Senate bill targets online sex trafficking

Social media would be liable under legislation

WASHINGTON – On Christmas Eve in 2016, police found the body of a 16year-old girl, Desiree Robinson, raped and murdered in a Chicago suburb.

Desiree’s mother, Yvonne Ambrose, later learned that her teenage daughter had been coerced into prostitution, pimped out on an advertising website called Backpage.com, where men found her picture under a posting that read: “New girl in town looking to have fun.”

Next week, Ambrose will be watching as the Senate debates legislation designed to curb online sex trafficking — a problem that has increased exponentially in recent years as traffickers and their customers use the anonymity of the Internet to sell adults and children for sex across the U.S.

Supporters say the bill will give trafficking victims and law enforcement officials new tools to go after websites that have knowingly facilitated sex trafficking and prostitution.

“Any child that has access to the Internet via phone, via computer, is susceptible to being prostituted or exploited through these online channels,” Ambrose said by phone last week.

Critics say the bill will do little to stop that problem — and will instead stifle innovation and free speech online.

“Online censorship isn’t the solution to fighting sex trafficking,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for free speech and privacy rights on the Internet, said in a recent statement opposing the bill. Neither side disputes the problem. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, there’s been an 846% increase in reports of suspected child sex trafficking from 2010 to 2015 — a spike the organization said was “directly correlated to the increased use of the Internet to sell children for sex.”

“Technology has fundamentally changed how children are victimized through sex trafficking in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago,” Yiota G. Souras, senior vice president at the center, told a House panel last year. “An adult can now shop from the privacy of his home, office or hotel room, often on a cellphone, to buy a child for rape,” Souras said.

The center responded to more than 10,000 reports of possible child sex trafficking in 2017, according to a spokeswoman. From 2013 to 2017, 75% of its reports related to child sex trafficking involved suspected online cases.

In Congress, Sens. Rob Portman, ROhio, and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., led an investigation into Backpage.com, which found the website used a filter that stripped out words that would have revealed a child was being sold for sex — terms such as “Lolita,” “fresh,” and “school girl,” according to a report issued in January 2017 by the two senators. Employees would then post the edited ad in its adult section.

Parents and victims of sex trafficking have tried to sue Backpage.com, but courts have dismissed those suits, citing a provision in the 1996 Communications Decency Act.

Under that law, Internet companies and websites are not legally responsible for content posted by a third party. So, for example, Twitter and other social media sites cannot be sued if a user posts something offensive or illegal.

In response, Portman and others crafted the measure now pending in the Senate. It would allow online platforms to be held criminally and civilly liable if they knowingly facilitate sex trafficking.

It would allow state prosecutors to go after websites that violate federal sex trafficking laws and increase criminal penalties for websites that facilitate illegal prostitution or sex trafficking.

A version of the Portman-Blumenthal bill has passed the House and the White House supports the measure. It has 68 co-sponsors in the Senate, virtually ensuring the legislation will become law if the Senate passes it next week. But opponents have promised a fight. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., crafted the protections for third-party online platforms in the 1996 law, which aimed to protect children from Internet pornography.

“The failure to understand the technological side effects of this bill — specifically that it will become harder to expose sex-traffickers, while hamstringing innovation — will be something that this Congress will regret,” Wyden said after the House passed the bill.

“Technology has fundamentally changed how children are victimized through sex trafficking,”

Yiota G. Souras National Center for Missing and Exploited Children

Ivanka Trump, President Trump’s daughter and adviser, speaks during a bipartisan discussion with members of Congress and private sector members on anti sex trafficking. SUSAN WALSH/AP