Craigslist bows to pressure, cleans up adult content
By Dave Parrack
Craigslist, a popular online classifieds service, has been forced to clean up the ‘Erotic Services’ section of its site after months of pressure from law enforcement agencies and several other groups. There will still be a section dedicated to the subject, but it will be re-branded as ‘Adult Services’ and will be 100 percent manually moderated.
You can find pretty much anything you want on Craigslist, including sexual encounters and prostitution. This market for selling sex emerged a few years ago as a safer, more controlled alternative to standing on a street corner and picking up random strangers. Unfortunately, even online prostitution proved to be a dangerous affair.
A few weeks ago, the danger of meeting people online became all too apparent when Julissa Brisman was found murdered in a Boston hotel. She is believed to have met her murderer through an advert on Craigslist. A medical student by the name of Philip Markoff has been arrested for the murder but the case is ongoing.
Even before this incident, several law enforcement agencies in the United States had been imploring Craigslist to shut its Erotic Services section. Not only is prostitution illegal in many states, setting up random sexual encounters, paid or otherwise, carry risks the Brisman case highlights only too well.
Craigslist has so far refused to act, but according to The L.A. Times, under increasing pressure from a variety of sources has now tried to reach a compromise it feels will suit both sides of the argument.
Adult Services will now be moderated entirely, whereas the old Erotic Services was not. Also, the price of posting an ad will be increased from $5 to $10 and will only be open to what the site is calling “legal adult services providers” rather than random housewives trying to make a few extra dollars on the side.
This is clearly a balancing act of trying to appease the opponents of the adult section of the site while still keeping it open and adding to the business. Which is, after all, what Craigslist is. The problem for law enforcement agencies is that all this move is likely to do is push online prostitution to other, less publicly known and less accessible, sites. Is moving the problem underground really a suitable solution? Surely that just adds to the danger these people are placing themselves in.
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on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
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May 14th, 2009
I never understood why law enforcement would want to shut down CL this way. It will do exactly as stated, push it to less known sites and make it harder for law enforcement to track down those illegally prostituting themselves via the site. Heck, piece of cake to bust these idiots who posted offers there.
My beef with CL has always been their inadequate scrutiny of the rest of the site. Erotic services ads pop up in other categories FAR too often.