My name is Nacole and I am the mother of one of the girls featured in the movie “I am Jane Doe,” which chronicles the battle that my daughter and I are waging against Backpage.com, the adult classifieds site that for years was part of the Village Voice. My daughter was 15 years old when she made the teenage decision to leave home. What she didn’t choose was what happened next. Which I can not even bring myself to write. But suffice to say, she was bought and sold on Backpage, and raped repeatedly at the hands of adult men.

At the time, I had never heard of Backpage and didn’t realize that human trafficking or sex trafficking happened in this country. But it does. In numbers that would make your head explode.

Other mothers and children have filed suit against Backpage, which has for years, been able to avoid any responsibility for facilitating child sex trafficking, despite the fact that it makes hundreds of millions of dollars per year from sex ads.

Why? Because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 which protects websites from responsibility for third-party content. That means they can enable the selling of people – and the government can’t do anything about it. And therefore many of the children who have sued Backpage have lost their cases.

However, the Senate began an investigation into sex trafficking and found evidence that Backpage actively participated in this crime.

It has, after years of calls to amend Section 230, just now introduced a bill in the Senate and the House as well.

However, Google and the technology communities are launching an offensive to kill these bills. They’re coming on strong in effort to stomp out any reasonable tweak to the law.

And the dirty little secret is that Google and other technology companies have been actively supporting and working with Backpage over the years to protect Section 230 at all costs. Even if those costs include the children sold online.

No girl or woman or anyone should be sold online. We have to get that message out. (The more people that understand how it happens, and additionally the more people that understand that online companies like Google are fighting back to keep from being held responsible as a tech company that facilitates human trafficking, the closer we get to ending online sale of humans).

I ask all of you reading this to write a letter to your Senators, to your Congress members, about why this is important to YOU. I don’t have the money that Google has. I need the help of every other mother or father out there, who might have a daughter who is online (as recruitment happens in chat rooms); or who might struggle with depression or anxiety (or drugs or alcohol); or a LBGTQ child, because all of our children are at risk.

Please help me and join with me to see this loophole which allows Backpage to operate to the tunes of millions of dollars a year, earned on the backs of children and trafficked victims, closed.

Thank you,
Nacole Lynn

I Am Jane Doe Film

Washington Post article about pending bill

The need to update #CDA230 is not a Freedom of Speech issue; it’s about stopping actual criminal conduct

Transcript HR1865

Nacole Lynn is the mother of one of the girls featured in the film “I am Jane Doe,” which chronicles the battle that she and her daughter are waging against Backpage.com, the adult classifieds site that unconscionably enables the sale of people, even children. Nacole urges the public to watch the film “I am Jane Doe” and to write letters and call Congress members in support of their efforts to amend #CDA230, which currently tech companies and Backpage use as a guise to hide behind, as if their enabling the sale of children for sex, via the web, were simply a matter of free speech.