What Craigslist and Backpage Can Tell Us About the Meta Settlement

Meta’s settlement with states over child safety claims—to the tune of up to $17.1 billion—has come as a disappointment to people who would have liked to see the social media giant battle this one out. Meta has First Amendment rights. Minors have First Amendment rights. If anyone is well-positioned to push back against government overreach on this front, it’s the world’s largest social media company.

Instead, Meta caved. It agreed not just to pay off the 47 states suing it but also to make myriad changes to the way it treats minors using the platform. It’s also agreed to make more changes and pay more money if other big social platforms will do the same. “The base line of Meta’s monetary settlement is $12 billion,” notes New York Times reporter Mike Isaac, but it will throw in an extra $5 billion if TikTok and YouTube pay $5 billion too.

Some have accused Meta of using the settlement to try and stave off further regulation, write the rules in its own favor, and hamstring competitors. And that’s a fair critique.

But I still have some sympathy for Meta here, because I remember what happened to Craigslist and to Backpage.

A Tale of Two Platforms

Both Backpage and Craigslist were online platforms for user-generated classified ads. Craigslist is still around today. Backpage was shut down by the federal government in 2018. (From then until last year, it looked like the image below, until the feds let the URL expire. It now redirects to an explicit webcamming platform.)

In the late ’00s, when politicians and advocates started freaking out about online advertisements for sex work, people largely ignored Backpage, which was smaller and newer. Their main target was Craigslist’s “erotic services” section. At first, Craigslist pushed back a little. But after a couple of years of government bullying and bad publicity, it shuttered the section.

So…adult ads just went away, right? HAHAHAHA. Of course not. They simply migrated to other sections of Craigslist, taking over “casual encounters” (a section theoretically devoted to non-commercial hookups), or to other platforms, most prominently Backpage.

The problem (insofar as you can call it that) didn’t actually go away. Nothing changed—except that the legal attacks on Craigslist stopped and the company could largely go on as before.

Then the government moved on to Backpage. But this was a different beast. Backpage hadn’t started as a standalone platform for user-posted ads; it started as the literal back page of a spate of alt-weekly papers. Its founders—James Larkin and Michael Lacey—were old-school newspapermen who had been fighting First Amendment battles against the government for decades, including previously pushing back against an Arizona law that criminalized abortion advertising.

When authorities started going after Backpage over its adult ads, Lacey and Larkin pushed back and did not stop. They refused to shut down the section. (They did make a few changes here and there, but generally refused to accept the government’s terms of debate.) They not only fought back against lawsuits and criminal charges on First Amendment and Section 230 grounds; they proactively sued over legislation and other government pressure that they believed to be unconstitutional. And they were very vocal about it.

So what happened? State and federal officials kept bullying. They had a show trial in Congress. They brought civil suits and bogus criminal charges. They assigned a team of federal prosecutors to build a sex trafficking case against the company, and when those prosecutors recommended against it—writing that Backpage was helping to stop sex trafficking, and that many of the adult sex work ads it ran were legal, protected speech—officials pivoted to a dubious money laundering case.

Eventually, the Department of Justice brought federal criminal charges against Lacey, Larkin, and several other Backpage executives, accusing them of facilitating prostitution and using the few concessions they had made to government demands as evidence against them. They seized the website. They seized not just the company’s assets but money and property from Lacey, Larkin, and other executives, long before any criminal trial was even started, let alone concluded. They tried to disqualify the defendants’ lawyers. Essentially, they tried everything possible to make sure this wasn’t a fair fight, all while making heinous (and unsubstantiated) public allegations against them, too.

The case finally made it to court in 2021. It was declared a mistrial, because prosecutors and their witnesses kept accusing Backpage of child sex trafficking, even though this wasn’t a trafficking trial and no such charges existed. Prosecutors pushed for another trial—one Larkin would never see, having killed himself just before it was scheduled to begin. Lacey was eventually found guilty on precisely one of the 86 counts against him, for transferring some of his money to a Hungarian bank in 2017 (a transfer that he notified the IRS about, and that he did only after authorities pressured U.S. banks not to do business with him). The jury had been hung on some of the other counts, leading federal prosecutors to vow to try him again.

From Sex Ads to Social Media

It was clear to me, as the animosity against Backpage was revving up, that this was not just about sex ads and was not going to stop with Backpage. This was about internet platforms and speech more broadly, and how much control government authorities could exert over them. People started with venues for adult ads because they knew few would pay close attention or push back if they thought this was just about sex work or, even worse, sex trafficking. (“We’re the canary in the coal mine for the internet,” Larkin told me in 2023.)

And now here we are. The authorities have been using a lot of the playbook they perfected with Backpage and Craigslist for a broader attack on platforms that host user-generated speech—a.k.a. social media platforms. And unlike Craigslist and Backpage, the tech companies under attack today have a good model for how this plays out.

Craigslist executives caved to the government’s demands and got to keep on much as before. Backpage leaders tried to assert the company’s First Amendment rights and wound up having their business and their lives destroyed. How could any sane and self-preserving tech leader look at this and not at least consider taking the path of least resistance?

