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newstfionline · 3 years

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Thursday, April 29, 2021

Biden to propose free preschool, as speech details emerge (AP) President Joe Biden will call for free preschool for all three- and four-year-old children, a $200 billion investment to be rolled out as part of his sweeping American Families Plan being unveiled Wednesday in an address to Congress. The administration said the historic investment would benefit 5 million children and save the average family $13,000. It calls for providing federal funds to help the states offer preschool, with teachers and other employees earning $15 an hour. The new details are part of Biden’s $1 trillion-plus package, an ambitious next phase of his massive infrastructure investment program, this one focused on so-called human infrastructure—child care, health care, education and other core aspects of the household architecture that undergird everyday life for countless Americans. Together with Biden’s American Jobs Plan, a $2.3 trillion infrastructure investment to be funded by a corporate tax hike, they add up a whopping $4 trillion effort to fulfill his campaign vow to Build Back Better.

Navy SEALs to shift from counterterrorism to global threats (AP) Ten years after they found and killed Osama bin Laden, U.S. Navy SEALs are undergoing a major transition to improve leadership and expand their commando capabilities to better battle threats from global powers like China and Russia. The new plan cuts the number of SEAL platoons by as much as 30% and increases their size to make the teams more lethal and able to counter sophisticated maritime and undersea adversaries. That decision reflects the broader Pentagon strategy to prioritize China and Russia, which are rapidly growing their militaries and trying to expand their influence around the globe. U.S. defense leaders believe that two decades of war against militants and extremists have drained resources, causing America to lose ground against Moscow and Beijing.

Scientist: Extent of DDT dumping in Pacific is ‘staggering’ (AP) Marine scientists say they have found what they believe to be more than 25,000 barrels that possibly contain DDT dumped off the Southern California coast near Catalina Island, where a massive underwater toxic waste site dating back to World War II has long been suspected. The 27,345 “barrel-like” objects were captured in high-resolution images as part of a study by researchers at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. They mapped more than 56 square miles (145 square kilometers) of seafloor between Santa Catalina Island and the Los Angeles coast in a region previously found to contain high levels of the toxic chemical in sediments and in the ecosystem. Historical shipping logs show that industrial companies in Southern California used the basin as a dumping ground until 1972, when the Marine Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act, also known as the Ocean Dumping Act, was enacted. Disposing of industrial, military, nuclear and other hazardous waste was a pervasive global practice in the 20th century, according to researchers. The long-term impact on marine life and humans is still unknown, said Scripps chemical oceanographer and professor of geosciences Lihini Aluwihare, who in 2015 co-authored a study that found high amounts of DDT and other man-made chemicals in the blubber of bottlenose dolphins that died of natural causes.

Electric Vehicle Appeal Loses Steam (Nature.com/ArsTechnica) California is the largest market in the US for plug-in vehicles. But a new study in Nature Energy has found that about 20% of those early electric vehicle adopters have given up their EVs to return to fossil fuel-powered transport. Survey responders said what they liked most about their plug-ins were recharging costs, reliability, and safety. What they liked least were the driving range and convenience of charging. Not surprisingly, those who decided to keep their EVS had more access to level 2 charging (240 V AC) at home, as well as more access to charging generally.

The real crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border (Washington Post) There’s a crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border, but it isn’t the crisis that the media has been covering and that the Republican governors of Arizona and Texas recently blamed on President Biden. The crisis I’m talking about is the one that is eroding the livelihoods of U.S. citizens on the borderlands. Just ask Blanca Gallardo, 45, or her colleague Ivan Caballero, 39, two of the three workers left at La Familia, a mega-discount store in the border city of Nogales, Ariz. The store once employed 24 people. La Familia occupies a prime piece of real estate on Morley Avenue, Nogales’s Main Street. Like other retail businesses on and around this thoroughfare, La Familia depends almost entirely on shoppers who live on the other side of the border fence a short walk away—Mexicans who have not been allowed to enter the United States since March last year, when land ports of entry were closed to visa-carrying nonessential travelers in an effort to contain the coronavirus pandemic. The result has been devastating. Sheriff David Hathaway, a lifelong Nogales resident and the top law enforcement official in Santa Cruz County, one of four border counties in Arizona, said that 90 percent of local businesses have shut their doors and may never reopen. “There is no migrant crisis,” Hathaway told me. “What we have is a big economic crisis.” That’s not just a Nogales problem, though. One downtown merchant in the border city of El Paso told Border Report in November that his store had lost as much as 90 percent of its customers since last March.

López Obrador’s bid to alter Mexican Supreme Court seen as threat to judicial independence (Washington Post) He won the presidency in a landslide. His party dominates Congress. Now, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is in a battle over the country’s judiciary, as opponents and legal analysts accuse him of making an unconstitutional power grab. Lawmakers from López Obrador’s party have triggered outrage by voting to add two years to the four-year term of the Supreme Court chief justice, Arturo Zaldívar. Zaldívar is generally regarded as sympathetic to the president. As in the United States, where some Democrats want to expand the U.S. Supreme Court, there are fears that the judiciary is becoming increasingly politicized. But the Mexican measure carries especially grave implications, analysts say, because it appears to violate a constitutional limit on the chief justice’s term. López Obrador is increasingly challenging institutions created as part of Mexico’s transition to democracy, including the national elections board and the freedom-of-information institute. Critics worry that the president, who came to power as a leftist political outsider, could use his popularity to reestablish elements of the one-party system that reigned here for seven decades.

With pools closed, Peruvians turn to open-water swimming (AP) The swimmers began gathering even before dawn glimmers on Pescadores beach, plunging into the Pacific surf for one of the few athletic endeavors permitted under Peru’s strict pandemic restrictions. Swimming pools have been closed for more than a year, but government has since Oct. 30 allowed open-water swimming, even if relaxing on the beach is banned to prevent mass gatherings. Forty-three-year-old Lorena Choy said swimming “relaxes me, unstresses me. ... It helps a lot psychologically.” Swimming coach Víctor Solís, 47, said he estimated that the number of swimmers out each morning has multiplied fivefold recently.

UK to come under scrutiny in Italy’s largest mafia trial in decades (The Guardian) In a high-security, 1,000-capacity courtroom converted from a call centre, Italy’s largest mafia trial in three decades is under way in Lamezia Terme, Calabria. About 900 witnesses are set to testify against more than 350 defendants, including politicians and officials charged with being members of the ‘Ndrangheta, Italy’s most powerful criminal group. Several of the defendants will be asked to respond to charges of money laundering over establishing companies in the UK with the alleged purpose of simulating legitimate economic activity. The ‘Ndrangheta—based in the southern region of Calabria, the toe of the Italian boot—is reputed to be one of the richest and most feared criminal organisations in the world. A study by the Demoskopita Research Institute in 2013 estimated its financial strength as more than that of Deutsche Bank and McDonald’s combined, with an annual turnover of €53bn (£44bn). Investigators say the secret of its success lies in its ability to connect the underworld with the upper world, where often the “upper world” stands for London. In the last decade, hundreds of investigations have asserted how the ‘Ndrangheta has laundered billions of euros in the City.

The U.S. Built the Afghan Military Over 20 Years. Will It Last One More? (NYT) President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that first propelled the United States into conflict, has prompted deep fears about the Afghan security forces’ ability to defend what territory remains under government control. For nearly two decades, the United States and NATO have engaged in the nation-building pursuit of training, expanding and equipping Afghanistan’s police, army and air forces, spending tens of billions of dollars in an attempt to build government security forces that can safeguard their own country. But despite this enormous effort, the undertaking has only produced a troubled set of forces that are woefully unprepared for facing the Taliban, or any other threat, on their own. What comes next is anything but certain. The Taliban already control vast amounts of the country, even with American military power present. Afghan units are rife with corruption, have lost track of the weapons once showered on them by the Pentagon, and in many areas are under constant attack. Some soldiers have not been home in years because their villages have been overtaken by the Taliban. Prospects for improvement are slim, given slumping recruitment, high casualty rates and a Taliban insurgency that is savvy, experienced and well equipped—including with weapons originally provided to the Afghan government by the United States.

In India, Illness Is Everywhere (NYT) Crematories are so full of bodies, it’s as if a war just happened. Sickness and death are everywhere. Dozens of houses in my neighborhood have sick people. One of my son’s teachers is sick. The neighbor two doors down, to the right of us: sick. Two doors to the left: sick. I’m sitting in my apartment waiting to catch the disease. That’s what it feels like right now in New Delhi with the world’s worst coronavirus crisis advancing around us. India is now recording more infections per day—as many as 350,000—than any other country has since the pandemic began, and that’s just the official number, which most experts think is a vast underestimation. New Delhi, India’s sprawling capital of 20 million, is suffering a calamitous surge. A few days ago, the positivity rate hit a staggering 36 percent—meaning more than one out of three people tested were infected. A month ago, it was less than 3 percent. The infections have spread so fast that hospitals have been completely swamped. Although New Delhi is locked down, the disease is still rampaging.

US Navy fires warning shots in new tense encounter with Iran (AP) An American warship fired warning shots when vessels of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard came too close to a patrol in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. Navy said Wednesday. The Navy said the USS Firebolt fired the warning shots after three fast-attack Guard vessels came within 68 yards (62 meters) of it and the U.S. Coast Guard patrol boat USCGC Baranoff. The incident Monday marked the second time the Navy accused the Guard of operating in an “unsafe and unprofessional” manner this month alone after tense encounters between the forces had dropped in recent years.

Hong Kong passes immigration bill, raising alarm over ‘exit bans’ (Reuters) Hong Kong’s legislature passed on Wednesday a controversial immigration bill, which lawyers, diplomats and right groups fear will give authorities unlimited powers to prevent residents and others from entering or leaving the Chinese-ruled city. The government has dismissed those fears as “complete nonsense,” saying the legislation, which will come into effect on Aug. 1, merely aims to screen illegal immigrants. The assurances, however, come in a climate of mistrust after the increasingly authoritarian path officials have taken the imposition of a sweeping national security law by Beijing last year. Lawyers say the new law will empower authorities to bar anyone, without a court order, from entering or leaving Hong Kong—essentially opening the door for mainland China-style exit bans—and fails to prevent indefinite detention for refugees. The Hong Kong Bar Association (HKBA) said in February the bill failed to explain why such powers were necessary, how they would be used and provided no limit on the duration of any travel ban, nor any safeguards against abuse.

