don't believe me, see the search results for yourself and start clicking those "report" buttons.
Nothing you quoted in that reply says anything about "running an underage prostitution ring" so that claim remains unfounded.
Ok how about "they made aggressive moves to break into the underage prostitute ad market". Are happy with that wording?
As far as the underage thing consider
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), the majority of child sex trafficking cases referred to NCMEC involve ads on Backpage. Backpage says that it blocks about a million ads per month, mostly suspected of child sex trafficking or prostitution. Of those, they report around 400 ads a month to NCMEC which in turn notify law enforcement. Content submitted to Backpage is surveyed by an automated scan for terms related to prostitution. At least one member of a team of over 100 people also oversees each entry before it is posted.
Backpage has had continued issues with credit card processors, who were under pressure from law enforcement to cease working with companies that allegedly allow or encourage illegal prostitution. In 2015 Backpage lost all credit card processing agreements, leaving Bitcoin as the remaining option for paid ads.
In an amicus curiae brief, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says the efforts of Backpage are inadequate and their reporting lacked in several areas. They say Backpage does not report all ads that have been flagged as being underage, does not report when someone tries to advertise children under 18 years of age, and does not respond to requests of parents to have ads of their trafficked children removed. They also say Backpage "encourage[s] dissemination of child sex trafficking content on its website". They say Backpage is much slower in removing ads that advertise children than ads placed by authorities aimed at trapping traffickers, guides traffickers in creating false pages for underage children, instructs traffickers and buyers on how to pay anonymously, and makes it easier to make adult posts than other posts. They said "To all intents and purposes, Backpage has instituted no effective procedures to prevent child sex trafficking ads from being created on its site." They say that they do not use obvious techniques to identify traffickers, such as using the same phone number, email address or credit card of a known trafficker, or reusing the same picture of known victim of human trafficking.
They were clearly turning a blind eye to people advertising underage prostitutes, rather like Pirate Bay did to people posting torrents that violate copyright.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
If you look at the site: they turn a blind eye to prostitution hosted at www.backpage.com. Picking and choosing which prostitutes are under-age, lying about their age, or are undercover police is a burden for any website which would be a legal nightmare to undertake. There are many others that have carefully turned a blind eye to such traffic: Craigslist used to do so, and withdrew from the business after a notable murder of a prostitute found on craigslist. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for more details.
Note: teenagers are not children as in "pedophilia" so there's already some seriously loaded wording by describing underage post-pubescent adolescents this way.
Someone quibbling about the distinction between ephebophiles and pedophilia seems to be inevitable in these sorts of discussions.
I wonder why...
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Having sex with anyone under the age of consent is wrong and illegal.
Who decides what's "wrong"? What happens when the abritrary age chosen as "age of consent" is wrong? Because the age of concent in America, 18, is one of the highest in the world. Most of the world uses 14-16 as the age of consent. So who's right and who's wrong? Is the world wrong? Or is America wrong?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Are you saying it's morally ok to have sex with a 16 year old when your on holidays in Alabama but not ok when your on holidays in Colorado?
Your appeal to authority makes no logical sense on this issue.
Or Italy or most of Europe where it's 14. And what if they are legally 18 but still child sized? Like 4'8", 80 lbs? Isn't it just as bad as a pedophile?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone