This is a hard case- — hard not in the sense that the legal issues defy resolution, but hard in the sense that the law requires that we, like the court below, deny relief to plaintiffs whose circumstances evoke outrage. The result we must reach is rooted in positive law. Congress addressed the right to publish the speech of others in the Information Age when it enacted the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA). See 47 U.S.C. § 230. Congress later addressed the need to guard against the evils of sex trafficking when it enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA), codified as relevant here at 18 U.S.C. §§ 1591, 1595. These laudable legislative efforts do not fit together seamlessly, and this case reflects the tension between them. Striking the balance in a way that we believe is consistent with both congressional intent and the teachings of precedent, we affirm the district court’s order of dismissal. The tale follows.
I. BACKGROUND
In reviewing the grant or denial of a motion to dismiss under Federal Rule of
Backpage.com provides online classified advertising, allowing users to post advertisements in a range of categories based on the product or service being sold. 1 Among the categories provided is one for “Adult Entertainment,” which includes a subcategory labeled “Escorts.” The site is differentiated by geographic area, enabling users to target their advertisements and permitting potential customers to see local postings.
This suit involves advertisements posted in the “Escorts” section for three young women — all minors at the relevant times— who claim to have been victims of sex trafficking. Suing pseudonymously, the women allege that Backpage, with an eye to maximizing its profits, engaged in a course of conduct designed to facilitate sex traffickers’ efforts to advertise their victims on the website. This strategy, the appellants say, led to their victimization.
Past is prologue. In 2010, a competing website (Craigslist) shuttered its adult advertising section due to concerns about sex trafficking. Spying an opportunity, Back-page expanded its marketing footprint in the adult advertising arena. According to the appellants, the expansion had two aspects. First, Backpage engaged in a campaign to distract attention from its role in sex trafficking by, for example, meeting on various occasions with hierarchs of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and making “false and misleading representations” to the NCMEC and law enforcement regarding its efforts to combat sex trafficking. But this campaign, the appellants suggest, was merely a ruse.
The second aspect of Backpage’s expansion strategy involved the deliberate structuring of its website to facilitate sex trafficking. The appellants aver that Backpage selectively removed certain postings made in the “Escorts” section (such as postings made by victim support organizations and law enforcement “sting” advertisements) and tailored its posting requirements to make sex trafficking easier. 2
In addition, the appellants allege that Backpage’s rules and processes governing the content of advertisements are designed to encourage sex trafficking. For example, Backpage does not require phone number verification and permits the posting of phone numbers in alternative formats. There is likewise no e-mail verification, and Backpage provides users with the option to “hide” their e-mail addresses in postings, because Backpage provides message forwarding services and auto-replies on behalf of the advertiser. Photographs uploaded for use in advertisements are shorn of their metadata, thus removing from scrutiny information such as the date,
The appellants suggest that Backpage profits from having its thumb on the scale in two ways. First, advertisements in the “Adult Entertainment” section are the only ones for which Backpage charges a posting fee. Second, users may pay an additional fee for “Sponsored Ads,” which appear on the right-hand" side of every page of the'“Escorts” section. A “Sponsored Ad” includes a smaller version of the image from the posted advertisement and information about the location and availability of the advertised individual.
Beginning at age 15, each of the appellants was trafficked through advertisements posted on Backpage. Jane Doe # 1 was advertised on Backpage during two periods in 2012 and 2013. She estimates that, as a result, she was raped over 1,000 times. Jane Doe # 2 was advertised on Backpage between 2010 and 2012. She estimates that, as a result, she was raped over 900 times. Jane Doe # 3 was advertised on Backpage from December of 2013 until some unspecified future date. As a result, she was raped on numerous occasions. 3 All of the rapes occurred either in Massachusetts or Rhode- Island. Sometimes the sex traffickers posted the advertisements directly and sometimes they forced the victims to post the advertisements.
Typically, each posted advertisement included images of the particular appellant, usually taken by the traffickers (but advertisements for Doe #3. included some pictures that she herself had taken). Many of the advertisements embodied challenged practices such as anonymous payment for postings, coded terminology meant to refer to underage girls, and altered telephone numbers.
