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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: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Thursday December 28 2017, @01:56AM
He's making no such claim, just like he isn't claiming that simply being male is causative to sexism or misogyny. Tech workers aren't the only introverts in the world, you know; introverts comprise (IIRC) roughly 30% of the population. And plenty of introverts have no trouble getting dates, are outgoing enough to approach women, etc. It's not some rare, crippling disease, it's very common and just describes a psychological mindset that a significant fraction of the population has, and which differs from the other rough grouping of the population that prefers more time with social contact.
It's just that tech workers tend to overwhelmingly be introverted, just like they overwhelmingly tend to be male. The group he's describing is a small subset of the intersection of those two groups.