This is actually more serious than it sounds. Ashton Kutcher has been a longtime advocate fighting to end exploited children and while on the Piers Morgan show, mentioned that there are between 100,000 and 300,000 child sex-slaves in the United States today. The Village Voice felt the need to vigorously fact-check Kutcher on this claim. It turns out that Kutcher misspoke and the 100,000 to 300,000 number is the number of children at-risk, not the actual number of victims.

Case closed? Nope. The Village Voice and Kutcher continued battling each other on Twitter until this little war escalated to the point where Kutcher started going after The Village Voice’s advertisers by noting The Village Voice’s ties to adult ads, etc. The Village Voice was notably upset about that and took to Twitter to defend itself:

We’ll keep spending millions to keep kids out of our adult pages, no matter how much @aplusk keeps trying to silence us.

And this:

Excellent description of how we’re keeping kids off of our adult pages at our Seattle sister paper, Seattle Weekly: http://t.co/z4lDgiZ

Here’s an excerpt from the “excellent description” (Trevor Neilson is Kutcher’s partner in this anti-trafficking effort):

Instead of acknowledging the bogus stats and the damage they’re causing, however, Neilson has spent the bulk of his time since Wednesday, the day the piece came out, on Twitter, trying to “expose” Seattle Weekly’s connection to Backpage.com, an online classifieds site that, like this paper, is owned by Village Voice Media.
In no fewer than 100 Tweets (there’s no way we’re actually going to count them all), Neilson has contacted nearly every major media outlet and elected official in the Pacific Northwest in an effort to get them to report on our connection with Backpage. Mayor McGinn was one of those elected officials, and at today’s press conference he said Neilson’s Tweet prompted him to call Police Chief John Diaz, to, in his words, “see if this was a problem.”
Diaz came back with a number: four. That’s how many underage girls who’ve been linked to Backpage have been recovered so far this year by the Seattle Police Department.
Four is obviously four too many. And we welcome McGinn’s invitation to improve the ways in which Backpage and the police department can work together to catch those exploiting vulnerable kids–a task we’ve been working on for some time now.
Backpage is based in Arizona, and has a staff of 123, most of whom are there to screen every adult or personal ad. When one of those employees sees an ad that looks suspect, they alert the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who then call local law enforcement. (For context, this daisy chain of aggressive reporting happened 230 times just last month.)

Well fantastic. Only four underage girls were linked to Backpage.com in the Seattle area. I wonder how their pimps were able to elude Backpage’s crack investigative staff. A true mystery.

Ashton Kutcher took their defense the same way I did and basically went nuclear. An excerpt from a blog post he wrote the day after the Seattle paper’s weak defense of its revenue stream:

While on the Piers Morgan show, when presenting the data that I understood to be accurate, I miss spoke in saying that 100k-300k children are being trafficked in the US. The data point that I was referring to assumes 100k-300k children in the US are at risk of being Trafficked. I am by no means the authority on Human Trafficking statistics. There is great value in disputing the hard numbers and pointing to insufficient allocation of government spending and this effort would be commended if Backpage.com, which is owned and operated by the Village Voice, wasn’t profiting off of the victims at the same time. Due to this, I question the bias data that is being delivered by the Village Voice that will earn 20 plus million dollars this year on Backpage.com, through facilitating the sale of women and girls for sex.
The Village Voice has repeatedly attempted to reduce sex trafficking to an “under-age” issue. And while they claim to spend millions of dollars fighting underage sex trafficking, they fail to address the countless number of girls that are over the age of 18 and being forced by their pimps and traffickers to post ads on Backpage.com. I have personally had conversations with many of these victims and have heard horror stories confirming this. Furthermore, if the Village Voice and Backpage.com really wanted to combat human trafficking it would create an ID based age gate system that would cost far less than a couple million dollars to build. Why don’t they? I believe their real concern is that it would cost them far more than that in lost revenue if they were no longer to host this illicit activity. I am all for an open uncensored web. I support the democratization of media. I don’t want to censor the Village Voice; I just want them to stop selling trafficking victims (people) next to couches and bicycles. I don’t believe in companies choosing profits over human dignity. It has never been my aim to tell an adult woman what she can or can’t do with her body, or where she can sell it. I simply desire to help those who are being sold in the sex trade by force, fraud, or coercion.
Village Voice, you have attempted to discredit the work my wife and I have done to fight human trafficking. If you don’t feel that our ad campaign was effective, that’s fine. If you want to claim that I’m stupid or a bad actor, I’ll live with it. If you want to research the true statistics around human trafficking, I welcome it. But when you make bias claims in an effort to defend your bottom line, I stand up. If you make snide remarks about my wife’s efforts domestically and abroad to fight human trafficking, I stand up.

And. . .

As for advertisers, it’s my intention to continue to make them aware of who you are and what happens on your platform. They can do with that what they choose.

I’m still perplexed at how stupid The Village Voice was in going after Kutcher in the first place.

Of course, Ashton Kutcher is set to take the place of the hooker-loving character on Two and a Half Men, so we’ll so if Kutcher’s character holds the same concern for the well-being of prostitutes as the actor himself. Stay tuned.