The appellants filed suit against Back-page in October of 2014. The. operative pleading is the appellants’ second amended complaint, which limns three sets of claims. The first set consists of claims that Backpage engaged in sex trafficking of minors as defined by the TVPRA and its Massachusetts counterpart, the Massachusetts Anti-Human Trafficking and Victim Protection Act of 2010 (MATA), Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 265, § 50(a). The second set consists of claims under a Massachusetts consumer protection statute, which forbids “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in the conduct of any trade or commerce.” Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 93A, § 2(a). The last set consists of claims alleging abridgements of intellectual property rights.
In due season, Backpage moved to dismiss the second amended complaint for failure to state claims upon which relief could be granted.
See
Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(b)(6). Although the appellants vigorously opposed the motion, the district court dismissed the action in its entirety.
See Doe ex rel. Roe v. Backpage.com, LLC,
II. ANALYSIS
The appellants, ably represented, have constructed a series of arguments.
A. Trafficking Claims.
The appellants challenge the district court’s conclusion that section 230 of the CDA shields Backpage from liability for a course of conduct that allegedly amounts to participation in sex trafficking. We begin our consideration of this challenge with the text of section 230(c), which provides:
(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content'provider.
.(2) Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy,.excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in [subparagraph (A)]. •
47 U.S.C. § 230(c). Congress enacted this statute partially in response to court cases that held internet publishers liable for defamatory statements posted by third parties on message boards maintained by the publishers.
See, e.g., Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Servs. Co.,
There has been near-universal agreement that section 230 should not be construed grudgingly.
See, e.g., Doe v. MySpace, Inc.,
In holding Backpage harmless here, the district court found section 230(c)(1) controlling.
See Backpage.com,
The-broad construction accorded to section 230 as a whole has resulted in ■ a capacious conception of what it means to treat a website operator as the publisher or speaker of information provided by a third party.- Courts have recognized that “many causes of action might be premised on the publication or speaking of what one might call ‘information content.’ ”
Barnes v. Yahoo!, Inc,,
The- appellants have an uphill climb: the TVPRA claims that they assert appear to treat Backpage as the publisher or speaker of the content of the challenged advertisements. After all, the appellants acknowledge in their complaint, that the contents of all of the relevant advertisements were provided either by their traffickers , or by the appellants themselves (under orders from their traffickers). Since the appellants were trafficked by means of these advertisements, there
The appellants nonetheless insist that their allegations do not treat Backpage as a publisher or speaker of third-party content. They rest this hypothesis largely on the text of the TVPRA’s civil remedy provision, which provides that victims may bring a civil suit against a perpetrator “or whoever knowingly benefits, financially or by receiving anything of value from participation in a venture which that person knew or should have known has engaged in an act” of sex trafficking. 18 U.S.C, § 1595(a); see id. § 1591. Characterizing their allegations as describing “an affirmative course of conduct” by Backpage distinct from the exercise of the “traditional publishing or editorial functions” protected under the CDA, the appellants contend that this course of conduct amounts to participation in sex trafficking and, thus, can ground liability without treating Back-page as the publisher or speaker of any of the underlying content. This contention comprises more cry than wool.
We begin with the appellants’ assertion that Backpage’s activities do not involve traditional publishing or editorial functions, and are therefore outside the protective carapace of section 230(c)(1). In support, the complaint describes choices that Backpage has made about the posting standards for advertisements — for example, rules about which terms are permitted or not permitted in a posting, the lack of controls on the display of phone numbers, the option to anonymize e-mail addresses, the stripping of metadata from photographs uploaded to the website, the website’s reaction after a forbidden term is entered into an advertisement, and Back-page’s acceptance of anonymous payments. The appellants submit that these choices are distinguishable from publisher functions. We disagree.
As an initial matter, some of the challenged practices — most obviously, the choice of what words or phrases can be displayed on the site — are traditional publisher functions under any coherent definition of the term.
See Zeran,
Precedent cinches the matter. In
Ly-cos,
we considered the argument that the prophylaxis of section 230(c) did not encompass “decisions regarding the ‘construct and operation’” of a defendant’s websites.
