Social Media

What Craigslist and Backpage Can Tell Us About the Meta Settlement

It doesn't matter if you're right. If you don't cave, the government might stop at nothing to destroy you.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 8.31.2026 12:25 PM

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(Photo: Sergei Elagin/Dreamstime.)

Meta's settlement with states over child safety claims—to the tune of up to $17.1 billion—has come as a disappointment to people who would have liked to see the social media giant battle this one out. Meta has First Amendment rights. Minors have First Amendment rights. If anyone is well-positioned to push back against government overreach on this front, it's the world's largest social media company.

Instead, Meta caved. It agreed not just to pay off the 47 states suing it but also to make myriad changes to the way it treats minors using the platform. It's also agreed to make more changes and pay more money if other big social platforms will do the same. "The base line of Meta's monetary settlement is $12 billion," notes New York Times reporter Mike Isaac, but it will throw in an extra $5 billion if TikTok and YouTube pay $5 billion too.

Some have accused Meta of using the settlement to try and stave off further regulation, write the rules in its own favor, and hamstring competitors. And that's a fair critique.

But I still have some sympathy for Meta here, because I remember what happened to Craigslist and to Backpage.

You are reading Sex & Tech, from Elizabeth Nolan Brown. Get more of Elizabeth's sex, tech, bodily autonomy, law, and online culture coverage.

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A Tale of Two Platforms

Both Backpage and Craigslist were online platforms for user-generated classified ads. Craigslist is still around today. Backpage was shut down by the federal government in 2018. (From then until last year, it looked like the image below, until the feds let the URL expire. It now redirects to an explicit webcamming platform.)

In the late '00s, when politicians and advocates started freaking out about online advertisements for sex work, people largely ignored Backpage, which was smaller and newer. Their main target was Craigslist's "erotic services" section. At first, Craigslist pushed back a little. But after a couple of years of government bullying and bad publicity, it shuttered the section.

So…adult ads just went away, right? HAHAHAHA. Of course not. They simply migrated to other sections of Craigslist, taking over "casual encounters" (a section theoretically devoted to non-commercial hookups), or to other platforms, most prominently Backpage.

The problem (insofar as you can call it that) didn't actually go away. Nothing changed—except that the legal attacks on Craigslist stopped and the company could largely go on as before.

Then the government moved on to Backpage. But this was a different beast. Backpage hadn't started as a standalone platform for user-posted ads; it started as the literal back page of a spate of alt-weekly papers. Its founders—James Larkin and Michael Lacey—were old-school newspapermen who had been fighting First Amendment battles against the government for decades, including previously pushing back against an Arizona law that criminalized abortion advertising.

When authorities started going after Backpage over its adult ads, Lacey........

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