By adding a word filter to keywords like rape and amber alert?

Okay, lets think about this, your product team happens to be looking at the system logs and sees an uptick in keywords like rape. The company's internal chat goes abuzz with this company wide emergency because some of the people are uncomfortable that their platform is being used for this, after an all hands meeting a simple solution is made to simply programmatically make a word filter. Phew, now the logs won't be polluted anymore and some underrepresented people "in tech" won't go to the NY Times, Washington Post and other esteemed outlets like Twitter about how triggered they were.

The whole thing had nothing to do with senators and law enforcement or what people were actually searching for, but this law would connect the dots in a completely different way and say that was criminal intent to cover up sex trafficking.

Even in this backpage example, searching with those key words wouldn't have helped anyone use the site? That part of the indictment made no sense thats why it got dismissed, the Senate is being steered by emotions and proposing silly solutions.

Read that section carefully. They didn't make a filter to block ads with words like "rape" and "little girl"; they hid the keywords to make them harder to find while leaving the ads up, and they did not report them to law enforcement. That's not keeping out abusers, that's protecting abusers.

were the ads saying "here's the vulnerable child you might have seen in the amber alert, in case you were searching for missing persons to rape" or something along those lines? How did you interpret it, and where could I find the truth of the matter

In another story, a 13-year-old girl was kidnapped, raped, beaten, drugged, and put up for sale on Backpage, with pictures of her naked and battered. The girl was recovered alive and her kidnapper went to prison, but Backpage repeatedly refused to remove the ad and its pictures unless they were paid to do so. This was also linked directly from the article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/06/backpage-ceo...

Yes.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant but sunlight doesn't go underground.

If the market is above ground it might actually make stopping those violating the law easier. Never mind also, in this case, improving health by mandating things like screenings and protection.

They can and are being prosecuted for it:

> "Based on the August ruling in Sacramento, he said he had been left to prosecute Backpage.com on charges of conspiracy and money laundering"

It seems to me that this crime is already a crime. Actively encouraging/cloaking and profiting from the commission of a crime is conspiracy to commit and is illegal.

What appears to be the new illegality added by this amendment is being aware that your platform is being used to facilitate human trafficking (e.g. you saw an ad for human trafficking in your blog's comments) and doing nothing.

Would it also cover deleting that one ad/comment, but not engaging in active monitoring of all future comments or installing some sort of comment filter?

This is my problem with the vagueness of the law and the idea that we don't need the blanket immunity provided by the CDA. Small operators especially need this blanket immunity, because going to trial to litigate intent is simply not an option for them.

If we do remove blanket immunity, we should do so with a less board law that much more clearly lays out the standards for knowledge.

> Civil penalties are not sufficient for slavers.

The goal here is not moral rectitude, but the reduction/elimination of human trafficking. Ideally while preserving as much freedom and creating as little friction as possible.

Given that slavery and conspiracy to commit slavery are crimes already, can't we just increase the penalties for those crimes to the appropriate level?