A panel of Senate lawmakers voted Wednesday to hold in contempt a website that lets people advertise for sex and “adult entertainment,” after the company behind the site refused to comply with a subpoena.
The website, Backpage, could become the first entity to be cited for contempt of the Senate in 20 years. The website has been implicated numerous sex trafficking cases, which prompted the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee to issue a subpoena for documents about the business.
“In order to address the problem of selling children and coerced adults in online marketplaces in a legislative manner, first we need to understand it better and that’s what our work has been,” Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said Wednesday.
The committee passed the contempt resolution unanimously as part of an investigation into Backpage, which has already concluded that the site edits advertisements in order to obscure signs of human trafficking.
“The company touts its ‘moderation’ practices — the process of reviewing advertisements to screen them for evidence of violations of its terms of use and possible illegality,” the report said. “Its general counsel and chief spokeswoman, Elizabeth McDougall, has written that the widespread adoption of similar practices are the ‘key to disrupting and eventually ending human trafficking via the World Wide Web.’ To better understand these procedures, their efficacy, and their costs, the subcommittee served a subpoena on Backpage requiring the production of documents concerning Backpage’s moderation and ad-review procedures, basic financial information, and other topics.”
Portman, who has been investigating the company along with Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., cited a child advocacy group that found “71 percent of all suspected sex trafficking reports” are run through Backpage.
“I was in Ohio this week and met with four women who had been trafficked and are now in a program to deal with their drug addiction and help them get back on their feet, all four of them talked about it and talked about the coercion that they were under and the fact that Backpage was how they were sold,” Portman said.