At oral argument in this court, the appellants placed particular emphasis on Backpage’s provision of e-mail anonymization, forwarding, auto-reply, and storage services to posters. In the last analysis, however, the decision to provide such services and the parallel decisión not to impose the same conditions on messaging services as are applied to “Escorts” section postings are no less publisher choices, entitled to the protections of section 230(c)(1).
We add, moreover, that applying section 230(c)(1) to shield Backpage from liability here is congruent with the case law elsewhere. Relying on that provision, courts have rejected claims that attempt to hold website operators liable for failing to provide sufficient protections to users from harmful content created by others, For instance, where a minor claimed to have been sexually assaulted by someone she met through the defendant’s website and her suit alleged that the website operator “fail[ed] to implement basic safety measures to protect minors,” the Fifth Circuit rejected the suit on the basis that the claims were “merely another,way of claiming that [the website operator] was liable for publishing the communications and they speak to [the website operator’s] role as a publisher of online third-party-generated content.”
Doe,
Nor does the text of the TVPRA’s civil remedy provision change this result. Though a website conceivably might display a degree of involvement sufficient to render its operator both a publisher and a participant, in a sex trafficking venture (say, that the website operator helped to procure the underaged youths who were being trafficked), the facts pleaded in the second amended complaint do not appear to achieve this duality. But even if we assume, for argument’s sake, that Back-page’s conduct amounts to “participation in a [sex trafficking] venture” — a phrase that no published opinion has yet interpreted— the TVPRA claims as pleaded premise that participation on Backpage’s actions as a publisher or speaker, of third-party content. The strictures of section 230(c) foreclose such suits. 6
That ends this aspect of the matter. We hold that claims that a website facilitates illegal conduct through its posting rules necessarily treat the website as a publisher or speaker of content provided by third "parties and, thus, are.precluded by section 230(c)(1). This holding is consistent with, and reaffirms, the principle that a website operator’s decisions in structuring its website and posting requirements are publisher functions entitled to section 230(c)(1) protection.
In this- case, third-party content is like Banquo’s ghost: it appears as an essential component of each and all of the appellants’ TVPRA claims. Because the appellants’ claims under the TVPRA necessarily treat Backpage as the publisher or speaker of content supplied by third parties,-the district court did not err in dismissing those claims. 7
In an effort to shift the trajectory of the debate; the appellants try a pair of end runs. First, the appellants call our attention to section 230(c)(2), which provides that decisions made by website operators to block or remove content are protected from- liability as long as they are made in good faith. Building on this foundation, the appellants assert'that the district court relied on Backpage’s descriptions of its efforts to block and screen the postings in the “Escorts” section of its website, and that those descriptions amount to an implicit invocation of section 230(c)(2). So, the appellants say, the district court should have allowed discovery into Back-page’s good faith (or lack of it) in blocking and screening content. The district court’s refusal to allow them to pursue this course, they charge, eviscerates section 230(c)(2) and renders it superfluous.
The appellants start from a faulty premise: we do not read the district court’s opinion as relying on Backpage’s assertions about its behavior. That Backpage sought to respond’to allegations of misconduct by (among other things) touting its efforts to combat sex trafficking does not, without more, invoke section 230(c)(2) as a defense.
The appellants’ suggestion of superfluity is likewise misplaced. Courts routinely have recognized thát section 230(c)(2) provides a set of independent protections for websites, ■ see,
e.g., Barnes,
Next, the appellants suggest that their TVPRA claims are saved by the operation of section 230(e)(1). That provision declares that section 230 should not “be construed to impair the enforcement of ... any ... Federal criminal statute.” The appellants posit that the TVPRA’s civil suit provision is part of the “enforcement” of a federal criminal statute under the plain meaning of that term and, thus, outside the protections afforded by section 230(c)(1). This argument, though creative, does not withstand scrutiny.
We start with the uncontroversial premise that, where feasible, “a statute should be construed in a way that conforms to the plain meaning of its text.”
In re Jarvis,
It is equally telling that where Congress wanted to include both civil and criminal remedies in CDA provisions, it did so through broader language. For instance, section 230(e)(4) states that the protections of section 230 should not “be construed to limit the application of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986,” a statute that contains both criminal penalties and civil1 remedies.