#headlines #news

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wickedbananas · 6 years

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Google Questions and Answers: A Case Study

Posted by MiriamEllis

Ever since Google rolled out Questions and Answers in mid-2017, I’ve been trying to get a sense of its reception by consumers and brands. Initially restricted to Android Google Maps, this fascinating feature which enables local business owners and the public to answer consumer questions made it to desktop displays this past December, adding yet another data layer to knowledge panels and local finders.

As someone who has worked in Q&A forums for the majority of my digital marketing life, I took an immediate shine to the idea of Google Questions and Answers. Here’s a chance, I thought, for consumers and brands to take meaningful communication to a whole new level, exchanging requests, advice, and help so effortlessly. Here’s an opportunity for businesses to place answers to FAQs right upfront in the SERPs, while also capturing new data about consumer needs and desires. So cool!

But, so far, we seem to be getting off to a slow start. According to a recent, wide-scale GetFiveStars study, 25% of businesses now have questions waiting for them. I decided to hone in on San Francisco and look at 20 busy industries in that city to find out not just how many questions were being asked, but also how many answers were being given, and who was doing the answering. I broke down responders into three groups: Local Guides (LGs), random users (RUs), and owners (Os). I looked at the top 10 businesses ranking in the local finder for each industry:

Industry Number of Questions Number of Answers LGs RUs Os Dentists 1 0 0 0 0 Plumbers 2 0 - - - Chiropractors 0 - - - - Mexican Restaurants 10 23 22 1 - Italian Restaurants 15 20 19 1 - Chinese Restaurants 16 53 49 4 - Car Dealers 4 5 3 2 - Supermarkets 7 27 24 3 - Clothing Stores 4 1 1 - - Florists 1 0 - - - Hotels 44 142 114 28 - Real Estate Agencies 0 - - - - General Contractors 1 0 - - - Cell Phone Stores 14 3 3 - - Yoga Studios 1 0 - - - Banks 1 0 - - - Carpet Cleaning 0 - - - - Hair Salons 1 0 - - - Locksmiths 1 0 - - - Jewelry Stores 0 - - - -

Takeaways from the case study

Here are some patterns and oddities I noticed from looking at 123 questions and 274 answers:

There are more than twice as many answers as questions. While many questions received no answers, others received five, ten, or more.

The Owners column is completely blank. The local businesses I looked at in San Francisco are investing zero effort in answering Google Questions and Answers.

Local Guides are doing the majority of the answering. Of the 274 answers provided, 232 came from users who have been qualified as Local Guides by Google. Why so lopsided? I suspect the answer lies in the fact that Google sends alerts to this group of users when questions get asked, and that they can earn 3 points per answer they give. Acquiring enough points gets you perks like 3 free months of Google Play Music and a 75% discount off Google Play Movies. Unfortunately, what I’m seeing in Google Questions and Answers is that incentivizing replies is leading to a knowledge base of questionable quality. How helpful is it when a consumer asks a hotel if they have in-room hair dryers and 10 local guides jump on the bandwagon with “yep”? Worse yet, I saw quite a few local guides replying “I don’t know,” “maybe,” and even “you should call the business and ask.” Here and there, I saw genuinely helpful answers from the Local Guides, but my overall impression didn’t leave me feeling like I’d stumbled upon a new Google resource of matchless expertise.

Some members of the public seem to be confused about the use of this feature. I noticed people using the answer portion to thank people who replied to their query, rather than simply using the thumbs up widget. Additionally, I saw people leaving reviews/statements, instead of questions: And with a touch of exasperated irony: And to rant:

Some industries are clearly generating far more questions than others. Given how people love to talk about hotels and restaurants, I wasn’t surprised to see them topping the charts in sheer volume of questions and answers. What did surprise me was not seeing more questions being asked of businesses like yoga studios, florists, and hair salons; before I actually did the searches, I might have guessed that pleasant, “chatty” places like these would be receiving lots of queries.

Big brands everywhere are leaving Google Questions and Answers unanswered

I chose San Francisco for my case study because of its general reputation for being hip to new tech, but just in case my limited focus was presenting a false picture of how local businesses are managing this feature, I did some random searches for big brands around the state and around the country.

I found questions lacking owner answers for Whole Foods, Sephora, Taco Bell, Macy’s, Denny’s, Cracker Barrel, Target, and T-Mobile. As I looked around the nation, I noted that Walmart has cumulatively garnered thousands of questions with no brand responses.

But the hands-down winner for a single location lacking official answers is Google in Mountain View. 103 questions as of my lookup and nary an owner answer in sight. Alphabet might want to consider setting a more inspiring example with their own product… unless I’m misunderstanding their vision of how Google Questions and Answers is destined to be used.

Just what is the vision for Google Questions and Answers, I wonder?

As I said at the beginning of this post, it’s early days yet to predict ultimate outcomes. Yet, the current lay of the land for this feature has left me with more questions than answers:

Does Google actually intend questions to be answered by brands, or by the public? From what I’ve seen, owners are largely unaware of or choosing to ignore this feature many months post-launch. As of writing this, businesses are only alerted about incoming questions if they open the Google Maps app on an Android phone or tablet. There is no desktop GMB dashboard section for the feature. It’s not a recipe for wide adoption. Google has always been a fan of a crowdsourcing approach to their data, so they may not be concerned, but that doesn’t mean your business shouldn’t be.

What are the real-time expectations for this feature? I see many users asking questions that needed fast answers, like “are you open now?” while others might support lengthier response times, as in, “I’m planning a trip and want to know what I can walk to from your hotel.” For time-sensitive queries, how does Questions and Answers fit in with Google’s actual chat feature, Google Messaging, also rolled out last summer? Does Google envision different use cases for both features? I wonder if one of the two products will win out over time, while the other gets sunsetted.

What are the real, current risks to brands of non-management? I applauded Mike Blumenthal’s smart suggestion of companies proactively populating the feature with known FAQs and providing expert answers, and I can also see the obvious potential for reputation damage if rants or spam are ignored. That being said, my limited exploration of San Francisco has left me wondering just how many people (companies or consumers) are actually paying attention in most industries. Google Knowledge Panels and the Local Finder pop-ups are nearing an information bloat point. Do you want to book something, look at reviews, live chat, see menus, find deals, get driving directions, make a call? Websites are built with multiple pages to cover all of these possible actions. Sticking them all in a 1” box may not equal the best UX I’ve ever seen, if discovery of features is our goal.

What is the motivation for consumers to use the product? Personally, I’d be more inclined to just pick up the phone to ask any question to which I need a fast answer. I don’t have the confidence that if I queried Whole Foods in the AM as to whether they’ve gotten in organic avocados from California, there’d be a knowledge panel answer in time for my lunch. Further, some of the questions I’ve asked have received useless answers from the public, which seems like a waste of time for all parties. Maybe if the feature picks up momentum, this will change.

Will increasing rates of questions = increasing rates of business responses? According to the GetFiveStars study linked to above, total numbers of questions for the 1700 locations they investigated nearly doubled between November–December of 2017. From my microscopic view of San Francisco, it doesn’t appear to me that the doubling effect also happened for owner answers. Time will tell, but for now, what I’m looking for is question volume reaching such a boiling point that owners feel obligated to jump into management, as they have with reviews. We’re not there yet, but if this feature is a Google keeper, we could get there.

So what should you be doing about Google Questions and Answers?

I’m a fan of early adoption where it makes sense. Speculatively, having an active Questions and Answers presence could end up as a ranking signal. We’ve already seen it theorized that use of another Google asset, Google Posts, may impact local pack rankings. Unquestionably, leaving it up to the public to answer questions about your business with varying degrees of accuracy carries the risk of losing leads and muddying your online presence to the detriment of reputation. If a customer asks if your location has wheelchair access and an unmotivated third party says “I don’t know,” when, in fact, your business is fully ADA-compliant, your lack of an answer becomes negative customer service. Because of this, ignoring the feature isn’t really an option. And, while I wouldn’t prioritize management of Questions and Answers over traditional Google-based reviews at this point, I would suggest:

Do a branded search today and look at your knowledge panel to see if you’ve received any questions. If so, answer them in your best style, as helpfully as possible

Spend half an hour this week translating your company’s 5 most common FAQs into Google Questions and Answers queries and then answering them. Be sure you’re logged into your company’s Google account when you reply, so that your message will be officially stamped with the word “owner.” Whether you proactively post your FAQs while logged into your business’ account is up to you. I think it’s more transparent to do so.

If you’re finding this part of your Knowledge Panel isn’t getting any questions, checking it once a week is likely going to be enough for the present.

If you happen to be marketing a business that is seeing some good Questions and Answers activity, and you have the bandwidth, I’d add checking this to the daily social media rounds you make for the purpose of reputation management. I would predict that if Google determines this feature is a keeper, they’ll eventually start sending email alerts when new queries come in, as they’re now doing with reviews, which should make things easier and minimize the risk of losing a customer with an immediate need. Need to go pro on management right now due to question volume? GetFiveStars just launched an incredibly useful Google Q&A monitoring feature, included in some of their ORM software packages. Looks like a winner!

Do be on the lookout for spam inquiries and responses, and report them if they arise.

If you’re totally new to Google Questions and Answers, this simple infographic will get you going in a flash:

For further tips on using Google Questions and Answers like a pro, I recommend following GetFiveStars’ 3-part series on this topic.

My questions, your answers

My case study is small. Can you help expand our industry’s knowledge base by answering a few questions in the comments to add to the picture of the current rate of adoption/usefulness of Google’s Questions and Answers? Please, let me know:

Have you asked a question using this feature?

Did you receive an answer and was it helpful?

Who answered? The business, a random user, a Local Guide?

Have you come across any examples of business owners doing a good job answering questions?

What are your thoughts on Google Questions and Answers? Is it a winner? Worth your time? Any tips?

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bluewatsons · 4 years

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Shellyne Rodriguez, How the Bronx was Branded, The New Inquiry (December 12, 2018)

Art moguls, real-estate developers, city institutions, and local elites unite in the name of development for the few, displacement for the many

Lisa Kahane, Falsas Promesas, The Bronx, NY, 1980

In July 2015, a slick, minimalist billboard appeared above the Bruckner Expressway in the South Bronx, proclaiming: “South Bronx—Piano District. Luxury Waterfront Living. World-Class Dining, Fashion, Art, + Architecture. Coming Soon.” The billboard featured the logo of Somerset Partners and their business associate the Chetrit Group and was funded by developer Keith Rubenstein. Earlier that year they had purchased land along the formerly industrial Bronx waterfront for $58 million, a process facilitated by Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr. As with the renaming of other places in New York City like “SoHo” and “East Williamsburg” in previous decades, the billboard signaled with colonial arrogance that two working-class neighborhoods of color—currently known as Port Morris and Mott Haven—were now destined to be carved into new territories of luxury real-estate development. Two 25-story towers were to be constructed, with market-rate apartments starting at $3,500 per month. Angry Bronx residents revolted against the proposed name change, and it culminated with the “Piano District” billboard being defaced.

