(credit: Steven Depolo)

Backpage.com, whose executives and former owners beat back pimping charges a month ago, is shuttering its adult section over what it says is “unconstitutional government censorship.”

The Dallas-based media concern said that it had been under too much pressure from the Senate Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations’ sex trafficking inquiries. The inquiries found that the online ads portal “edits” content of ads that amount to solicitation of prostitution by “deleting words and images before publication.” The company, which lost a Supreme Court First Amendment battle and was forced to turn over thousands of pages of company documents detailing its business methods, said it fell victim in the same way that Craigslist did a decade ago, when it removed adult ads.

From left: Carl Ferrer, James Larkin and Michael Lacey. (credit: Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department)

“Like the decision by Craigslist to remove its adult category in 2010, this announcement is the culmination of years of effort by government at various levels to exert pressure on Backpage.com and to make it too costly to continue,” Backpage told Congress late Monday,