Washington Post Gives 'Three Pinocchios' To Rep. Ann Wagner For Falsely Claiming FOSTA Stopped 90% Of Sex Trafficking Ads

Back in July we were flabbergasted to see a stunningly misleading and dishonest video put out by the the House Judiciary Committee trying to claim that FOSTA had been a huge success in stopping sex trafficking. There is literally no evidence to suggest this, while there's plenty of evidence to show the harm that has been created by FOSTA. One of the claims in the video came from Rep. Ann Wagner, who was the original sponsor of FOSTA and has been a leading voice in stoking the exaggerated and misleading moral panic around sex trafficking (which is a real problem, but very, very limited compared to what many -- including Wagner -- have said about it). Wagner's latest trick has been to try to massively expand the PATRIOT Act for spying on Americans by again freaking everyone out about sex trafficking.

As we noted back in July, in the video, Wagner tries to imply that FOSTA helped kill off 90% of sex trafficking. She worded it awkwardly so that it clearly implies 90% of sex trafficking went away due to FOSTA, but it could also be read to just say that 90% of sex trafficking ads went away. As we pointed out at the time, this was clearly not true either way. While Backpage contained many ads, it stopped with those ads a year and a half before FOSTA was law, and was taken down by the feds before FOSTA was signed. So there was literally no way that FOSTA could be in any way credited for a drop in ads coming from Backpage.

I missed it, but a few weeks later, the Washington Post set its fact checker on these specific claims, and did an even more thorough analysis, even asking Wagner's office for details. And those details make Wagner look even worse, leading the Washington Post to give her the full three Pinocchios in their final ruling on the accuracy of her claim. Specifically, Wagner's office argued that a DARPA analysis saw a "weekly global ad volume dropped 87 percent from January to April." But, as the WaPo article notes (and as we did as well) the vast majority of that was from the takedown of Backpage, which was not due to FOSTA.

But, from there things get even worse. The Washington Post asked DARPA for what happened after April and found... things are not at all what the House Judiciary Committee and Wagner were claiming. Indeed, while there was an initial decline due to Backpage shutting down (again, not due to FOSTA), it quickly went back up after April -- conveniently ignored by Wagner and the HJC. Why contaminate the narrative with facts:

Worldwide ads had a daily average of about 105,000 when FOSTA-SESTA passed on March 21 and had dropped 28 percent by the time Backpage was closed on April 5. It then plunged another 75 percent and reached a low of 19,456 on April 17, for a total decline of about 82 percent.

But on the day the Judiciary Committee posted the video, sex-trade ads were back at about 50 percent of the daily volume before the law had passed; as of Aug. 11, they were at almost 75 percent....

"The volume of ads dropped dramatically after the shutdown of Backpage but has been climbing since," said Chris Dickson, director of research engineering at Uncharted. "There is now a volume approaching what we observed before."

So, once again it appears that Wagner and the HJC like to completely make up stories for grandstanding political purposes. They over-hyped the size of sex trafficking to pass this bad law, and then they massively over-hyped the impact of the law, ignoring (1) that the impact they took credit for had nothing to do with the law, and (2) ignoring that the data didn't actually support what they claimed.

So why the hell is anyway still listening to Rep. Ann Wagner and her use of "sex trafficking" to try to pass new laws?