Have you ever talked to a sex worker or former sex worker? I know a few. Fantasy and role play is part of the job, even if it's just pretending to be someone's girlfriend for a couple hours.
I don't see anything wrong with making money off of other people's fantasies (in virtual or real life), as long as everyone is a consenting adult. The indictment doesn't establish that backpage encouraged underage prostitution.
We are viewing the mechanisms Backpage implemented and ads placed on that site, both in the context of the adult marketing fantasy world you talk about and in the context of literal child sex slavery occurring on Backpage.
Eh, what? You can't just say "as long as" first and then change the bar to "[isn't] established that they encouraged" in the next sentence. Maybe I am missing something.
We know, and Backpage don't deny this, that many of the ads were for children.
But if we restrict ourself to adults; it's a myth that women want to work in prostitution, or that it's just another job. The vast majority of women working in prostitution only do so to feed a drug addiction,or because they're in debt, or because they're being coercively controlled. Yes, I do speak to women who've been through this.
A coworker of a friend of mine who works in the medical field also works as an escort on the side just for the money and fun of it. She's one of the ones that goes to parties and on dates with lonely rich people. She's been bought cars and jewelery paid vacations to tons of places.
What about a law forbidding all work that has the work injury rates (or higher) of current legal prostitution and where the majority of employees are in debt? As a purely theoretical idea I wonder how wide of an impact that would have.
Coercion is naturally a bigger issue and reminds me of how mining and debt slavery co-evolved. Targeting the illegal behavior worked there quite effective in turning mining into a normal profession and away from a place where men in debt worked until they died at an early age.
I'll just have to go with "what can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence". Back up your claims, and "I talked to a few women" does not count.
This is flat-out wrong.
No, it was prostitution, which is, however, also well-known to be fake on many levels and selling fantasy.
If they really just edited out those words, then that’s pretty f’d up. The ads were very clearly for prostitutes, all with very obvious photos. If someone looks very underage, and advertises as underage, then they should do the right thing and notify the authorities themselves. To profit from that is extremely unethical.