SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the looking-for-love-in-all-the-wrong-places dept.
Amazon and Microsoft employees caught up in sex trafficking sting
The tech industry has a clear history of sexism and misogyny, but a recent Newsweek report highlights another problem. The publication got its hands on a slew of emails sent to brothels and pimps between 2014 and 2016 that document the industry's patronage of brothels and purchasing of services from trafficked sex workers. Among the emails, which were obtained through a public records request to the King County Prosecutor's Office, were 67 sent from Microsoft employee email accounts, 63 from Amazon accounts and dozens more from companies like Boeing, T-Mobile, Oracle and local Seattle tech firms.
Some of the emails were collected during a 2015 sting operation that targeted sex worker review boards and resulted in the arrest of 18 individuals, including high-level Amazon and Microsoft directors. Two opted for a trial, which is currently set to begin in March.
Seattle's sex industry has grown right alongside its tech industry and the city's authorities have said that some men spend up to $50,000 per year on sex workers. Brothels are even known to advertise how close they are to tech offices. Alex Trouteaud, director of policy and research at the anti-trafficking organization Demand Abolition, told Newsweek that the tech industry is a "culture that has readily embraced trafficking."
Newsweek: Tech Bros Bought Sex Trafficking Victims by Using Amazon and Microsoft Work Emails
Related: "Pimping" Charges Against Backpage Executives Dismissed
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @09:03AM (2 children)
It's called Cultural Marxism. Pick on a minority group, even if it's a hopelessly unfixable one, and use it against the majority to disrupt and degrade it. In this case, male dominated tech industry. Put a bunch of girls in it and productivity will plummet. Yeah I know politically incorrect but who cares, truth is what it is.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:51PM
No, it's not, except by illiterates and ignoramuses. "Marxism" is not a catch-all scary word to attach to anything you vaguely dislike. It is a specific and very detailed theory that a very smart guy named Karl Marx spent a lot of time and words to construct. It's a theory with a fatal flaw, but nevertheless throwing it around loosely as you have is like watching a monkey smear his feces all over a computer screen and then cackle about how clever he is.
Why not dial back your loathing vocabulary a couple centuries to a classic better matched to your mean level of derision and call it "cultural devilry?". See? There you get the dissolute menace you want to insinuate without plaguing the rest of us with moronic pretense to educated authority.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday December 28 2017, @02:00AM
In this case, male dominated tech industry. Put a bunch of girls in it and productivity will plummet.
Personally I think that's bullshit, but even if it isn't, what's the problem? What is the tech industry doing these days that's so great anyway? Making a bunch of stupid, useless cellphone apps and web pages with horrible flat UIs? There's still a few small sectors here and there that are doing pretty cool stuff, like SpaceX, but overall it's just a bunch of wasted effort on reinventing the wheel, poorly. UIs, after all, hit their peaks between 2005-2010, and have been going straight downhill ever since.