The billboard announced Rubenstein’s desire to purchase the South Bronx and build a luxury colony in one of the poorest regions of New York City, which for decades had been associated in mainstream media with stereotypical images of dereliction, crime, and violence. As suggested by the slogan of the billboard, an appeal to “art” would be crucial in transforming the image of the South Bronx from marginal working-class zone to among the most hyped-up frontiers of property speculation in the city—a process led by developers that would unfold with the full support of local and city government. Each of these entities—developers, local elected officials, and the city administration—weaponized the arts to move this initiative further along. It reveals an unnerving intersection of power that positions real-estate developers, the art world, and city government in an alliance to advance gentrification, as a process of systematic repopulation, further into poor and working-class communities.

Rather than simply erasing the cultural history of the Bronx, contemporary neoliberalism has worked to appropriate it in the service of rebranding. Though this process is spearheaded by figures like Rubenstein, Bronx-born elites have themselves been complicit in it, including homegrown celebrities like rapper-producer Swizz Beatz. In turn, the apparently more benign discourse of “social-practice art” is poised to play a role in this process as well, especially through the cultural initiatives of New York City Director of Cultural Affairs Tom Finkelpearl, whose work will inevitably be integrated with the pro-developer policies of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, even as Finklepearl makes appeals to community engagement and local cultural heritage.

During the 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam War and large-scale deindustrialization, which led to massive unemployment, the Bronx was largely abandoned by city and state agencies. New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan espoused a philosophy of “benign neglect,” also known as planned shrinkage, in the borough, which essentially withdrew city services such as sanitation, street repair, and firehouses. What followed was the murderous mass torching of buildings and homes in the Bronx by racist, greedy landlords looking to collect fire-insurance money from these properties. By 1977, “the Bronx is Burning” would be a catchphrase heard all across the world as it became a symbol of urban decay, sending Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan into the bombed-out borough to pander for votes.

In the midst of this wave of plagues, young people in the Bronx formed a new culture, a radical avant-garde art movement that would shape culture globally: hip-hop. The South Bronx continues to be a beacon of art and culture. Young people there reinvent language, fashion, music, and dance at lightning speed. By the time this genius is “discovered” by some corporate exec, it is already stale, and these young people have moved on to new iterations of joy and survival expressed through this cultural practice.

Despite this genius, honorable cultural distinction reserved for the Bronx has not affected its political economy; marked as the poorest U.S. congressional district in 2010, the Bronx continues to rank among the areas highest in poverty, unemployment, asthma, obesity, and malnutrition in the country. In New York, the importance of the Bronx as the birthplace of hip-hop has only recently been embraced and acknowledged—but as a marketing tool. The hip-hop origin story has become a selling point for luxury developers in the South Bronx.

While the aesthetics of Keith Rubenstein’s first “Piano District” billboard in July 2015 were minimalist and matter-of-fact, the kickoff promotional event for his campaign to rebrand the South Bronx was an extravagant spectacle of the borough’s traumatic history. The event, entitled “Macabre Suite,” was held on Halloween 2015 in one of Rubenstein’s newly purchased warehouses slated for development on the waterfront. It was orchestrated by Salon 94 gallerist Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who commissioned artist Lucien Smith to create installations in the former piano factory where the party took place. The installations entailed a clichéd reimagining of the South Bronx in the 1970s. Bullet-ridden cars were installed in the space along with hobo-style bonfires in metal barrels. Rubenstein then chartered buses for A-list celebrities and art-world impresarios making their way from Manhattan. The social-media accounts of attendees swarmed with the hashtag of the night, #thebronxisburning, creating a mockery of the arson committed by slumlords decades earlier.

Backlash ensued in protests and in the press and Rubenstein receded from the media spotlight to let the controversy die down quietly, launching an offshoot of Somerset Partners under the name Somerset Hospitality Group. This entity began systematically opening local businesses in the vicinity of the Piano District project as a way to expedite the gentrification process. La Grata Pizzeria and Filtered Coffee were the first to open in the neighborhood. Locally, he invested in young Bronx designer Jerome LaMaar’s boutique 9J, the boxing gym South Box, and the nonprofit art gallery BronxArtSpace. Under the guise of “trying to do right by the community,” Rubenstein hired locals to work in his pizzeria and coffee shop. As he told NPR, “People who live in the public housing down the street work at the new pizza place. The boxing gym will offer scholarships to local kids. And residents who’ve been clamoring for access to the waterfront will finally get it.” Rubenstein uses the deceptive rhetoric of “job creation,” forming a human shield to ward off criticism, but the relatively few people who are employed by the local businesses Rubenstein floats do not outweigh the massive number of people who will be forced to move because they can no longer afford their apartments. Rubenstein will shamelessly parade around the recipients of his benevolence, but the wages they earn will not be enough to save them from displacement.

The Rubenstein strategy is simple: build a planned community by planting “Trojan horse” businesses in the area to hold space. Artists in search of cheaper rents will inevitably flock to the South Bronx, where the rent is quickly becoming unaffordable for long-time residents but is considered affordable to newcomers who have been priced out of Brooklyn. Struggling artists will inevitably respond, and through no fault of their own set in motion the displacement of the people who live there, before they are eventually displaced too. Rubenstein’s shallow investment in local businesses and talent takes advantage of a people who have historically been locked out of pursuing creative business endeavors. While this is the case, protests and boycotts of those local Bronx residents who crossed the hypothetical picket line and accepted Rubenstein’s patronage are obligatory. Rubenstein knows all too well that artists and the poor and working-class people of the Bronx are starved of funding and opportunity and seeks to exploit these circumstances for his own profit. Developer tactics range from “lending” spaces to artists and curators for pop-up shows in new developments built in the middle of poor and working-class neighborhoods to draw in potential renters, to funding start-ups and small-business ventures to create ambiance and selling points for neighborhoods still considered too “edgy,” to donating free studio space to up-and-coming artists as a way of generating interest in their new investments.

Positioning himself as a benevolent and pragmatic capitalist with a conscience, Rubenstein insistently suggests that support for local upstarts and artists today might absolve him from travesties committed tomorrow, that charity will exonerate him when he eventually bulldozes and displaces a whole neighborhood. Rubenstein mimes the philosophies touted by progressive liberals who believe that working within the system can produce some kind of “conscious capitalism,” but his philanthropy is a smoke screen. With a significant amount of local support Rubenstein was ready to re-announce his venture in the South Bronx. Rather than throw another party himself, he brought in a famous Bronx native armed with his own philanthropic project: rapper-producer Swizz Beatz.

Kasseem Dean, who goes by his stage name Swizz Beatz and is a well-known art collector, joined the board of trustees of the Brooklyn Museum in 2015. In August 2016, Dean was hired as “Global Chief of Creative Culture” for Bacardi and launched the project No Commission, an art fair that showcased the work of emerging artists of color alongside prominent African-American artists. Dean’s motto, “If you free the artist, you free the world,” was widely applauded. The No Commission model allowed artists to sell their work directly to buyers without paying the high commissions charged by galleries. This commission-free selling took place in the context of a four-day music festival that was free and open to the public, as long as attendees RSVPed on the Bacardi website. The audience was privy to performances by DMX, Q-Tip, Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel, Dean’s wife Alicia Keys, A$AP Rocky, Young Thug, Fabolous, and many more. There was a Ferris wheel on-site for partygoers to enjoy, and the outer walls of the venue were covered in a mural by TATS CRU, the legendary graffiti collective. The Bacardi was free.

“I think without the Bronx in the world, a big hole would be missing,” declared Dean nostalgically as he bicycled through his old neighborhood with A$AP Rocky in a promotional video for No Commission. But this nostalgia did not stop Dean from partying at the Macabre Suite event the year before, reveling in the mockery of the same people who were now the object of his sentimentality. In fact, the No Commission event served as a vehicle for reintroducing the Keith Rubenstein project to the Bronx, helping Rubenstein reframe the site where the Macabre Suite party had occurred. Dean’s street cred and social capital served as the ultimate buffer for Rubenstein’s project, though his musings about making the arts accessible to Bronx residents weren’t reflected in the event. The RSVP on the Bacardi website didn’t work for many, and the barricades surrounding the venue with manned NYPD officers certainly made it unwelcome to the people in the neighborhood.

As a result of Dean’s collaboration with Rubenstein, No Commission was heavily protested by groups such as Take Back the Bronx, Why Accountability, and a wide variety of folks from the community, among their numbers many outraged New York–based artists of color. When Dean was forced to respond, he applauded the “landlord” (Rubenstein) for pushing back his development project for two months so that Dean could hold the festival (the delay cost Rubenstein only $2 million). Ultimately, Dean treated the gentrification of the South Bronx as inevitable, and his indifference to how it would affect the borough that raised him was made plain in an interview he did with Vibe magazine about working with Rubenstein: “The plan is already done . . . so let’s go out with a blast.” The minute the No Commission event was over, Dean jet-setted out of the Bronx, leaving local artists and activists deeply divided. Some initiated conversations in the community about the implications of a famous hip-hop star from the Bronx lending his street cred to a developer. Others—missing the bigger picture entirely—focused on the fact that Dean didn’t include local Bronx artists in the show. Other artists who did participate resented the activists for protesting what they saw as their big break, since opportunities of this caliber for artists of color are rare. Meanwhile, Rubenstein made a clean getaway, as the debates around these complex issues turned the focus away from his development project.

The potential for social and economic advancement for a few puts countless long-time residents in danger of displacement. Hip-hop culture and its icons, from the oldest pioneers to the youngest up-and-coming emcees, are co-opted by developers who operate in the Bronx with strong government support thanks to Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr. In 2016 Rubenstein hosted a $2,500-a-plate fundraiser at his home for Díaz’s reelection campaign. Díaz in turn champions gentrification as revitalization and is a long-standing ally of developers. He points to Rubenstein’s shiny new Potemkin village as an example of urban progress, and manipulates the desires of the people of the Bronx, who have endured decades of benign neglect. In his cozy relationship with real-estate interests, Díaz is not unusual among New York City politicians. Many of these politicians cower before the Rent Stabilization Association (RSA) and the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), two powerful groups that lobby on behalf of landlords and fill the coffers of every politician from the Bronx to the state capital in Albany.