Meta did push back in the California “addiction” lawsuit against it, even as Snapchat and TikTok settled. It lost. And then lost in a New Mexico state case. And then it found itself immediately up against nearly every U.S. state (not to mention all the individual and school district cases it’s still facing).

As with the sex work ads—which first migrated from Craigslist to Backpage, and then from Backpage to other platforms—the “problem” here isn’t going to be solved by the suits or the settlements. We have ample evidence that age verification policies are ineffective, and ample evidence that it’s not social media causing various problems facing teens today. No one’s going to be saved by Instagram booting teens after two hours. It’s all a charade, but it’s one where such settlements let the authorities keep up the illusion that they’re fighting the good fight.

Many have been suggesting that Meta “accepted” the premises of the state’s arguments against it. I don’t think that’s true. Meta and other social media companies that settle suits accusing them of harming children and agree to make changes to their policies are simply reacting rationally to the realities before them.

Meta’s proposed changes and this settlement “should not be presumed to mean that ‘social media addiction’ has been proven or that the products are inherently harmful to teens,” said Jennifer Huddleston, a technology policy analyst at the Cato Institute, in a press release. “For a large company like Meta, settling may at times provide a reasonable alternative given the risk of higher fines and greater restrictions if it were to lose in court. For smaller companies, there can be even more incentives to settle even if there is a high likelihood of winning at trial due to the sheer costs and uncertainty of litigation.”

It might also just mean that they’ve internalized the lessons of Craigslist and Backpage. As Larkin once put it: “If the government decides to point its finger at you, there’s really no question that they’re going to try to ruin you”—and “given the system and the way it’s set up,” that they will succeed.

Unless, of course, you just give in.

In the News

Having paid for sex will no longer disqualify you from arresting people who try to pay for sex. “The FBI is dropping a categorical hiring ban on applicants who have had sexual encounters with sex workers and will instead consider in a more holistic manner at least some candidates who have engaged in the practice in the past,” reports The Guardian.

The move away from an automatic disqualification falls along a continuum of evolving recruitment standards within federal law enforcement and at the buttoned-up bureau, which several years ago relaxed its approach to candidates’ past marijuana use and has drawn more recent concern among some current and former agents about a perceived loosening of recruitment requirements as it seeks to replenish its ranks.

The bureau still intends to dismiss applicants who are revealed during the vetting process to have engaged with sex workers within the last 10 years, three or more times overall, or while in a position of trust, such as in a public safety capacity, according to guidance issued this past spring and described by a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss internal decision-making and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Followup

The Trump administration’s Anthropic retaliation was illegal, court says. Remember back in February, when the Trump administration declared Anthropic a national security risk after the artificial intelligence company refused to say the Pentagon could use its products for mass surveillance or robot weapons? And then Anthropic sued, alleging illegal retaliation and accusing the administration of trying to punish Anthropic for protected speech? A ruling is now in, and it’s in Anthropic’s favor. The New York Times has more:

Judge Rita Lin of the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California wrote in her 59-page ruling that the government had unlawfully retaliated against Anthropic “for constitutionally protected expressive activities” after the A.I. company spoke out about how its technology should be used.

“The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,” she wrote.

In a statement, Anthropic said: “We welcome the court’s ruling that this supply chain risk designation was unlawful. We remain focused on working productively with the government to harness A.I. for our national security so all Americans benefit from this technology.”

Read the whole ruling here.

More Sex & Tech

• “Fairgoers looking toward the sky at the Kentucky State Fair may spot an unexpected message trailing behind an airplane: ‘Abortion pills by mail,'” reports Fox 56 Louisville.

• Reason‘s Robby Soave pushes back against the Institute for Family Studies’ video game “addiction” panic.

• A webcam model in Sweden complains about the country’s law criminalizing the purchase of customized digital content of a sexual nature: “Sweden decided that if you order a custom-made video, then that is the same as buying sex in person because you request the person to do something for you that they might not want to do. But I mean I can say ‘no’ to requests. But apparently I’m not allowed to make that decision for myself.”

• Can AI be guilty of crime? “This was one dilemma raised when a self-described ‘swarm’ of AI agents hacked the company Hugging Face because they thought it might have the information they needed to cheat on a task given to them by humans at OpenAI,” notes Jerusalem Demsas at The Argument. Is tort law the proper remedy here?

• Democrats in New York’s Nassau County want to make landlords liable for prostitution on their property—potentially incentivizing property owners to profile residents and businesses and to reject anyone who might, based on stereotypes, seem like a sex worker. They also want to impose a spate of new regulations on massage parlors. These are allegedly aimed at stopping human trafficking, but would in reality simply make life more difficult for small business owners and the (often immigrant women) workers they employ.

• Law enforcement’s “focus on policing consensual private behavior is a shocking misallocation of community resources,” writes Maxine Doogan, responding to the arrest of a major league sports team owner in an East Palestine, Ohio, prostitution sting.

• Concerning Tennessee’s age verification law, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said a lower court must reconsider its denial of a preliminary injunction request by the tech trade group NetChoice.