See
18 U.S.C. §§ 2511, 2520. Preserving the “application” of this Act contrasts with Congress’s significantly narrower word choice in safeguarding the “enforcement” of federal criminal statutes. The normal presumption is that the employment of different words within the same statutory scheme is deliberate, so the terms ordinarily should be given differing meanings.
See Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain,
This holding is entirely in keeping with the policies animating, section 230(e)(1). Congress made pellucid that it sought “to ensure vigorous enforcement of Federal criminal laws to deter and punish” illicit activities online, 47 U.S.C. § 230(b)(5); and this policy coexists comfortably with Congress’s choice “not to defer harmful online speech through the ... route of imposing tort liability on companies that serve as intermediaries for other parties’ potentially injurious messages,”
Lycos,
B. Chapter 93A Claims.
We turn next to the appellants’ state-law unfair trade practices claims. A Massachusetts statute, familiarly known as Chapter 93A, creates a private right of action in favor of any individual “who has been injured by another person’s use or employment” of unfair or deceptive business practices.
See
Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 93A, § 9(1). The appellants’ Chapter 93A claims (as framed on appeal) target misrepresentations allegedly made by Back-page to law enforcement and the NCMEC regarding Backpage’s efforts at self-regulation. The district court jettisoned these claims, concluding that the causal chain alleged by the appellants was “too speculative to fall as a matter of law within the penumbra of reasonable] foreseeability.”
Backpage.com,
As this ruling hinges on the plausibility of the appellants’ allegations of causation, we first rehearse the plausibility standard. It is, of course, apodictic that a plaintiff must supply “a short and plain statement of the claim showing that [she] is entitled to relief.” Fed.R.Civ.P. 8(a)(2). Although this requirement does not call for the pleading of exquisite factual detail, the complaint must allege “enough facts to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.”
Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly, 550
U.S. 544, 570,
Evaluating the plausibility of a complaint is a two-step process. First, “the court must separate the complaint’s factual allegations (which must be accepted as true) from its conclusory legal allegations (which need not be credited).”
Morales-Cruz v. Univ. of P.R.,
With this standard in mind, we proceed to the appellants’ assignment of error. To prevail on a Chapter 93A claim of this sort, the “plaintiff must prove causation — that is, the plaintiff is required to prove that the defendant’s unfair or deceptive act caused an adverse consequence or loss.”
Rhodes v. AIG Domestic Claims, Inc.,
Here, the second amended complaint attempts to forge the causal chain as follows: Backpage made a series of disingenuous
This causal chain is shot through with conjecture: it pyramids speculative inference upon speculative inference. This rampant guesswork extends to the effect of the alleged misrepresentations on an indeterminate number of third parties, the real impact of Backpage’s behavior on the overall marketplace for sex trafficking, and the odds that the appellants would not have been victimized had Backpage been more forthright.
When all is said, and done, it is apparent that the attenuated causal, chain proposed by the appellants is forged entirely out of surmise.' Put another way, the causation element is backed only by “the type of conclusory statements that need not be credited at the Rule 12(b)(6) stage.”
Maddox,
To be sure, the complaint does plead a few hard facts. For example, it indicates that some meetings occurred involving Backpage and the NCMEC. It also indicates that Backpage made some efforts (albeit not the ones that the NCMEC recommended) to address sex trafficking. But beyond these scanty assertions, the complaint does not offer factual support for its attenuated causal analysis.
In an effort to plug this gaping hole, the appellants argue' that' in a Chapter 93A case the plausibility of causation should be tested at the pleading stage not by looking at facts but, rather, by employing “common economic sense.”
Bos. Cab Dispatch, Inc. v. Uber Techs., Inc.,
No. 13-10769,
The short of it is that the pertinent allegations in the second amended complaint are insufficient “to remove the possibility of relief from the realm of mere conjecture.”