With a Bronx borough president in the pocket, Rubenstein is guaranteed to receive the proper governmental infrastructure necessary to accompany the lifestyle needs and aesthetic markers that define a neighborhood as “up and coming.” This appears as the revitalization of public spaces. The city plants new trees, replaces street signs, repairs and repaints roadways, and creates bike lanes. After years of neglect, public services beneficial to everyone are expedited solely because it serves a developer’s needs. In 2016, St. Mary’s Park, located a 20-minute walk from the Rubenstein property, received $30 million as part of the NYC “Anchor Parks” initiative. For Mott Haven, this upgrade of St. Mary’s Park is being accompanied by a new $50 million state-of-the-art architecturally avant-garde police station. The new 40th-precinct police station, whose completion is scheduled to coincide with the completion of the nearby Rubenstein project in 2019, will have a green roof, a courtyard, and a training area. It will also have the first-ever “community meeting room” located within the station itself. Inside the community room, a work of community-engaged art will be installed, commissioned by Percent for Art, a division of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, which requires that a percentage of the construction budget of new buildings be used for public art. This art project could be viewed as a step in building a bridge between the community and the police, but what it actually accomplishes is placing art in the service of an abusive and authoritative apparatus of state power that in turn maintains the institutional frameworks upholding the conditions for profitable capital accumulation.

Borinquen Gallo, one of the artists selected to create the installation, contributed a project informed by interviews she conducted with NYPD officers at the 40th precinct and neighboring Bronx residents. Her research culminated in the production of a pair of neon signs. An interior sign, facing the space where officers will hold briefings, will read “Black Lives Matter,” and an exterior neon sign, facing the community room, will read “Blue Lives Matters.” The work is intended to be an equalizer, an effort to bring the police and the community together, but Gallo’s effort collapses under her false assumption that the many generations of people who have lived under the authority of the NYPD, and who are routinely harassed, beaten, and arrested by police, can access equal power in a space located inside a police station. She assumes that the NYPD will not exercise its authority and just unplug the interior sign, leaving the Blue Lives Matter sign blazing and asserting the truth about the power dynamic Gallo glosses over.

The project at the 40th precinct is within the purview of the Department of Cultural Affairs, which is spearheaded by art-world darling and social-practice champion Tom Finkelpearl, who joined the de Blasio administration in 2014 and is charged with overseeing city funding of the arts. In his role as director of cultural affairs, Finkelpearl’s goal is to promote cultural diversity in arts programs citywide; he sees artists and cultural organizations as vital not only for the economic benefits they bring to the city but also for the integral roles they play in their communities. For this reason, Finkelpearl has championed social-practice art, which he understands as art that is not just isolated on the wall of a museum for judgement by an individual viewer but a form of collective participatory interaction engaging with public matters in an urban context.

To his credit, Finkelpearl understands clearly the dilemma faced by artists trying to pursue their practice while living in New York City. As he told Artnet News in 2014,

There are problems for artists related to housing, but the problem in general is that housing is too expensive, and actually I would combine that with the crisis related to student debt . . . But debt is also a big problem for low-income individuals in general. So how do you create coalitions to have artists and folks in the art world understand the coalitions that they should be building with other low-income folks? That’s fundamental to the vision of the administration.

However, as director of cultural affairs, Finkelpearl is beholden to the de Blasio administration. While his personal vision may not be aligned with the goal of assisting developers in hyper-development, his ideological underpinnings allow the city to co-opt his ideas and to bastardize them in the service of private development. This co-optation hinges on Finkelpearl’s idea of what praxis should be—an idea he derives from the famous community organizer and progressive liberal icon Saul Alinsky. Alinsky espoused “realistic pragmatism,” believing that one should focus on single issues and work within the system to achieve winnable goals. But in this approach, concessions won through struggle will always remain within the power structures that grant them. Finkelpearl could preside over the greatest overhaul in cultural equity this city has ever seen, but instead he risks inadvertently providing the channels for the city to utilize the arts as a path-clearing tool for predatory development.

In his book Rules for Radicals, Alinsky attempts to persuade future community organizers to follow his “pragmatic” approach, which he says must begin from the premise that we must “accept the world as it is.” In order to change it, one must work within the system. He is only interested in concessions that can be gained from the powerful elite, leaving undisturbed the structures that constrict freedom and hold time and space captive.

Writing extensively about the organizing he stewarded with his Back of the Yards organization, Alinsky propels the role of the organizer to the forefront as “the architect and engineer” of campaigns. This hierarchical positioning of the organizer over the community is also found within most union organizing, where bureaucratic negotiations are managed by a weak leadership that is uncomfortably cozy with the bosses. This absence of antagonism renders the unions largely powerless vis-à-vis their employers. Nonprofit organizations have also adopted Alinsky’s model of “single-issue,” service-oriented community work administered by a paid staff who, in order to keep their jobs, must prioritize the desires of the foundations that fund them over the needs of the community. At their core, philanthropic foundations aim to determine the priorities and limits of community organizing. Foundations requiring grant recipients to focus on a single issue is a tactic, and the Alinsky model of organizing follows suit.

In his classic 1969 text Black Awakening in Capitalist America, Robert L. Allen details the strategic interests of these powerful foundations, such as the Ford Foundation, the Urban Coalition, and the National Alliance of Businessmen, in the fight for civil rights and black liberation. The nonprofit foundation, he writes,

was designed to counter the potentially revolutionary thrust of the recent black rebellions in major cities across the country. This program was formulated by America’s corporate elite—the major owners, managers, and directors of the giant corporations, banks, and foundations which increasingly dominate the economy and society as a whole—because they believe that the urban revolts pose a serious threat to economic and social stability.

This mixture of counterinsurgency on the one hand and accommodation and integration on the other haunts what we now know as the “nonprofit industrial complex,” defined by Dylan Rodríguez as “set of symbiotic relationships that link together political and financial technologies of state and owning-class proctorship and surveillance over public political intercourse, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements.” This helps explain why Finkelpearl’s Department of Cultural Affairs has commissioned artists to decorate a new NYPD station house in the Bronx: Both departments are arms of the same apparatus.

The Rubenstein development in the South Bronx is well underway and has been sold to Brookfield Properties for $165 million. Rubenstein remains in the South Bronx, as he has opened offices for Somerset along the Bruckner and now owns other properties in the area. The coffee shops are open and the real estate is booming. Ultimately, the wave was too strong to escape, and the people in the Bronx scramble now to get ahead of any city planning sessions for rezonings to try to stop these developer giveaways in their tracks. What developers, city officials, and politicians have ultimately taken from us is space.

In New York City, artists experience this crisis of the disappearance of space alongside other New Yorkers in many ways. Less space on the subway, which is constantly delayed and in disrepair. There is less space for work, as opportunities to sustain our lives continue to disappear and our hours and budgets are trimmed while the rent on our studios and our apartments increases.

Like many other major cities, New York has been reorganized into roommate-driven living systems where we barely restore our bodies, in order to repeat the process of sustaining our lives so we might continue to prop up the structures that continue to allot less time to actively pursue leisure or, more importantly, to organize and agitate for our freedom. How would an artistic practice that aims to disrupt alienation appear in our hallways, elevators, and all the spaces we share in our communities? What if these considerations were practiced outside of the art world, without foundation grants or institutional support as just an act toward freedom? Rather than only thinking about the aesthetic qualities of space, artists can aim to topple the neoliberal scaffold that holds capitalism steady above us, like a firmament.

#the bronx #new york city #gentrification #class stratification #displacement #poverty #the bronx is burning #south bronx #bill de blasio #neoliberalism #urban development #saul alinsky #Keith Rubenstein #art #neighborhoods

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Inside Backpage.com’s Vicious Battle With the Feds

In Michael Lacey’s younger and more vulnerable years, his father gave him this advice: “Whenever someone pokes a finger in your chest, you grab that finger and you break it off at the knuckle.” Lacey grew up in the 1950s as a bright, bookish boy. His father, a sailor turned enforcer for a New York construction union, had little use for his son’s intellectual gifts. If Lacey lost a fight at school, he says, his dad “came home and beat me again.” But the boy toughened up, and he carried the lessons he’d learned into adulthood. He became a newspaper editor and earned a reputation as a down-and-dirty First Amendment brawler. Early on in his career, he struck up a partnership with James Larkin, a publisher whose sensibilities matched his own. Together, they built the nation’s largest chain of alternative newsweeklies.

Lacey and Larkin were heroes to many—micks from the sticks who made a fortune thumbing their shanty-Irish snouts at authority. Their papers went after mayors and police chiefs, governors and senators, Walmart and the Church of Scientology. They provoked outrage with their business practices too, by setting up Backpage.com, a kind of red-light district for the internet. As attorney Don Moon, the pair’s longtime adviser, puts it: “Their brand was always ‘Fuck you. We don’t have friends. We have lawyers.’��” That approach served them well for 45 years, right up until the morning Michael Lacey found himself staring into the barrel of a Glock.

A few minutes before 9 am on April 6, 2018, a fleet of unmarked vehicles with government plates rolled up in front of Lacey’s multimillion-dollar compound in Paradise Valley, a few miles outside of Phoenix. These weren’t the guests he’d been expecting. The 69-year-old divorced father of two had recently gotten remarried, and he was preparing to host a lavish party to celebrate his vows. Tents were pitched on his lawn; retired journalists and overworked lawyers were winging their way into town. FBI agents informed the groom that he was being arrested on charges of money laundering and facilitating prostitution. They cuffed him, then subdued the home’s other occupants, including Lacey’s 76-year-old mother-in-law, whom they ordered out of the shower at gunpoint.

For the next six hours, the lawmen tossed the compound looking for, among other things, “evidence of wealth.” They seized art, cash, computers, even the bride’s wedding ring. Meanwhile, at the Phoenix airport, federal marshals awaited a 747 inbound from London. When it touched down, the flight crew made an announcement: Police would be boarding, so passengers must stay put. “I wondered who they were there for,” recalls Larkin, then 68, who was seated beside his son in business class. “I quickly figured out it was me.” (The Department of Justice declined to comment on the arrests.)

Partygoers soon received a cryptic text message. Owing to “unforeseen circumstances,” it said, the wedding celebration had been “postponed.” A notice went up on Backpage, explaining that the website had been seized “as part of an enforcement action.” More than a few guests completed the journey to Phoenix anyway; reporters can’t resist a story, and Lacey had already paid for a block of rooms at the Hotel Camby. They gathered at various local watering holes, offering what one attendee describes as “toasts to the accused,” and pieced together a gripping narrative—a tale of free-speech crusaders crossed over to the dark side, dedicated newshounds become digital pimps.

