Craigslist Dumping Erotic Services Section
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Craigslist has felt the pressure from state agencies as well as the public and is changing their policy as it pertains to their erotic services section. In 7 days Craigslist will remove this topic from their ad sections. In its place will be an adult section in which ads will be manually approved. According to an article at the LA Times it states that:
As of today, the erotic services section will no longer accept new ads and will be removed completely in seven days. Posts to the adult services section will cost $10, twice as much as those for erotic services listings. Craigslist had agreed to donate proceeds from the erotic services listings to charity but says that rule will not necessarily apply to the new ads.
Craigslist Chief Executive officer Jim Buckmaster said in an interview that the site had come to the decision after carefully weighing input from law enforcement, users, legitimate online businesses and free speech advocates.
“It was a balancing act where we’re trying to respond to feedback to constituencies that we felt were important. When you’re talking about attorneys general who are the top legal authority in their respective states,” he said, “That was feedback that we felt was important to take into account.”
“We’re optimistic that we’ve struck the right balance,” he added.
It seems that Craigslist may have struck the right balance. By manually censoring the content of the erotic ads, they may prevent a repeat of the murder[s] that happened previously.
What do you think? Is Craigslist doing enough?
Comments welcome.
7 Comments
Czar
May 14th, 2009
at 7:17pm
I think its a step in the right direction.
BTW, you spelled Craigslist wrong in the article name.
Ryan Farmer
May 14th, 2009
at 7:49pm
This is what happens when country bumpkins that don’t understand the internet want something to blame and lash out at the service instead of the people that use it.
Is Craigslist the new Limewire?
joshua
May 14th, 2009
at 10:28pm
i think that this may help in a small way but there are still other ways that they can get that stuff out there…. they can only do so much at once…. people just need to learn that the world is an imperfect place. and there are always going to be wackjobs out there.
Ron Schenone
May 15th, 2009
at 4:45am
Thanks for the comments.
Czar - Corrected.
Janel
May 15th, 2009
at 8:35am
Just another case of government censure over the only thing they can control right now. They figure if they focus on Craigslist and put to the stop that “one” thing, people will forget they’re handing out dollars by the billions as if they were cupcakes at a local cake walk.
Poor strippers aren’t going to have much of an advertising venue now, are they?
As the other poster said, predators will always find a place to prey. There are sites all over the internet.
Ryan Farmer
May 15th, 2009
at 12:26pm
Meh, I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again.
What was Jack the Rippers Craigslist username?
oh right….
Doctor Chemistry
May 23rd, 2009
at 4:22pm
Given the popularity of the erotic section and the large amount of time that went by before a murder occurred, I think efforts to make the erotic site safer would be better than pushing the advertising into other venues. For those who may have been exploited, enforcement would have been able to readily view the listings. Unfortunately, people prefer the “out of sight, out of mind” approach, and they likely think the actions by Craigslist somehow made the country a safer place.