Watch Now: Classified: The War on Backpage.com
Classified: The War on Backpage.com is now streaming on the video platform CiVL. It’s a new 42-minute documentary film produced by Reason, directed by Paul Detrick, and reported by me. Classified features exclusive interviews with Backpage co-founder Michael Lacey as he awaited sentencing.
Lacey is now in prison, sentenced to five years. And his story bodes poorly for free speech online broadly, for sex workers who want safer working conditions, and for all sorts of tech companies.
The first time I met Michael Lacey, he had just been grilled by members of the Senate. In the hallway after the hearing, reporters flanked him and James Larkin, Lacey’s longtime friend and partner in the newspaper and later online classifieds business. They weren’t answering questions. I waited until they had passed the crowd and went up and introduced myself. Lacey recognized my name from the years of Reason reporting I’d already done on Backpage. “Get in,” he said as he, Larkin, and a small entourage of lawyers boarded an elevator. “What’s next?” I asked them inside. Lacey looked at me deadpan: “A drink.”
That was in 2017. Back then, anything involving Backpage commanded a lot of media attention. The site had been scapegoated by many in media and politics—including now-Vice President Kamala Harris—who seemed intent on stoking sex-trafficking panic, and held up by attorneys general and lawmakers as a reason for weakening free speech protections online.
From the beginning, the panic over “adult” ads online seemed to me misplaced. I knew from sex workers that such services were making their jobs easier and safer. And I knew from years of observing and reporting on how the government operates that there was something more going on here than simply misplaced concern by authorities.
Buzzwords like “sex trafficking” and “human trafficking” were being thrown around liberally by influential activist groups and celebrities, demanding that authorities do something to avoid allegations of indifference.
But it was more than that, too. The fact that so much of the sex industry had migrated online gave cover to people in power who sought more control of the internet broadly. They will use this, I thought (and wrote) then. And—oh boy—has that come to pass.
FOSTA (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) was the first significant weakening of the vital-for-free-speech-online provision known as Section 230. Lawmakers pushed through FOSTA with desperate warnings that it was needed to take down Backpage, which they had been framing for years as some sort of hotbed of child sex trafficking. Their tactics worked, and FOSTA passed, and the whole thing earned everyone involved a lot of media accolades.
But not only was their characterization of Backpage wrong, the idea that FOSTA was needed to “take down” Backpage was a lie, too. The Department of Justice seized the site and arrested Lacey, Larkin, and other former executives before FOSTA was actually signed into law.
I spent some time in Phoenix during the week of 4th of July in 2018, a few months after the feds had raided Lacey’s and Larkin’s homes. They still weren’t talking to much press, but they had invited me out to spend a few days interviewing them. I had no idea what to expect. I’m embarrassed to admit now that, at the time, I knew very little about their background—their very long and storied history in the alt-weekly newspaper world; their decades of fighting in court for their First Amendment rights; their decades of publishing pieces that took powerful people to task.
On that trip, they took me to a bar in Phoenix’s Clarendon Hotel. Forty-eight years ago, Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles had gone there to meet an alleged source and been blown up by dynamite placed in his car. A group of reporters had descended on Phoenix afterward to report on the story. “They came in to try to capture the environment where somebody thinks they could get away with killing a journalist,” Lacey told me in 2018. Their pieces wound up “pointing a machine gun at all the players in Arizona.” The Arizona Republic “refused to run it…And so we ran it,” he said. It helped put their paper, the New Times, on the proverbial map. The Clarendon Hotel bar now features a bust of Bolles commissioned and donated by Lacey and Larkin. I think that’s as good a glimpse as any into who these two are.
Since that 2018 trip to Phoenix, I interviewed them many times via phone and email, and once in person during a Reason gathering in Phoenix. But I did not get back out to Lacey’s house until last March, when we started making Classified. Detrick, a videographer, and I spent two days out there interviewing and filming.
My youngest son—then about six months and refusing to take a bottle—had to accompany me and
Article from Reason.com
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