Backpage.com

» see backpage.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

backpage was a part of the american internet that did not have a turkish-language equivalent. i was reading about it from a distance, mostly as a news story about section 230 and online speech. the site itself was a plain-blue craigslist clone with the same categories: jobs, vehicles, real estate, services, and then the adult-services section that paid most of the bills.

it was founded in 2004 inside new times media, the alt-weekly newspaper chain that owned the village voice and the phoenix new times, among others. michael lacey and jim larkin had run that chain since the 1970s. craigslist had eaten alt-weekly classified revenue everywhere in the country, and backpage was their attempt to take some of it back. within a few years backpage had become the largest competitor to craigslist for classified ads in the united states.

craigslist shut down its own adult-services section in september 2010 under pressure from state attorneys general. that traffic moved to backpage almost overnight. by 2013 backpage was estimated to handle around seventy percent of the us online sex-work classifieds market, with revenues in the hundreds of millions a year. it was also the focus of a sustained legal campaign, lawsuits from trafficking survivors, senate subcommittee investigations, the 2017 senate permanent subcommittee on investigations report that documented backpage editing ads to remove keywords like "lolita".

~ the case file ~

~ the day it died ~

april 6 2018 the fbi raided lacey's home in paradise valley arizona and seized the backpage.com domain. larkin was arrested at a phoenix airport returning from overseas. the indictment listed conspiracy, money laundering, and travel act violations. the charges were federal and predated sesta-fosta, which trump signed five days later on april 11. the seizure was the act of an executive branch already moving in this direction. sesta-fosta was the legislative branch catching up.

~ the long tail ~

jim larkin died by suicide on july 31 2023, about a week before his retrial was due to start. michael lacey was finally convicted on one money-laundering count in november 2023 and sentenced to five years in august 2024. the legal aftermath outlasted the site by years. the broader effect of sesta-fosta was that platforms across the us internet cut off any user-generated content that touched sex work, including craigslist personals, which is why those went dark in march 2018. backpage was the discrete domain seizure. sesta-fosta was what reshaped what everyone else allowed.

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