Tambone,
C. Intellectual Property Claims.
This brings us to the appellants’ intellectual property claims. Section 230 provides that “[n]othing in this section shall be construed to limit or expand any law pertaining to intellectual property.” 47 U.S.C. § 230(e)(2). We assume, without deciding, that the appellants’ remaining claims come within the compass of this exception. 9
1. Unauthorized Use of Pictures of a Person. All of the appellants brought claims under state laws (Massachusetts and/or Rhode Island) guarding against the unauthorized use of a person’s picture. See Mass. Gen. -Laws ch. 214, § 3A; R.I. Gen. Laws § 9-1-28, These nearly identical statutes, reprinted in relevant part .in the margin, 10 confer private rights of action upon individuals whose images are used for commercial purposes without their consent. The appellants insist that Backpage, by garnering advertising revenues from their traffickers, profited from the unauthorized use of their photographs. This fusillade is wide of the mark: the statutes in question impose liability only upon persons or entities who deliberately use another’s image for -commercial gain. As we explain below, Back-page (on the facts alleged here) is not such an entity.
Neither the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) nor the . Rhode Island Supreme Court has confronted the exact scenario that is presented here., Our task, then, is to make an informed determination of how each- court would rule if it faced- the question, taking into account analogous state decisions, cases from other jurisdictions, learned treatises, and relevant policy rationales!'
See Andrew Robinson Int’l, Inc. v. Hartford Fire Ins. Co.,
The appellants argue that the use of their images cannot be written off as incidental because them pictures were “the centerpieces of commercial advertisements.” But this argument misapprehends both the case law and the rationale that animates the underlying right.
Tro-peano
exemplifies the point. That case involved the publication of the plaintiffs image to illustrate a magazine article in which she was not even mentioned.
See
In our view,
Tropeano
establishes that even a use leading to some profit for the publisher is not a use for advertising or trade purposes unless the use is designed to “appropriate] to the defendant’s benefit the commercial or other values associated with the name, or likeness.”
Id.
at 850 (quoting
Nelson,
Here, there is no basis for an inference that Backpage appropriated the commercial value of the appellants’ images. Although Backpage does profit from the sale of advertisements, it is not the entity that benefits from the misappropriation. A publisher like Backpage is “merely the conduit through which the advertising and publicity matter of customers” is conveyed,
Cabaniss v. Hipsley,
Basic policy considerations reinforce this result. There would be obviously deleterious consequences to a rule placing advertising media, such as newspapers, television stations, or websites, at risk of liability every time they sell an advertisement to a party who engages in misappropriation of another person’s likeness. Given this verity, it is hardly surprising that the appellants have identified no case in which a publisher of an advertisement furnished by a third party has been held liable for a misappropriation present within it. The proper target of any suit for damages in such a situation must be the advertiser who increases his own business through the misappropriation (in this case, the traffickers). 11
2.
Copyright,
The last leg of our journey takes us to a singular claim of copyright infringement. Shortly after the institution of suit, Doe #3 registered a copyright in one of the photographs used by her traffickers. In the second amended complaint, she included a claim for copyright infringement. The court below dismissed this claim, reasoning that it identified no redressable injury.
See Backpage.com,
Assuming (without deciding) that Backpage could be held liable for copyright infringement, the scope of Doe # 3’s potential recovery is limited by the fact that she did not register her copyright until December of 2014 — after the instant action had been filed. By then, Backpage was no longer displaying the copyrighted image. Given the timing of these events, Doe #3 cannot recover either statutory damages or attorneys’ fees under the Copyright Act.
See
17 U.S.C. § 412;
Johnson v. Gordon,
The prospect of such a recovery, however, is purely theoretical: nothing in the complaint raises a plausible inference that Doe #3 can recover any damages, or that discovery would reveal such an entitlement.
See Twombly,
By the same token, nothing in the complaint plausibly suggests a basis for a finding that Doe #3 would be entitled to profits attributable to the infringement. The closest that the complaint comes is an optimistic assertion that because photographs “enhance the effectiveness of advertisements,” Backpage necessarily reaps a financial benefit from these images (including, presumably, Doe # 3’s photograph). But a generalized assertion that a publisher/infringer profits from providing customers with the option to display photographs in advertisements, standing alone, cannot plausibly be said to link the display of a particular image to some discrete portion of the publisher/infringer’s profits.
