When the owners of the company approve that policy, and spend years in repeated court cases to defend the ads, claiming that they're powerless to stop the ads and even if they weren't powerless to stop the ads they don't need to because that's the law: that's a completely different level if evil.
I find it hard to believe that such a policy could ever be created without the managers buy in or tacit consent (maybe to create plausible deniability).
If it proven beyond any reasonable doubt that they all knew of this and allowed it then I'm all for piercing the corporate veil and going after all their assets, including private ones and shareholder assets unless it is totally clear that they did not know about this to compensate the victims.
Just some bits from the linked article:
"“I called Backpage dozens of times asking them to take down those photos, that my daughter was just a child and that what had been done to her was a crime,” says Kubiiki. “They refused and said if I didn’t pay for it, they couldn’t take it down. In the end they just stopped returning my calls.”"
That alone makes them complete scumbags, the rest of what's documented in the article should make a good basis for a criminal case against them.
I know. This is where it goes to almost cartoonish villainy.
I'm honestly bewildered how this even happens. This must have escalated up the support levels and involved several people, and one individual listing that isn't even applicable anymore can't be a huge revenue source for them. Even assuming that it's a company led by amoral psychopaths, why push back for so little gain? how did nobody in the chain of information say "what the hell are we doing"?
