Talk:Backpage/Archives/2018
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Alleged victims
On April 9, 2018, the US Justice Department's indictment against Backpage was unsealed. It includes information about 17 alleged victims. I suggest to add a "Alleged victims" section. How about the draft paragraph below? I tried to focus on publicly reported information, which is based on the JD's indictment, while protecting the private identify of the victims, as well as including both point of views (POV).
On April 9, 2018, the US Justice Department's indictment against Backpage was unsealed. It contains details about 17 alleged victims. Which range from minors as young as 14 years old to adults, who were allegedly trafficked on the site while Backpage was knowingly facilitating prostitution. A first 15 years old child victim was forced to do in-calls at hotels. A second young teenager victim was told to “perform sexual acts at gun point and choked” until she had seizures, before being gang-raped. A third victim was advertised under the pseudonym “Nadia” was stabbed to death. A fourth victim was murdered in 2015 before being set aflame to burn her corpse. The lawyer for Backpage operations manager Andrew Padilla, stated that his client was “not legally responsible for any actions of third parties under U.S. law. He is no more responsible than the owner of a community billboard when someone places an ad on it,”[1][2]
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Francewhoa (talk) 02:56, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
Present/Past tense in lead
The site is seized. That means at present the site is not available. It has not ceased to exist, it is not 'dead', like Prince or Micheal Jackson. It's a website, a domain name, whatever. Refer to it as currently blocked, whatever, but without a source we can't talk about it as though it is a person who "died" or a painting that was destroyed, or computer file magnetized forever--yet. Not without a source anyway. Being seized does not equal being destroyed. ZarhanFastfire (talk) 17:04, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
I agree. Using past tense upon a site attached to a domain name is awkward at best! Whatever the guilt or innocence of the persons involved, the odds that the domain will be sold, with or without the rest of the pre-existing site content that was not plausibly illegal, such as ordinary garage-sale stuff & real estate ads, are very high. Even a follow-up site that uses no pre-existing content & forces users to create brand new accounts with whatever webserver follows would still benefit from the pre-existing branding, with users checking that domain URL far into the future because they bought a used playstation on it once, and got a great deal. Indeed, the other employees who are not prosecuted might be able to make changes & continue operation without the parts of the site that justice department objected to. Using past tense sort of indicates a finality to the use of this domain name that only the verifiably clairvoyant could claim certainty on. It makes it sound as though litigation is complete, and that NO ONE wants to try gather whatever value remains of that domain name or brand. The past tense problem seems decidedly anti-NPOV to me. ♠Ace Frahm♠talk 21:22, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
- Unfortunately several IPs keep changing or reverting the tenses to past. I think the only way to stop this from recurring is to move up the material about the site being seized i.e. blocked right to the beginning of the article to make it clear to these readers why it's "is" and not "was". ZarhanFastfire (talk) 17:28, 12 May 2018 (UTC)