Cf. Mackie v. Rieser,
In a last ditch effort to bell the cat, Doe # 3 contends that the district court erred in failing to determine whether she was entitled to injunctive relief under 17 U.S.C. § 502(a), which permits such relief “to prevent or restrain infringement of a copyright.” She says, in effect, that Backpage may still possess the copyrighted photograph and that, therefore, she remains at risk of future infringement. We reject this contention.
To begin, the mere fact of past infringement does not entitle a plaintiff to permanent injunctive relief: the plaintiff must also show “a substantial likelihood of infringement in the future.”
Harolds Stores, Inc. v. Dillard Dep’t Stores, Inc.,
Viewing the complaint as a whole,
see Twombly,
III. CONCLUSION
As a final matter, we add a coda. The appellants’ core argument is that Back-page has tailored its website to make sex trafficking easier. Aided by the amici, the appellants have made a persuasive case for that proposition. But Congress did not sound an uncertain trumpet when it enacted the CDA, and it chose to grant broad protections to internet publishers. Showing that a website operates through a meretricious business model is not enough to strip away those protections. If the evils that the appellants have identified are deemed to outweigh the First Amendment values that drive the CDA, the remedy is through legislation, not through litigation.
We need go no further. For the reasons elucidated above, the judgment of the district court is affirmed. All parties shall bear their own costs.
Affirmed.
Notes
. The appellants sued Backpage.com, LLC, Camarillo Holdings, LLC, and New Times Media, LLC. For ease in exposition, we refer to these three affiliated companies, collectively, as "Backpage.”
. The appellants note that (among other things) the process of posting an advertisement in the "Escorts” section does not require the poster to provide either identifying information or the subject of the advertisement. And even though the website does require that posters verify that they are 18 years of age or older to post in that section, entering an age below 18 on the first (or any successive) attempt does not block a poster from entering a different age on a subsequent attempt. Backpage also allows users to pay posting fees anonymously through prepaid credit cards or digital currencies.
. Once the parents of Doe # 3 located some of the Backpage advertisements featuring their daughter, théy demanded that the advertisements be removed from the website. A week later (after at least one other entreaty to Backpage), the postings remained on the website.
. Certain amici advance an argument forsworn by the appellants in the. district court: that Backpage’s activities amount to creating the content of the advertisements. It is; however, clear beyond hope of contradiction that amici cannot “interject into a case issues which the litigants, whatever their reasons might be, have chosen to ignore.”
Lane v. First Nat’l Bank of Bos.,
. The appellants argue that a concurring opinion in
J.S. v. Village Voice Media Holdings, L.L.C.,
. To be sure, the complaint contains a few allegations that do not involve the publication of third-party content. Yet those allegations,
. Although the parties do not separately parse the text of the MATA, those claims' fail for essentially the same reasons: they treat Back-page as the publisher or speaker of content provided by third parties. - As a result, the MATA — at least in this application — is neces- . sarily inconsistent with the protections provided by section 230(c)(1) and,- therefore, preempted. See 47 U.S.C. § 230(e)(3).
. For the sake of completeness, we note that the court below held, in the alternative, that the appellants' Chapter 93A claims were barred by section ¿30(c)(1).
See Backpage.com,
. The application of the exemption to the appellants’ state law claims for the unauthorized use of pictures is not free from doubt. At least one court of appeals has suggested that state law intellectual property claims are not covered by this exemption.
See Perfect 10, Inc. v. CCBill LLC,
. Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 214, § 3A provides in relevant part that:
Any person whose name, portrait or picture is used within the commonwealth for advertising purposes or for the purposes of trade without his written consent may bring a civil action ... against the person so using his name, portrait or picture, to prevent and restrain the use thereof; and may recover damages for any injuries sustained by reason of such use.
R.I. Gen. Laws § 9-l-28(a) provides, as pertinent here, that:
Any person whose name, portrait, or picture is used within the state for commercial purposes without his or her written consent may bring an. action ... against the person so using his or her name, portrait, or picture to prevent and restrain the use thereof, and may recover damages for any injuries sustained-by reason of such use.
To the modest extent that. the wording of these statutes differs, neither the appellants nor Backpage suggests that the differences affect our analysis in any way. We therefore treat the statutes interchangeably.
. This is precisely the situation reflected in the earliest right of privacy cases,
see, e.g.,