Backpage, the domain that brought the federal government down on Lacey and Larkin’s heads, wasn’t much to look at—a bare-bones interface wrapped in Facebooky blue, similar to Craigslist in both form and function. Its name alluded to the old days of print publishing, when classified ads, especially ads for topless bars, escort services, and other sexually oriented businesses filled the final pages of alt-weeklies and provided much of their revenue. Visitors to the site were greeted with several columns of links, which directed them to listings for various metropolitan areas around the country. From there, they could reply to ads or write their own.

Many of the ads—for auto parts, part-time gigs, vacation rentals, and so on—were free to publish. But the lewd stuff, listed under the adult section, cost money. For as little as $2 a day, users could post in such categories as “body rubs” and “dom & fetish.” The site’s terms of use prohibited any content that could be considered “unlawful,” “harmful,” or “obscene.” To gain access to the adult section, all users had to do was click a link confirming they were 18 or older. Once inside, they saw an endless scroll of titles, some laden with innuendo (“Cum lay your hotdog on my bun for memorial day”), others more explicit (“Three holes anything goes $90”).

As in the print days, these adult ads reigned supreme. In 2011 they accounted for 15 percent of Backpage’s listings but generated more than 90 percent of its revenue. By the time the Feds pulled the plug on the site, it was operating in 97 countries and was valued at more than half a billion dollars. People called it the Google of commercial sex ads, a platform that dominated its market as thoroughly as Facebook dominated social networking or Amazon did online retail.

The government indictment that triggered Lacey and Larkin’s arrests, United States v. Lacey, et al., includes 17 “victim summaries”—stories of women who say they were sexually exploited through Backpage. Victim 5 first appeared in an ad on the platform when she was 14; her “customers” made her “perform sexual acts at gunpoint, choked her to the point of having seizures, and gang-raped her.” Victim 6 was stabbed to death. Victim 8’s uncle and his friends advertised her as “fetish friendly.” The indictment accuses Backpage of catering to sexual predators, of essentially helping pimps better reach their target audiences.

In the years before their arrest, Lacey and Larkin had successfully beat back charges like these in court. They took refuge not only in the First Amendment but also in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Congress’ great gift to the internet. Passed in 1996, Section 230 largely immunized online platforms from liability for the user-generated content they hosted. They were free to police offending material as they saw fit, without undue fear of prosecution by state or local authorities—as long as they didn’t create it themselves. America’s tech behemoths, from Twitter to Facebook, have often invoked Section 230 in court. The internet we have today wouldn’t exist without it. After all, you can’t build or sustain a giant network if you’re getting sued every time a user says or does something objectionable.

For a while, Lacey and Larkin’s strategy had worked: They’d won case after case, with the support of Big Tech and civil libertarians alike. But by the time the Feds descended on Paradise Valley that morning in the spring of 2018, the tide had turned. Many of their friends and allies had fled, spooked in part by too much bad press. The tech industry, which faced withering scrutiny over its role in the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, had thrown them under the bus. Their top lieutenant had flipped. And Congress had used them as an excuse to finally accomplish what it had been trying to do for more than 20 years—tear a hole in Section 230.

Maybe they should have seen it coming: The betrayals. The asset seizures. The changing zeitgeist. They were, to be sure, brazenly cashing in on the sex trade. But here’s the thing: Silicon Valley had better hope they win. United States v. Lacey is a dangerous case, with potential consequences far beyond the freedom of two aging antiauthoritarians.

A view from Paradise Valley, looking out onto Camelback Mountain.

Jesse Rieser

It’s a mid-November afternoon in 2018, and Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin are seated on either side of the 20-foot-long glass table that dominates Lacey’s living room. They’re clad in jeans, polos, and ankle monitors. A black charging cord snakes from a wall outlet to Lacey’s left foot, which emits an occasional beep.

Both men are out on million-dollar bonds, secured by real estate the government eventually hopes to own. The bulk of the charges against them fall under the Travel Act, a law designed by Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department to target organized crime. According to the indictment, Lacey, Larkin, and their underlings not only turned a blind eye to prostitution and child sexual abuse but, driven by greed, actively worked to abet it. Their case is set for January 2020. “El Chapo got to trial quicker,” Lacey quips.

I’ve worked for both sides in this showdown. In the late 1990s, I was a staff writer for the Dallas Observer, a weekly owned by Lacey and Larkin. Then, in 2001, I went to work for the Department of Justice as an assistant US attorney in Plano, Texas.

The two men have lived large, and it shows. Larkin is a burly former football player, 6 ’ 2 ” and easily 250 pounds, with cornflower eyes, chubby cheeks, and a ruddy complexion. Lacey’s mug reveals decades of sun and single-malt Scotch—the hooded lids, the sagging chin, the lines running like canyons down his face and into his neck. His spiky hair has thinned and grayed, but he still has the prominent schnoz, the ice-blue eyes, and the knuckles famously tattooed with “HOLD FAST.” (His father, who served in the Navy during World War II, had the same slogan inked across his fists.)

Their situation looks bleak. The government has seized all of Lacey’s financial accounts and most or all of Larkin’s. Prosecutors have already produced more than 10 million documents and have promised, or threatened, more to come. It will cost the defendants several million dollars just to buy the software they need to search the government’s files. For the time being, though, they’re still drinking well. When I arrive, Larkin has uncorked a bottle of Jack Quinn, a cabernet produced at his 3-acre vineyard in Napa. (Although Larkin has owned the place since before Backpage existed, the government has given notice that it intends to seize the vineyard, alleging that he used Backpage-derived funds for its maintenance.) Lacey, meanwhile, is still knocking back Macallan 21—although nowadays he stops to ask the price. At the Blue Hound bar in Phoenix, where we repaired for a later interview, it’s $120 per shot.

Lacey got his start in journalism in 1970, in the wake of the Kent State shootings, when he and a group of antiwar comrades at Arizona State University founded what would become the Phoenix New Times. In the beginning, he claims, he sold his blood to pay the bills. He met Larkin two years later—not long after Lacey’s father, the union enforcer, and his mother, an opera singer and registered nurse, were found frozen to death in a rented trailer in Oswego, New York. (“It was a murder-suicide,” Lacey says. “They were drunk, and she turned on the gas.”)

The men connected immediately. Both were college dropouts, and both had suffered through difficult childhoods. Larkin’s mother died when he was 2, and he spent most of his youth in what he describes as a “Catholic ghetto.” In high school, he cofounded a student newspaper, The Big Press, then promptly got himself suspended for criticizing administrators. “I wanted to be in that business,” he says. Lacey brought him on as publisher.

In 1977, Lacey and Larkin staged a putsch. They wrested control of the New Times from Lacey’s cofounders and set about turning the fledgling broadsheet into an empire. Larkin worked out a lucrative revenue model, emphasizing classifieds and personals. (While a page of big retail ads might net $1,000, a page of classifieds, 100 ads at $25 a pop, could bring in $2,500.) Six years later, they began to expand. They bought up struggling weeklies in cities across the country—Denver, Houston, Miami—and transformed them into serious news organizations, hiring experienced, high-profile reporters and giving them resources to do the job.

“I didn’t get into this racket to be told what to publish,” Lacey growls. “By anybody.”

They believed there was an audience for in-depth, long-form investigative reporting. A month after 9/11, for instance, The New Times Broward-Palm Beach published an exposé on how lapses in federal immigration policy had allowed the hijackers to enter the country. In 2003, Westword got the scoop on a sexual assault scandal at the US Air Force Academy. In 2013, The Miami New Times ran a story on the steroid scandal in Major League Baseball, which ultimately resulted in the suspension of 14 players. Lacey once told an interviewer, “As a journalist, if you don’t get up in the morning and say ‘Fuck you’ to someone, why even do it?”

They tangled with shareholders, authorities, competitors, printers, and municipalities that tried to restrict their distribution. Lacey, who wrote numerous stories himself, was known to clock reporters and pummel press aides, usually when spirits were involved. (He estimates that he’s been arrested “10 or 11 times,” but “only three for writing.” The one criminal conviction on his record is for a misdemeanor DUI.) When violence didn’t settle things, Lacey and Larkin often moved matters to the courtroom. Litigation was their idea of fun, the continuation of hell-raising by other means. “I didn’t get into this racket to be told what to publish,” Lacey growls. “By anybody. If you don’t like it, don’t read it.”

Steve Suskin, their former in-house counsel, says they and their companies were sued 56 times between 1997 and 2012 alone. “We won them all,” Suskin recalls. They were successful in part because they recognized that litigation is a war of attrition, and they were willing to go the distance. Says Lacey: “You want to sue us, bring your lunch pail, ’cause we gonna be awhile.” In their most famous legal set-to, they successfully sued Joe Arpaio, Maricopa County’s notoriously anti-immigrant sheriff, for false arrest, winning a $3.75 million settlement. In a final flip of the bird to Arpaio, they used the money to set up a nonprofit to defend the rights of undocumented immigrants and Latinx Americans.

Through it all, Larkin kept the money coming in, embracing each new fad in classified advertising. In 1989, for example, the New Times group launched its first adult section, appropriately dubbed Wildside. (The ads were moderated by sales staff to ensure no blatant sex-for-money propositions made it into print.) Racy ads fueled the company’s explosive growth; by 2001, Lacey and Larkin owned 11 papers, which raked in more than $100 million a year. But the good times didn’t last. Craigslist had begun expanding into cities outside the Bay Area, offering free ads in all categories except jobs and erotic services. Classified revenue tanked.

In 2003, Larkin was approached by Carl Ferrer, an ad salesman he’d hired away from a small paper in Louisiana and installed as classified ad director at the Dallas Observer. Ferrer, a short, slight man with a goatee and a perpetually worried look, proposed that they create an in-house version of Craigslist. Larkin put him in charge of building and running the website, which launched in 2004.

The following year, Lacey and Larkin won the prize they’d chased for years—The Village Voice, the grande dame of alt-weeklies. When the New Times group merged with Village Voice Media, the two companies formed a 17-paper megachain valued at about $400 million, with an estimated $180 million in annual revenue. Lacey and Larkin’s timing could not have been worse. Between 2006 and 2012, according to the Pew Research Center, American newspapers lost half their advertising revenue. Backpage, however, grew steadily, even if it wasn’t nearly enough to offset the papers’ declining receipts.

