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Authorities seek to crack down on Craigslist
South Carolina gives site 10 days to pull sex ads or face prosecution
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Craigslist.com, the wildly popular online community and classified bazaar, is coming under intense pressure from law enforcement authorities to eliminate what they say are ads for illegal sexual activities.
South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster sent the company a letter Tuesday giving site leaders 10 days to remove illegal content and prostitution ads or face prosecution, claiming managers had “knowingly allowed the site to be used for illegal and unlawful activity after warnings from law enforcement officials and after an agreement with 40 state attorneys general.”
That was a reference to a deal Craigslist struck in November with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and 43 attorneys general to crack down on ads for prostitution. Under the arrangement, Craigslist said it would require anyone who posted an “erotic services” ad to provide a working telephone number and pay a fee with a valid credit card; Craigslist said it would provide the information to law enforcement if it were subpoenaed.
The crackdown did not involve prepublication approval or review, however, and it did not apply to personal ads, where prostitutes have frequently been found advertising.
In the letter, which was addressed to Jim Buckmaster, the site’s chief executive, McMaster said the site had not kept up its end of the bargain.
“Recent national events, along with ongoing law enforcement efforts in South Carolina, indicate that Craigslist has not installed sufficient safeguards since November to prohibit the Internet site from being used as a vehicle to advertise or solicit prostitution,” it said.
The letter gave Craigslist until 5 p.m. ET on May 15 to remove “the portions of the Internet site dedicated to South Carolina and its municipal regions and which contain categories for and functions allowing for the solicitation of prostitution and the dissemination and posting of graphic pornographic material.”
In a statement Tuesday, the company said it saw “no legal basis whatsoever for filing a lawsuit against Craigslist or its principals and hope that the Attorney General will realize this upon further reflection.”
“We look forward to speaking directly with Attorney General McMaster about his concerns, and finding ways to address them without compromising the utility of Craigslist for South Carolinians, or anyone’s Constitutional rights,” it said.
Ads called illegal, dangerous
McMaster is not the only law enforcement official who is leaning on Craigslist, which Craig Newmark started in 1995 as an e-mail bulletin board and classified-ad service for the San Francisco region. In March, its traffic topped 20 billion page views across 570 local sites in 50 countries, making it one of the 30 most popular destinations on the World Wide Web, according to the Web traffic data company Alexa Internet Inc.
Attorneys general from three other states — Missouri, Connecticut and Illinois — met Tuesday with lawyers for Craigslist to urge the site to shut down its erotic services ads.
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“Anybody who goes on the erotic services section of Craigslist is going to find a set of ads that’s so blatant,” said Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster, who called the ads “not only illegal but dangerous.”
“No one will disagree that this is prostitution in many, many cases,” he said.
In a separate statement after the meeting, Craigslist said it was optimistic that the dispute could be resolved “without compromising the quintessentially American values of free speech embodied in our Constitution.”
Craigslist maintains that its system of user ratings and alerts is sufficient to weed out inappropriate material. In an interview with NBC News last month, Buckmaster said the erotic services section was no different from similar features in newspaper classified ad sections and alternative weekly newspapers, saying the material is “collected in a single category and put behind a warning screen.”
For Craigslist, insult to injury
The public pressure comes at a difficult time for Craigslist, which is in the spotlight in a homicide case. Philip Markoff, 22, a medical student at Boston University, has pleaded not guilty in the death of a 25-year-old massage therapist who had advertised on the site.
Craigslist is not accused of any wrongdoing, but Newmark acknowledged that its connection to the Markoff case and to a handful of similar cases in recent years was a significant blow.
“Despite the billions of times well-meaning people have helped each other through Craigslist, it’s been devastating to see that it can also be used by bad people to take cruel advantage of others and bring a senseless end to a beautiful young life,” Newmark said Sunday at a memorial concert in Eden Prairie, Minn., for Katherine Ann Olson, 24, who was killed in 2007 after answering a fake Craigslist ad for a babysitter.
“The most recent crime in Boston has been a grim reminder of that,” Newmark said.
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