Craigslist was in the news this week after Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart in Chicago filed a federal lawsuit calling for a ban on the Erotic Services section of the website. He claimed that the owners of Craigslist facilitated prostitution by failing to block clear offers to trade sexual acts for money.
“Craigslist is the single largest source of prostitution in the nation,” Dart said. “Missing children, runaways, abused women and women trafficked in from foreign countries are routinely forced to have sex with strangers because they’re being pimped on Craigslist.”
Reading an article about the case on the times online it appears to me that, whilst I’m sure they don’t condone the activity, Craigslist haven’t done much to prevent these posts being made on the site. They have recently placed some restrictions on entries into the erotic services section but these are only based around the provision of contact details, allowing the authorities to track the advertisers should their actions be deemed illegal. This appears more of a token gesture by Craigslist to appease the authorities, rather than a true intent to crack down.
In some ways I sympathise with the Craigslist team, there is no way they can vet every posting, there are however ways of using technology to prevent those of a dubious nature and these don’t appear to be in use. You have to believe that Craigslist are scared of losing the traffic volumes which come via this section of their directory otherwise they would have simply bowed to pressure and closed the erotic services category before it got to this point.
In my opinion Craigslist have to be held responsible in some way for the content placed on their site and whilst they are not themselves, pimping out adult services or activity faciliitating the activities advertised, they are providing a medium for those that are, and they don’t appear to have done much about it. It will be interesting to see how this one pans out.
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