Lacey and Larkin say they were advised by counsel that what Backpage was doing was 100 percent legal. They saw no distinction between advertising and editorial; it was all protected speech, all mission-critical. In 2008, they were honored by the Arizona chapter of the ACLU as Civil Libertarians of the Year. In his acceptance speech, Lacey decried “the gentrified instincts of soccer moms,” which led demagogues like Joe Arpaio to crack down on press freedom. He vowed that both he and Larkin would continue to oppose the “forces of offended decency” wherever they found them.

Today, they remain defiant. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Lacey declares. “I didn’t do what they say. And if they think they’re gonna punk me, they got the wrong fucking guy.”

One of the great ironies of internet history is that the Communications Decency Act—a law conceived, as its name suggests, to rid the web of vice—actually ended up doing the opposite. It was proposed in 1995 by Senator J. James Exon, a Nebraska Democrat who’d watched with increasing alarm as “the worst, most vile, most perverse pornography” spread online. He was particularly concerned about what all this obscenity might do to the minds of America’s children, and went so far as to compile a “blue book” packed with X-rated screenshots. “This is a sample of what is available today free of charge,” he told his colleagues on the Senate floor when the CDA came up for debate. “Click, click, click on the computer, on the information superhighway.”

Although Exon repeatedly described the legislation as “narrow” and “streamlined,” the Department of Justice warned that its indecency provisions were unconstitutionally broad. Within a year and a half of the CDA’s passage, the Supreme Court agreed and struck those provisions down. Section 230, however, survived, offering a safe harbor to some of the same sites that Exon had hoped to bring down. The information superhighway began to look more perilous than ever.

In 2001 two academics at the University of Pennsylvania published a widely cited study in which they estimated that some 326,000 children were “at risk of commercial sexual exploitation.” Although the authors didn’t formally address what role the internet played, they asserted that “online sexual victimization of American children appears to have reached epidemic proportions.” By 2008, a new coalition of would-be regulators had emerged, led by the National Association of Attorneys General and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit partly funded by the US government. Together, both behind the scenes and in the press, the two groups began pushing some of the internet’s major players to strengthen their safety protocols.

In response, Myspace, the web’s largest social media platform at the time, gave the boot to some 90,000 convicted sex offenders. Facebook, meanwhile, took steps to prevent underage users from sharing personal information with strangers. Craigslist started requiring that anyone who posted an ad in its Erotic Services section provide a verified phone number and pay a fee by credit card. It also hired attorneys to moderate ads.

For some officials, though, these changes weren’t enough. In early 2009, Thomas Dart, the sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, sued Craigslist for facilitating prostitution. “Missing children, runaways, abused women, and women trafficked in from foreign countries are routinely forced to have sex with strangers because they’re being pimped on Craigslist,” he said. “I could make arrests off Craigslist 24 hours a day, but to what end? I’m trying to go up the ladder.” That same spring, tabloids across the country were awash in headlines about the “Craigslist killer,” a young man in Boston who’d responded to a massage ad on the site, then murdered the woman who posted it.

A federal judge in Chicago quickly tossed Dart’s case, citing Section 230. But Craigslist eventually surrendered anyway. On the night of September 3, 2010, it quietly covered its Adult Services section with the word censored. Two weeks later, in testimony before Congress, Craigslist execs explained that they’d done their best to address their critics’ complaints; now, it seemed, they just wanted out of the headlines. They also warned that law enforcement was losing a valuable partner in the fight against trafficking. Yet Ernie Allen, the lanky Kentuckian who ran the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, saw this as a necessary step. “Some of this problem will migrate to other areas,” he said, “but frankly that’s progress.”

Allen’s prediction was right. In the wake of Craigslist’s capitulation, the sex trade did indeed shift to other sites. There were many to choose from—myRedBook, Naughty Reviews, Cityvibe, Rentboy—but Backpage was the chief beneficiary. Larkin sent around an email advising his employees to expect “a deluge” of adult ads and reminding them that, “like it or not,” such ads “are in our DNA.” Lacey says he remained focused, as always, on the editorial side—though he had “no problem” seeing the ads “take off like they did.” Ferrer, meanwhile, seemed only too happy to inherit Craigslist’s share of the adult market, even if that meant assuming its place in the crosshairs. “It is an opportunity for us,” he wrote in an email. “Also a time when we need to make sure our content is not illegal.”

Backpage was already getting into hot water. A girl in Missouri had sued the site in mid-September, alleging that she’d been pimped out at the age of 14 and that Backpage had willfully “failed to investigate for fear of what it would learn.” She claimed, without clear evidence, that the site’s operators “had a strong suspicion” she was underage. Ultimately, a federal magistrate dismissed her case. The situation was tragic, he said, but Backpage was protected under Section 230. The girl needed to sue her pimp.

On October 18, Backpage announced on its blog that it had retained Hemanshu Nigam, a former federal prosecutor who specialized in sex crimes and child abuse, to develop a “holistic” safety program. Nigam sat on the board of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and had done similar work for Myspace. In the months that followed, Nigam and his new clients met repeatedly with representatives from anti-trafficking organizations. They discussed changes to Backpage’s site architecture, moderation practices, and content policies. The organizations suggested, for instance, that users should be prevented from employing search terms such as “incest” or “Lolita,” since these might “indicate illegal activity.” Backpage moderators, meanwhile, should be on the lookout for “ads written from masculine perspective,” particularly if they employed the euphemism “new in town,” which “is often used by pimps who shuttle children to locations where they do not know anyone and cannot get help.”

“You want to sue us, bring your lunch pail, ’cause we gonna be awhile.”

By late January 2011, Backpage had implemented many of the recommendations: It had banned photographs with nudity, drawn up a list of “inappropriate terms,” beefed up its vetting process, and begun referring “ads containing possible minors” directly to Allen’s staff. Ferrer also worked closely with the authorities. According to a Justice Department memo from 2012, “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.” A later memo noted that “even Ernie Allen believed that Backpage was genuinely trying to rid its site of juvenile sex trafficking.”

Lacey and Larkin say they were more than willing to help crack down on child abuse. But the demands being made of them seemed increasingly unreasonable. Sex trafficking, defined as commercial sex involving coerced adults or anyone under 18, was one thing. Consensual sex work was quite another—and it wasn’t even illegal under federal law.

In March 2011, Lacey and Larkin flew to Virginia to meet with Allen. “To say that the meeting did not go well is an understatement,” Allen wrote later that day. After a full hour, he and Lacey “were still screaming at each other.” Allen demanded that Backpage do more to combat prostitution. Larkin said the site would enforce a “newspaper standard,” but Lacey added, “We are not Craigslist, and we aren’t going to succumb to pressure.” A Justice Department memo continues the story: “Allen responded that ‘At least you know what business you are in.’ ”

Lacey’s memories are no rosier. “Allen pulls out this shoddy U. Penn report”—the one from 2001—and “thumps the table with it,” he recalls. The report sent Lacey into orbit. “They love to inflate the numbers by talking about children ‘at risk’ of exploitation,” he says. Owing to the shadowy nature of sex trafficking, such numbers are notoriously hard to pin down: Experts at the Crimes Against Children Research Center have noted that “scientifically credible estimates do not exist,” and one of the Penn report’s authors told The Washington Post in 2015, “Clearly, a new, more current study is needed.”

Lacey thought he knew what business Allen was in too—fearmongering in the interest of fund-raising. He took the meeting as a finger in the chest. Within a few weeks, The Village Voice began to run articles examining the fishy data on child sex trafficking.

In April, Nigam suggested that, as a gesture of goodwill, Backpage should join the Demi and Ashton Foundation, a nonprofit created by actors Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. The foundation had recently run a series of PSAs under the slogan “Real men don’t buy girls,” featuring various Hollywood bigwigs. Lacey ignored Nigam’s suggestion. Instead, he instructed The Village Voice to publish an article titled “Real Men Get Their Facts Straight.”

Larkin, for his part, tried to make nice with the authorities—at least until he and Lacey could cash out. Backpage was causing too many headaches, and the papers were growing deader by the day. “Selling print sooner than later was the winning move,” Larkin explains. “The longer you waited, the dumber you were.” Initially it seemed that Backpage would be the easier business to unload. By September 2011, a private-equity firm focused on “out-of-favor industries” had agreed to buy it for $150 million. But the deal fell apart after the National Association of Attorneys General announced an investigation of Backpage. Larkin and Lacey were incensed. Section 230 provided that websites could be prosecuted only under federal criminal law, so they considered a state-level investigation extralegal. From that point on, both men were ready to go to the mattresses.

The following fall, Lacey and Larkin sold their beloved alt-weeklies to a group of their own editors for just over $32 million, about 8 percent of what the chain had been valued at in 2005. (Even this amount was later negotiated down, after the buyers defaulted.) In a farewell letter, Lacey wrote that they were leaving to carry on their jihad “over the First Amendment, free speech on the internet and Backpage.” Cynics pointed to the money; by 2011, Backpage was raking in more than $50 million a year, nearly as much as the newspapers that spawned it.

Whatever their mix of motives, Lacey and Larkin moved their cause to the courtroom. With Section 230 as their weapon, they won a series of civil suits and successfully challenged anti-Backpage laws in New Jersey, Tennessee, and Washington state. Many of the court opinions noted the First Amendment problems inherent in regulating internet content. “When freedom of speech hangs in the balance,” wrote the Tennessee judge, “the state may not use a butcher knife on a problem that requires a scalpel to fix.”

By this point, the nation’s attorneys general had had enough. As they saw it, Backpage and other internet platforms were using Section 230 as an excuse to duck their responsibilities to users. In July 2013, 49 of them signed a letter to Congress saying that the law needed an overhaul.

Lacey shows off his ankle monitor and knuckle tattoos.

Jesse Rieser

State attorneys general weren’t the only prosecutors itching to get in on the action. The Feds were too, but they had a problem: They couldn’t identify a viable crime. Prostitution wasn’t a federal offense, and they didn’t seem to think they could make sex-trafficking charges stick. Back in 2011, the Justice Department had quietly opened a grand jury investigation into Backpage in Washington state; according to an internal memo, prosecutors interviewed more than a dozen witnesses and subpoenaed more than 100,000 documents but ultimately decided that “a successful criminal prosecution of Backpage is unlikely.” They thought about trying to make a case under the Travel Act but, as they noted, that theory “had never been litigated in a similar context.” So they formulated another potential plan of attack. “Moving forward,” they wrote, the Justice Department should “take a hard look at bringing this case as a civil forfeiture case,” with its “lower standard of proof.” In this scenario, the government would seize a website operator’s assets and property, then force them to prove they weren’t implicated in criminal activity.

