[8] Craigslist and Backpage had listings for a variety of goods and services, such as real estate, yard sales, personals, work wanted and jobs offered.

[17] In September 2010, a Missouri girl sued Village Voice Media, claiming that she'd been trafficked at age 14 via ads placed on the site, and that Backpage had been negligent.

[19] A month after the suit was filed, Backpage hired former federal prosecutor and NCMEC board member Hemanshu Nigam to come up with a strategic plan to combat the misuse of the site for trafficking.

"[21] In a response to the ad, VVM asserted that it had "extensive working relationships with law enforcement from FBI to the local police", and claiming it had "spent millions of dollars and dedicated countless resources to protecting children from those who would misuse an adult site".

[37][38] In 2012, at the behest of a number of NGO's including Fair Girls and NCMEC, Fitzgibbon Media (at the time, a well-known progressive/liberal public relations agency) created a multimedia campaign to garner support for the anti-Backpage position.

Over 230,000 people including 600 religious leaders, 51 attorneys general, 19 U.S. senators, over 50 non-governmental associations, musician Alicia Keys, and members of R.E.M., The Roots, and Alabama Shakes petitioned the website to remove sexual content.

He also urged mainstream advertisers to boycott Village Voice Media and linked to a Change.org petition asking VVM to stop allowing its users to post adult ads on Backpage.

In response to the article, the Village Voice criticized Kristof's reporting, noting that Backpage had not existed in the cities where Alissa had been prostituted at the time she was underage.

The unsigned Voice article also contended that Backpage dedicated "hundreds of staff to screen adult classifieds in order to keep juveniles off the site and to work proactively with law enforcement in their efforts to locate victims".

[37] The protection afforded to website owners under section 230 was upheld in numerous court cases subsequent to the passage of the legislation in 1996 including Doe v. MySpace Inc., 528 F.3d 413 (5th Cir.

Village Voice Media Holdings, LLC Plaintiff M.A., a 14-year-old runaway, claimed to be a victim of sex trafficking by one Latasha Jewell McFarland, who later pleaded guilty to taking nude photos of M.A.

[51] In 2011, the court ruled that CDA Section 230 still applied and "even if Backpage knows that third parties are posting illegal content, 'the service providers' failure to intervene is immunized'".

The act is "hopelessly vague and overbroad" and "impermissibly chills protected speech," the judge wrote, ridiculing NJ's Attorney General for ignoring the statute's plain language in his defense of it.

They claimed to have been raped numerous times while underage and accuse Backpage of facilitating sex trafficking due to its business and editorial practices, as well as the design of the website itself.

In an opinion written by Judge Bruce M. Seyla, the appeals court ruled that the actions by Backpage were "traditional publisher functions" regarding third-party content, and therefore were shielded by CDA Section 230.

Backpage's counsel argued that the ad's poster actually made the change, but the court said this was a fact to be determined at trial and allowed Jane Doe 3's case to continue.

[78][79] Backpage general counsel Liz McDougall dismissed the raid as an "election year stunt", which wasn't "a good-faith action by law enforcement".

[81] Harris's office fought against releasing the men on bail, and the three prisoners appeared together in court, confined to a cage inside a Sacramento courtroom, wearing orange jumpsuits.

[90] Superior Court Judge Lawrence Brown dismissed the new pimping charges on August 23, 2017, writing that the state's "attempt to assign criminal liability to defendants who offered an online forum on which other people posted advertisements that led to prostitution .

The state alleges that Backpage illegally set up separate accounts to accept payments for ads from credit card companies that refused to do business with them after Sheriff Dart threatened them.

After a voluntary, day-long briefing and interview provided by the company's General Counsel, PSI followed up with a subpoena to Backpage.com demanding over 40 categories of documents, covering 120 subjects, regarding Backpage's business practices.

Rob Portman, a Republican, and ranking Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill, issued statement denying that Backpage's move was in response to censorship, saying the site's shutdown of its adult ad section was a "validation of our findings".

[111] Portman claimed that the subcommittee's investigators discovered that Backpage had created a "filter" to delete "...hundreds of words indicative of sex trafficking or prostitution before publication..."—words such as "Lolita," "teen," "young" and so forth, ostensibly to hide questionable ads from law enforcement.

[113] In a piece on the hearing, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, a senior editor at Reason magazine, wrote that the terms in question did not necessarily indicate sex trafficking, since, for example, "teen" could apply to 18 and 19-year-olds, who were "both 'teens' and, legally, adults".

[114] In late March 2018 and early April 2018, courts in Massachusetts and Florida ruled that Backpage's moderation practices may have fallen outside the immunity from civil suits granted by Section 230.

[128] In his opening statement, federal prosecutor Reginald Jones claimed that the site's owners and operators were aware that Backpage was being used for illegal activity, specifically prostitution, "but they didn't shut down the website.

[132] On September 14, 2021, federal Judge Susan Brnovich declared a mistrial in the case, saying that prosecution had abused the leeway she had given it by making constant references to child sex trafficking rather than focusing on the crimes the defendants are charged with: facilitating prostitution.

The 2012 memo paraphrased an FBI agent with the Innocence Lost Task Force stating that, "...unlike virtually every other website that is used for prostitution and sex trafficking, Backpage is remarkably responsive to law enforcement requests and often takes proactive steps to assist in investigations.

Backpage's age-verification protocol was imperfect but standard in the industry and it reported ads suspected of involving child sex trafficking to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

[159] On April 15, 2019, a Wisconsin man was convicted on federal sex trafficking charges over victims who he brought across state lines, forced into prostitution and advertised on Backpage.