A new lawsuit brought by 50 anonymous women who say they have been victims of sex trafficking on the classified ad site Backpage before it was shuttered in a federal law enforcement raid in April targets the cloud-based business-software firm Salesforce, saying that the company sold “data tools” that provided the “backbone” of the Backpage site, according to a CNBC report.
The lawsuit appears to be the first to exploit the new FOSTA/SESTA law, which made online sites responsible for any illegal activities by third-party users, as an analysis by Reason magazine online noted.
Previously, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protected online platforms “under the foundational internet principle that web platforms and internet service providers shouldn't be treated as the speaker of every message they transmit,” according to Reason.
FOSTA, which was supposedly designed to put the brakes on internet sex trafficking, wiped out those protections by making sites that allow third party content, ranging from classified advertising to discussion group comments and social media posts, legally liable for that content as if it were their own.
While Salesforce has been considered one of the more socially conscious companies in the technology industry, the lawsuit claims that “behind closed doors," the company provided tools enabling Backpage to market to “pimps, johns, and traffickers."
“Despite the growing public outcry and efforts to shut down Backpage, Salesforce stepped in at the same time to help Backpage survive and even grow,” the lawsuit claims.
The suit, filed in California Superior Court for the County of San Francisco, goes on to label Salesforce “among the vilest of rogue companies” for selling its software tools to Backpage.
A Salesforce spokesperson told CNBC that the company would not comment on an active lawsuit, saying only, “We are deeply committed to the ethical and humane use of our products and take these allegations seriously.”
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages from Salesforce for the "fear, fraud, deceit, coercion, violence, duress, menace, or threat of unlawful injury” suffered by the 50 plaintiffs, according to the court filing.
“You see where all this leads, right? Backpage and FOSTA tested the waters. Congressional conservatives and liberals are now talking about carving out more exceptions in Section 230 or abolishing it entirely,” wrote Reason Associate Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown. “That would allow not just any politically disfavored platforms but anyone that provided any services to them—cloud companies, payment processors, any kind of software, vendors, etc.—to be sued or charged criminally.”
But while that may conceivably be accurate, a cursory look at the lawsuit indicates that its plaintiffs will have a very long road ahead in proving their claims. The suit, which can be read here, is replete with innuendo about both Backpage and Salesforce, and fails to show that Salesforce provided any services to Backpage that it wouldn't provide to any other online company seeking to expand its business. Whether those services implicate Salesforce in sex trafficking under the new guidelines set forth by FOSTA remains to be seen—but that's not at all obvious by the text of the complaint.
Photo By U.S. Department of Justice/Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
