By Truman Lewis
ConsumerAffairs.com
August 24, 2010
Seventeen states are demanding that craigslist shutter its Adult Services section, charging that the section is filled with prostitution advertisements and represents a hazard to minors.
A multi-state letter, to craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster and founder Craig Newmark, contends that craigslist cannot -- or will not -- adequately screen these ads, so it must stop accepting them altogether and shut down the Adult Services section.
The increasingly sharp public criticism of craigslists Adult Services section reflects a growing recognition that ads for prostitution -- including ads trafficking children -- are rampant on it, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood said. In our view, the company should take immediate action to end these ads."
In a recent blog posting, craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster said the company began manually screeening Adult Services ads in May 2009 and, since then, has intensified its efforts to keep objectionable material from being posted on its site.
"Before being posted each individual ad is reviewed by an attorney licensed to practice law in the US, trained to enforce craigslists posting guidelines, which are stricter than those typically used by yellow pages, newspapers, or any other company that we are aware of," Buckmaster said. "More than 700,000 ads were rejected by those attorneys in the year following implementation of manual screening, for falling short of our guidelines."
Our uniquely intensive manual screening process has resulted in a mass exodus of those unwilling to abide by craigslists standards, manually enforced on an ad-by-ad basis.
But in their statement, the attorneys general discounted craigslist's efforts.
Your much-touted 'manual review' of Adult Services ads has failed to yield any discernible reduction in obvious solicitations, the letter says. We recognize that craigslist may lose the considerable revenue generated by the Adult Services ads, the attorneys general said. No amount of money can justify the scourge of illegal prostitution, and the suffering of the woman and children who will continue to be victimized, in the market and trafficking provided by craigslist.
Hot spot
The AGs said that even following its 2008 public pledge to attorneys general and the public that it would better police its own site, craigslist remains a hot spot for blatant prostitution ads.
In July 2010, two girls who said that they were trafficked for sex through craigslist wrote an open letter to craigslist officials, pleading for the elimination of the Adult Services section. The girls told of brutalization and assault suffered not just by them, but also by untold numbers of other children, the attorneys general said.
The attorneys general call recent blog posts and public statements from Buckmaster and Newmark, including a CNN interview, deeply troubling because they seem to imply that victims, law enforcement officials and childrens advocates are at least partially to blame for these incidents due to their failure to provide craigslist with police reports, ad copy or links documenting the crimes.
The attorneys general said this position fails to acknowledge that craigslist is the only party positioned to stop these ads before they are published. While the perpetrators may eventually be apprehended and brought to justice, the victims -- assuming they survive -- will carry the scars for life, the attorneys general said.
Not alone
But in his blog, Buckmaster suggested that craigslist is being unfairly singled out for criticism while other companies -- including eBay -- continue to profit from pornography and prostitution.
Buckmaster said that eBay's LOQUO.com site offers "tens of thousands of exceptionally hardcore pornographic ads explicity offering sex for sale." He said eBay has blocked access to the site from U.S. addresses but continues to make the site available internationally.
Buckmaster scoffed at eBay's promise to take down the spicy ads.
Ill make a friendly wager that rather than taking down such listings, which eBay has aggressively marketed over the years to a very high level of profitability, upselling their users to higher and higher fees, eBay will instead soon sell their non family friendly sites such as this one to the highest bidder.