In June 2014 the Justice Department put this plan into action. It seized myRedBook and demanded that the site’s owner, Eric “Red” Omuro, forfeit $5 million in cash and property. The following summer, the Department of Homeland Security launched a similar raid against “the nation’s largest online male-escort service,” Rentboy, and its owner, Jeffrey Hurant. Both men pleaded guilty to violations of the Travel Act in exchange for lighter sentences and lesser fines. The forfeiture approach seemed to be working.

Meanwhile, Backpage opponents were finding sympathetic ears on Capitol Hill. In April 2015, Senator Rob Portman, a Republican from Ohio and the chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, fired off the following tweet: “backpage essentially sells human beings. It’s horrible, and I’m going after them.”

That same month, Lacey and Larkin finally located a serious buyer for Backpage: Carl Ferrer. He agreed to pay just under $603 million for the platform—four times what they’d been offered in 2011.

Portman’s subcommittee soon issued a series of subpoenas, seeking internal documents that would reveal Backpage’s moderation practices. The site fought back, but in September 2016 the US Supreme Court ruled that it had to fork over more than 1 million internal emails and other records. Every dubious decision, every bit of chatter and commentary, every lame joke between Backpage employees and managers, was about to come spilling out.

On January 8, 2017, the Senate subcommittee released its final report, titled “Backpage.com’s Knowing Facilitation of Online Sex Trafficking.” It pushed the theory that Lacey, Larkin, Ferrer, and their employees had invalidated their liability protections under Section 230: Rather than removing illegal and obscene content, the Senate said, Backpage had helped develop it, using clever moderation practices to “sanitize the content” and conceal it from the eyes of the law—all in the name of earning a few extra dollars. This, the subcommittee implied, put Backpage in the position of a content creator, not a mere content host.

Most courts had been rejecting the same argument for six years, but now Portman and his colleagues had what they considered incontrovertible evidence. Much of it was contained in the report’s 840-page appendix, which included highlights from the emails and other documents that the site had been ordered to produce.

The report outlined three major steps in Backpage’s road to perdition. In the early days of the site, most ads for commercial sex were deleted outright. By early 2009, however, Ferrer had begun to instruct his employees to manually remove any obscene photos and “forbidden words,” then post the ad anyway. In an email, he wrote that he considered this the more “consumer friendly” approach, because it would avoid “pissing off a lot of users who will migrate elsewhere.” But the true goal, according to the Senate, was to give those ads “a veneer of lawfulness.” One former Backpage moderator, identified in the report as Employee C, testified that she saw her role as “putting lipstick on a pig, because when it came down to it, it was what the business was about.”

By late 2010, Backpage had developed an automated filter called Strip Term From Ad. It was tuned to remove problematic words (“lolita,” “rape,” “fresh,” “little girl”) before any human moderator had seen the ad. Because the original language wasn’t saved on Backpage’s servers, the Senate complained, there would be no real record of the offending content—nothing to send to law enforcement. “Of course,” the subcommittee wrote, “the Strip Term From Ad filter changed nothing about the real age of the person being sold for sex or the real nature of the advertised transaction.”

Perhaps that’s why, in mid-2012, Backpage instituted a kind of hybrid process, automatically editing some ads while automatically banning others, depending on the terms used. But the Senate saw chicanery here, too. Ferrer complained that the auto-bans were causing confusion among users; if they submitted an ad that contained a banned term, they had no way of knowing why it had been rejected. And so Backpage rolled out an alert feature, which informed users which specific term was to blame. In the Senate’s eyes, it was “coaching its customers on how to post ‘clean’ ads for illegal transactions.”

The appendix was full of what appeared to be smoking guns. In late 2010, for instance, Backpage’s operations manager, Andrew Padilla, castigated one of his employees for putting a note on a user’s account suggesting she was a prostitute. “Leaving notes on our site that imply that we’re aware of prostitution, or in any position to define it, is enough to lose your job over,” Padilla wrote. “If you need a definition of ‘prostitution,’ get a dictionary.” The following summer, four months after the ill-fated meeting with Ernie Allen, Larkin cautioned Ferrer against publicizing Backpage’s moderation practices. “We need to stay away from the very idea of ‘editing’ the posts, as you know,” he wrote in an email.

On the night the Senate report was released, Backpage finally shut down its adult section. It was, of course, far too late to stave off what was coming. The next morning, Lacey, Larkin, Ferrer, and two other Backpage executives appeared in Room 342 of the Senate’s Dirksen Building for a grilling by Portman and his colleagues. It was a carefully choreographed bit of political theater. The Backpage witnesses took the Fifth, as senators knew they must; thanks to a pending case in California, they had no choice. Portman denounced them for refusing to “come clean.”

Within six months of the hearing, at least eight new civil lawsuits were filed against Backpage. The Section 230 defense now worked only intermittently, as courts increasingly read in exceptions. The site’s operators began preparing for a rumble with the Feds. Backpage handed out fat legal retainers, as key employees lawyered up. Lacey and Larkin started segregating cash; funds from the sale of Backpage went into one set of accounts, while proceeds from the newspaper sale went into another. Ferrer bought a brand-new Texas McMansion, put it in his wife’s name, and poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into renovations.

Still, Lacey and Larkin largely shrugged off the Senate’s report. “We didn’t go out and try to disprove it,” recalls an attorney who worked on the matter. “It’s not like there isn’t plenty to say. But to try to rebut 50 pages of allegations in the press? That’s fighting a losing battle.” The lawyer added: “It was a hit piece. It was intended to be a hit piece. What are you going to do?”

In August 2017, Portman launched another attack against Backpage. With a bipartisan group of 20 senators, including Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, he introduced the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or Sesta. Later, in an op-ed for WIRED, Portman laid out the bill’s key features: It would remove Section 230’s “unintended liability protections for websites that knowingly facilitate online sex trafficking” and “allow state and local law enforcement to prosecute” those sites. Just as J. James Exon, the sponsor of the Communications Decency Act, had done two decades earlier, the senators deflected concerns about constitutional overreach. Portman described Sesta as “narrowly crafted”; Blumenthal called it “narrowly tailored.”

Silicon Valley disagreed. On the day Sesta was introduced, the Internet Association—an industry consortium that represents Airbnb, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and more than three dozen other tech companies—released a statement calling the bill “overly broad.” While it was important to pursue “rogue operators like Backpage.com,” the association said, Sesta was more butcher knife than scalpel; it would create “a new wave of frivolous and unpredictable actions against legitimate companies.” In a letter to the Senate, a coalition of human rights and civil liberties organizations warned that the result of all this litigation would be “increased censorship across the web.” Platforms that had once sought to encourage free speech through light moderation would now take an iron-fisted approach. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the chilling effect would be particularly damaging to sites like Wikipedia, which “don’t have the massive budgets to defend themselves that Facebook and Twitter do.”

But Big Tech and its allies were no longer really in a position to complain. On Halloween, Congress hauled in executives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Legislators wanted to know why the platforms had failed to stem the tide of fake news and misinformation in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, why they’d sold political ad space to Russian nationals, why they were supposedly muzzling conservative voices. Pundits opined that the web was all grown up now; many questioned why platforms still needed Section 230’s protection.

Several days after the Capitol Hill perp walk, the Internet Association suddenly reversed course. It came out in favor of a lightly modified version of Sesta, which by now had been combined with an equally clumsily named House bill, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or Fosta. It was hard not to see the association’s move as a cynical act of political pandering. As Winston Churchill once said, “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.”

The Fosta-Sesta law is already panning out as its detractors feared. Once Trump signed it into law, platforms rushed to self-censor; nobody wanted to be Backpaged.

By the spring of 2018, things had gotten even worse for Big Tech. That March, news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, seeming to confirm the public’s worst suspicions. Four days later, Congress passed Fosta-Sesta. The law amends Section 230 to allow states and civil plaintiffs to go after websites that “promote and facilitate prostitution” or “knowingly benefit from participation in a venture that engages in sex trafficking.” Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, one of the original authors of Section 230 and a longtime tech industry ally, warned that further measures could be in the offing if “technology companies do not wake up to their responsibilities … to better protect the public.”

In spite of the protests of free speech advocates, more than 100 organizations had come out in favor of the law—Truckers Against Trafficking, Girls With Grit, the Christian Action League of Minnesota. Seth Meyers and Ivanka Trump touted it too. But sex workers and their allies were bitterly opposed. The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists noted that Fosta-Sesta contained “a sweeping and unproductive conflation of sex trafficking and consensual sex work.” The association further argued—just as Craigslist had when it shuttered its adult section in 2010—that, in forcing sites like Backpage to remove or censor their content, the law would merely drive predators into even darker corners of the internet. Their crimes would be harder to spot and investigate, and many sex workers would be forced “to pursue far riskier and more exploitative forms of labor” on the streets.

Two weeks after Fosta-Sesta passed, Carl Ferrer appeared in a closed federal courtroom in Phoenix. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to facilitate prostitution and launder money, surrendered Backpage and its assets, and promised to cooperate with federal authorities. (Ferrer’s plea forbids him to talk to the press. “I’m not trying to avoid you,” he told me at a recent court appearance. “I just have to say no comment.”) A day later, the Feds nailed Lacey and Larkin in Phoenix, charging them and five other Backpagers under long-existing criminal statutes. As many legal experts pointed out, the move suggested that the government never needed Fosta-Sesta to prosecute the pair; President Donald Trump had yet to even sign it into law. Lacey and Larkin never seemed to seriously consider that Ferrer might flip. Other insiders certainly did. “I think he just chickened out,” offers an attorney who worked with Ferrer for almost 20 years and spoke to me on condition of anonymity. The lawyer points out that Ferrer never shared Lacey’s and Larkin’s disdain for cops. “That’s an awful lot of pressure to put on a skinny white guy,” he continues. “And Jim was never all that nice to him.”

Though it is still relatively early, the broad outlines of each side’s strategy are clear. If this case reaches a jury, the government will likely argue that the end justifies the means—that sex trafficking and prostitution generally are so abhorrent that the government had to do away with Backpage, protected speech and all. They will employ what trial lawyers call “reptile theory,” tapping into the jury’s primitive instincts, arguing that Backpage constituted a public danger and that convicting the defendants will make the community safer. They will tell the grisly tales set forth in the indictment’s 17 victim summaries. They will depict Lacey and Larkin as calculating profiteers, outlaws who refused to honor the reasonable requests of law enforcement because they might make a few mil less. They will hope the defendants’ seeming indifference to the plight of trafficking victims inspires the jury to overlook holes in the prosecution’s case.

