Craigslist: Were sex ads ‘censored’?

“Let’s call the campaign against Craigslist what it was: a pathetic political stunt by headline-hungry politicians,” said Chris O’Brien in the San Jose Mercury News. Under pressure from 18 state attorneys general and the weight of public opinion, the online classifieds behemoth recently shut down its “adult services” section, pasting a “censored” label over it. Critics said that the section was functioning as a virtual red light district, with ads for prostitution and underage sex, resulting in at least “a couple of known cases of murder and sex trafficking.” But “escort” services are widely advertised on the Web and in alternative weeklies, and the coyly worded ads themselves aren’t illegal. “I’m not sure why they were targeted,” said one vice unit investigator. Perhaps it’s because Craigslist, with its high profile and 50 million U.S. users, “generates easy and widespread publicity.”

Perhaps it’s because Craigslist, with its 50 million users, has a “larger ethical responsibility,” said Brad Stone in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. True, there’s only so much the company can do to curb misuse of its site, operating as it does “with all of 30 employees working in a Victorian house in San Francisco.” Yet the company was on track to rake in some $44 million this year from “adult services” alone. It’s time this “famously nonconformist company” stopped pretending it’s a cool start-up and—like YouTube, AOL, Yahoo, and Facebook before it—started policing the site’s content in earnest. “First Amendment absolutists” object to such so-called censorship, said Margaret Carlson in Bloomberg.com, but these sex ads are exploitative and deeply creepy. In one section of the site, “you can buy a couch, and in another, order up a boy or a girl.”

As one of the prostitutes who advertised on Craigslist, said Melissa Petro in HuffingtonPost.com, I have a different perspective. Three years ago, I was a bored, uninhibited graduate student in need of extra cash, so I advertised my services on the site. By carefully scrutinizing the responses, I screened my “dates,” and “best of all, I kept every penny I earned.” Renting my body to strangers wasn’t much fun—in fact, it was “emotionally taxing and spiritually bankrupting,” which is why I quit. But if consenting adults are involved, it’s not the state’s responsibility—“nor its right, in fact”—to protect people like me from our own decisions. Whether I go on Craigslist to sell a couch, or myself, is my business.

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