Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations

Backpage.Com's Knowing Facilitation of Online Sex Trafficking Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) reported an 846-percent increase in reports of suspected child sex trafficking from 2010 to 2015-a spike the organization found to be "directly correlated to the increased use of the Internet to sell children for sex." Backpage.com sits at the center of that online black market. This is a large, profitable company: Backpage operates in 97 countries and 934 cities worldwide and was last valued at well over a half-billion dollars. According to an industry analysis in 2013, eight out of every ten dollars spent on online commercial sex advertising in the United States went to one website-Backpage. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Backpage is linked to nearly three-quarters of all suspected child sex trafficking reports that it receives from the general public through its "CyberTipline." And according to a leading anti-trafficking organization called "Shared Hope International," "[s]ervice providers working with child sex trafficking victims have reported that between 80 percent and 100 percent of their clients have been bought and sold on Backpage.com." Backpage has concealed evidence of crimes by systematically deleting words and images suggestive of illegal conduct from advertisements submitted to their website before publishing the ads. And some of those ads involved child sex trafficking. Backpage's editing process sanitized the content of millions of advertisements and hid important evidence from law enforcement.