The defense strategy is equally clear. Lacey and Larkin will offer high-minded arguments in defense of what the public regards as low-value speech. They will challenge government experts who claim they can look at a sample of Backpage ads and know beyond doubt that they proposed illegal transactions. It’s unclear how effective a witness Ferrer will be; over the past decade, he has given numerous sworn statements in Backpage litigation that contradict assertions in his plea. To the extent that Ferrer has anything damaging to offer, the defense will likely argue he was acting on his own. “We had lawyers telling us how to do this,” Lacey says. “The only way this was going to blow up was if Carl was doing something he shouldn’t have.”

Backpage cofounder James Larkin.

Jesse Rieser

Backpage cofounder Michael Lacey.

Jesse Rieser

Fosta-Sesta is already panning out as its detractors feared. Once Trump signed it into law, platforms rushed to self-censor; nobody wanted to be Backpaged. Cityvibe shut down altogether. Reddit banned numerous communities, including r/escorts and r/SugarDaddy. Google reportedly began purging its users’ cloud accounts of sexually explicit material. Cloudflare, one of the largest cybersecurity and website performance companies in the world, terminated service to Switter, a social media platform on which sex workers connected with each other and vetted their clients. Cloudflare is known for its commitment to free speech, but it was compelled to enforce what its general counsel called, in an interview with Vice, “a very bad law and a very dangerous precedent.”

The endless game of whack-a-mole continues. A month after Fosta-Sesta passed, ads for commercial sex had plummeted 82 percent, according to TellFinder, a data analytics tool originally built by the Defense Department. Within another four months, though, the numbers had rebounded to 75 percent of their previous daily volume. New sites popped up, seeking to fill the void left by Backpage, just as Backpage had done with Craigslist. One of them was called Bedpage.

Still, the Justice Department remains committed to taking the Backpage defendants down. Its plan seems to be to force them to plead, à la Rentboy and myRedBook. Since March 2018, federal prosecutors have seized more than $100 million in cash, real estate, and other assets from Lacey and Larkin. The strategy is simple: No money? No lawyers. QED.

The asset freezes raise all kinds of thorny constitutional questions. Generally speaking, federal prosecutors are permitted to freeze a defendant’s assets based on probable cause alone, even before the defendant has a chance to challenge the government’s case in court. But regular forfeiture rules do not apply in cases involving forums for speech—newspapers, films, books, magazines, websites. The US Supreme Court has decreed that when the government seizes these expressive materials, or the proceeds derived from them, it must immediately hold an evidentiary hearing to determine whether the seizure is valid.

But the Backpage defendants have a problem: So far, they can’t get a court to hear their claims. Since last summer, the Justice Department appears to have been playing a clever shell game. They’ve brought cases against the Backpage defendants in two federal districts—civil seizures in Los Angeles, criminal matters in Phoenix—and they’re making the defendants spend what money they have left chasing Uncle Sam from place to place. So far, judges in both districts have agreed with the government’s suggestion that they should defer to each other, effectively denying the defendants a forum to challenge the asset freezes. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear arguments in the case in July.

“The abuse on these platforms does not stop at sex trafficking,” the association of Attorneys General wrote.

Paul Watler, a media law specialist at Jackson Walker LLP in Dallas, is troubled by the seizure tactic. “It’s an end run around the First Amendment,” he says. The big question remaining, according to Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, is whether federal prosecutors will use this strategy to crack down on other platforms in the future. “Is this the leading edge or a one-off?” he asks. “I still don’t know the answer to that. But they’re coming for us, one way or another.” Even if Fosta-Sesta is one day ruled unconstitutional, as many legal scholars expect, government officials have shown that they’re willing to subvert Section 230 in other ways. If Lacey and Larkin lose—if the asset seizures stand and the Travel Act charges stick—prosecutors will have a valuable new weapon to wield against Silicon Valley. Personal wealth will be no deterrent.

Meanwhile, the National Association of Attorneys General is on the warpath once again. On May 23, 2019, the group sent a letter to a handful of congressional leaders urging further cutbacks to Section 230. “The abuse on these platforms does not stop at sex trafficking,” they wrote. “Stories of online black market opioid sales, ID theft, deep fakes, election meddling, and foreign intrusion are now ubiquitous.” They recommended that Section 230 be amended to allow a wide variety of state-level criminal prosecutions.

Lacey and Larkin remain convinced that the furor over sex ads is a moral panic, irrational and hysterical, cynically stoked by politicians and law enforcement. And they’re not about to surrender. They know they’re not the world’s most sympathetic defendants—rich (or formerly rich) white men accused of, at the very least, morally questionable business decisions, fighting for their right to hire the best lawyers money can buy.

Yet they can still seem oddly tone-deaf, even a touch naive. In April, a federal judge shot down Lacey’s request to have his ankle monitor removed in order to swim during a Hawaiian vacation. (In pleadings, Lacey’s lawyers explained he had use-’em-or-lose-’em flyer miles.) Prosecutors called Lacey a flight risk, and the resulting headlines were predictably brutal. Lacey responds with incredulity: “The idea that I would run—are you kidding? I’m taking the first flight to confront you.”

Christine Biederman is a lawyer and investigative reporter based in Dallas. She is working on a book about Backpage.com.

This article appears in the July/August issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at [email protected].

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avanneman · 6 years

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Koch U? Why not?

The Koch brothers, aka the Dave n’ Charlie Show, have gotten some fairly negative publicity regarding a large number of donations they have either made or leveraged to George Mason University in Northern Virginia. A recent article in the New York Times by Erica Green and Stephanie Saul quotes Bethany Letiecq, an associate professor at George Mason and president of the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, as saying that the school had “ceded our authority and autonomy to one of the wealthiest industrialists in the world.” In addition to the Kochs, it appears that officials from the Federalist Society, after giving George Mason a gift of some $20 million, had the temerity to suggest a student for admission to the university’s law school.

Well, I’m sure that’s never happened at Harvard, except in the case of White House dude Jared Kushner. Back in 2006, author Daniel Golden wrote, in his book The Price of Admission, about how some of us are more equal than others, and how Jared’s dad gave Harvard $2.5 million the same year his son was admitted. In a recent article, “The Story Behind Jared Kushner’s Curious Acceptance into Harvard”, Golden explains how the Cambridge Colossus trolls for donations in a way that, I suspect, never occurred to the simple souls down in Virginia.

But beating up on Harvard, however meritorious in and of itself, has taken me a bit off course. The real purpose of today’s post is this: why should the Kochs beat around the bush? Why can’t they create their own university, lock, stock, and two smokin’ barrels?

Admittedly, “Koch U.” is just not going to cut it. But what’s in a name? Why not buy a couple thousand acres of attractive West Coast real estate and create a first-rate university out of nothing—nothing but a couple billion of Koch Bro cash? The simple fact is, the good old USA needs another first-rate university—in fact, it needs a couple. Schools like Stanford and, yes, Harvard all admit that they turn away thousands of absolutely top-flight students. So why not create another absolutely top-flight school for those students to attend?

Okay, this won’t be easy, but the good things never are. Just announce that this is going to be absolutely top-flight university with absolutely no political correctness. Announce the obvious, that neo-Marxian, neo-Foucaultian fol-de-rol has run riot and made its masterpiece throughout higher education in the United States and that there is no reason for such nonsense to be tolerated in a new university.

Instead, announce that there will be limits to acceptable thought in Koch U., ranging (I guess) from some sort of neo-Thomism (if it’s not too medieval) to Ayn Randian rowdiness, as long as the primacy of free markets, in both thought and commerce, are recognized. Now, this will of course outrage everyone, but in my opinion, enough cash and enough elegant, wood-paneled offices for the faculty, plus tuition set at less than half the competition, will solve everything. Plenty of “conservatives” will be happy to escape to Koch U., along with, I suspect, plenty of “hard” scientists who really don’t give a damn about anything but their hard science, but will jump at the chance to escape from quotas.

Because there won’t be any quotas at Koch U. If the incoming class consists of 4,000 Chinese guys whose favorite sport is badminton, well, then that’s the freshman class. Deal with it. And the same goes for the faculty as well.

A "dramatic", ocean-front setting, plus gobs of high-end architecture, will be necessary to give the operation the necessary prestige, and attract the necessary high-end folks, both as professors and students, but, because Koch U. would be a brand new, built fresh from the ground up operation, Koch U. could take advantage of all the accoutrements of the digital age to offer a wide range of learning experiences that, with sufficient "rigor", would command respect throughout both academia and the private sector, while making first-class learning experiences available to a far wider population than is currently the case.

Private enterprise is already playing this game, of course, gobbling up academic stars in artificial intelligence and other hot fields with abandon. And the various think tanks in Washington DC and around the country aspired to create an alternative intellectual universe of sorts close to fifty years ago.

But the think tanks are too closely tied to policy, and don’t have the kind of endowment necessary to provide real freedom. The right-wing outfits in particular have ended up as Republican Party auxiliaries rather than incubators of enlightenment. Koch U. wouldn’t have that problem. The idea would be to spend whatever was necessary to create a prestigious, “non progressive” faculty, provide them with an endowment that would guarantee them their future independence from anyone, including the Kochs, endowing Koch U. with “cruising speed”, and then just let the whole thing evolve of its own accord.

What’s the likelihood that the Koch’s will do this? Not a lot, I would guess. The Kochs spend millions, but a university—a full university—would cost billions, and the infighting surrounding such a bonanza would be intense. And, most of the time, I haven’t really been a Koch guy, noting that they shrieked bloody murder when President Obama spent billions on health care for the poor, but rejoiced when President Trump blew up the budget to give tax cuts to the rich. After eight years of “Kenyan socialism”, each Koch has doubled his wealth, from $20 to $40 billion. Instead of spending millions to add to their billions, why don’t the Koch’s kick in a billion or two to create a living monument to free thought?

#Charles Koch #academia #George Mason University

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tainghekhongdaycomvn · 6 years

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How Is Google's New "Questions and Answers" Feature Being Used? [Case Study]

Posted by MiriamEllis

IndustryNumber of QuestionsNumber of AnswersLGsRUsOsDentists10000Plumbers20---Chiropractors0----Mexican Restaurants1023221-Italian Restaurants1520191-Chinese Restaurants1653494-Car Dealers4532-Supermarkets727243-Clothing Stores411--Florists10---Hotels4414211428-Real Estate Agencies0----General Contractors10---Cell Phone Stores1433--Yoga Studios10---Banks10---Carpet Cleaning0----Hair Salons10---Locksmiths10---Jewelry Stores0----