https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpage
The history of that article is ruinous, and badly shredded due to oversights and "questionable activity". Starting with the site's seizure by the FBI in April 2018 (they waited until the SESTA/FOSTA acts were passed in March), the article was the subject of a LOT of argumentation and editwarring. I remember seeing a lot of spillover on the talkpage archive--all "mysteriously gone". Occasional SPAs who were probably Backpage employees were reverted and blocked. You will find plenty of SPAs and socks in the article history. Spot them easily, their userpages are red links. The ones who were out to attack the company for being a disgusting "sexploitation" business ended up winning the battle.
Remember that Craigslist was running very similar ads. "We can't attack Craigslist, Craig Newmark loves Wikipedia! He's a member of our now-defunct Advisory Board!" Ask me about the Craigslist article sometime.
In 2018 the biographies of Larkin and Lacey were split off as separate articles. Both created by one Mwinog2777. There had been editwarring over this when they were merely weird subsections of the main Backpage article. Since they were the top managers of Village Voice Media and a long list of weekly local newspapers spread all over the US, one would think they were "notable" long before 2018. Nope! (PS, the VVM article is both more informative than the Backpage article, and looks to be paid-edited. References are "lacking". Take a bow, Fusionx2222!)
Larkin's article was short--until 2022, when a maniac named MarkListerFigg started grinding it. An utterly blatant sockpuppet single-purpose account. Now it's 102k bytes long.
And Mr. Lacey, an even more notoriously abrasive personality, now has a 79k byte article. Thanks mostly to ANOTHER obscure single-purpose account called Encyclopediawoman.
I felt this story should have been documented better, partly because Larkin committed suicide this week. Despite evidence that his company tried to cooperate with federal authorities on sex-trafficking cases for many years, it didn't matter--the Justice Department was going to "make an example" out of Lacey and Larkin. Partly because they publicly fought with California Attorney General Kamala Harris, well before she became vice-president, and with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Harris already had a reputation for being a vengeful backstabber/social climber and the Backpage prosecution is the "capper" on her career in law enforcement. You can read about Paxton and draw your own conclusions. Larkin and Lacey's publications had a long reputation of investigative "attack" journalism. This federal case certainly looks like a personal vendetta to me. (Again remember: Craigslist used to run very similar sex-related ads, until SESTA/FOSTA were passed. Newmark chickened out immediately and Backpage didn't.)
And Wikipedia helped these vengeful prosecutors by painting Backpage as the scum of the earth. Assholes win over other assholes. It certainly is a lot of screechy shit over a website that disappeared in 2018, eh?Paxton wrote after Ferrer's guilty plea that backpage.com was involved in 73% of all child trafficking cases reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “Taking down Backpage and obtaining a criminal conviction for the company and its CEO represents a significant victory in the fight against human trafficking in Texas and around the world,” Paxton said.
But two internal Department of Justice memos released in 2012 and 2013 tell a different story. Investigators apparently found no evidence at the time that either man knew about or allowed ads for child prostitution. The investigation failed "to uncover compelling evidence of criminal intent or a pattern or reckless conduct regarding minors.”
The memos indicate that Lacey and Larkin often held seminars to teach law enforcement how to best use their site and records to identify and stop trafficking. Ferrer even received a certificate from the FBI in 2011 thanking him for his cooperation with their investigations.
A 2021 Government Accountability Office report found that backpage.com’s takedown, paired with the passing of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, actually made it harder to investigate and prosecute sex trafficking cases, as adult advertisers took their businesses to less cooperative websites hosted overseas where United States subpoenas mean very little.
