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Craigslist Fights Back, Sues SC Atty General
FredMastro writes "Craigslist has now stepped past just asking for an apology. The Wall Street Journal and CNet report that Craigslist is fighting back. 'Craigslist said it has sued South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, in the latest escalation of a battle over adult-oriented ads on the company's site. Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist's chief executive, said in a blog post that the company filed its suit in federal court in South Carolina. ...'" Unfortunately, the WSJ's piece requires a subscription, but reader Locke2005 adds a link to coverage in the San Jose Business Journal.
People trying to make Craigslist into this big bad fraud sex site is getting old. It's about 2% of US internet traffic, no duh it's got a few hookers on it.
They are filing a civil case against a state's attorney general (which will make it a federal hearing) - alleging what?
That his sidebar remarks that Craiglist executives could have criminal charges filed against them cost them revenue? Affected their listings?
McMaster is an asshole, no doubt. He may as well have said that Hugh Hefner was going to go to jail for publishing that salacious playboy magazine all these years. He is just looking to grandstand, possibly because he thinks he's going to run for governor someday.
I'd like to see Craigslist attorneys hand that douche a slapdown, but I'm not holding my breath that the actual tort here won't get tossed.
Disclaimer: This is total speculation. I have no facts to back this up:
I'm wondering if there are some power printing/publishing interests lobbying the state government to hamstring Craiglists because of the thread that site represents to print advertising.
Consider this section of TFA:
Emphasis mine.
If it weren't for the thread that craigslist represents to print media advertising, I would have concluded that this was just another puritan witch hunt. However, the fact that craigslist has fewer adult services ads than mainstream publishers in the state leads me to speculate that this is about smacking down "unfair competition" from an outsider.
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Seriously, there are quite clear click-through warnings on the site, if you don't want to see adult advertising, don't go into that section. As for illegal activity, it's a public forum so you can expect a certain amount of that sort of thing.
This is the sort of thing that is going to go on regardless of the existence of craigslist. Now at least there is some kind of paper trail if something bad goes down ( kidnapping, murder, etc ) since most people don't secure delete their emails, but if we make sure this all keeps out on the street corner at night, it just makes it all that much more dangerous.
Blog
So Craigslist has become the defacto goto site for cutthroats and ner-do-wells all over the Internet. Why would the SC AG want to shut it down? With Craigslist, if they want to find the criminals, then there they are. Without Craigslist, you'd have to burn up some shoe leather pounding the pavement looking for these people.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
A bit off-topic: I applaud Craigslist, but I noticed this article is arguably more about McMaster than it is about Craigslist.
The bias is not hostile or obvious, as one might expect from stereotyped hostile reporting source, which is not to say that the SJ Business Journal is such. Mostly it is an imbalance in coverage styles and content.
Most paragraphs describe what McMaster did, what he thinks, what he has to say, etc. He is often quoted with his reactions to the suit. His position is explained in detail.
Craigslist, on the other hand, gets comparatively little verbiage in its own words. Craigslist's reaction to McMaster's assertions are stated in broad terms, without McMaster's sense of specificity and precision.
The reader is left with a good idea of McMaster's position and less of Craigslist's. This is a great article for students of propaganda studies to cite when looking for media bias in the news, either deliberate or incidental.
Just a note.
Of course the CEO of Craigslist may never have allowed the erotic services section in the first place if he thought he would be personally taken to court over it. His statement in one of the linked articles was that to truly prevent erotic advertisements in the way the AG wants is to not serve ads to the state of South Carolina. I wonder if he'd take the job if it meant he was on the hook personally for anything potentially illegal that is advertised on the website. Theoretically the court exists to determine if it was the corporation or the individual who was breaking the law or causing harm and to divy the punishment accordingly.
It seems likes there's a purposeful implication that the Adult Section of Craig's List is that it's meant to be for prostitution. It's not.
The Adult Section is just like any of hundreds of online and print services meant to match people of similar interests. It's like Match.com, or Cupid.com for people who really intend to get physical. Often these people do not want a relationship and desire only one time meet-ups. Obviously a desire to do so goes against some conventions, and success in looking for that can be difficult. But there's nothing at all illegal about it.
One might suggest that a purposefully misleading portrait of the Adult Section as an intended service to promote prostitution is an agenda to aid in policing morality. That would be extremely dangerous precedent for a State's AG to pursue.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
As a SC resident, I can say that I'll most certainly be voting against him when he makes his bid for the Governer's office. Not everyone here is backwoods redneck. Hell we have our hookers on the internet!
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
In the US, there are (at least) two types of prostitution, and two main groups of opposition.
Some prostitutes choose to be prostitutes, because it offers them the best income per unit time: they're just doing business. That's what many Americans, particularly libertarians, think of, when they advocate legalizing prostitution. In many countries, this has been the model they've taken.
Some prostitutes are not willing prostitutes -- they've been forced into it. This is primarily seen in the US with child prostitution, where we don't recognize the child's right to choose that particular profession, but in much of the world there is a large market for what is essentially sexual slavery.
Now, for the opposition: religious conservatives don't like the idea of sex outside marriage for a number of reasons. They're actively opposed to legalizing prostitution. Many other people are passively opposed to prostitution because they mentally model it as scabs crossing a union line called marriage, and dragging down the value of sex, to get all economic about it. This general group is going to oppose *any* type of prostitution, whether by choice or coercion.
The second type of opposition: many people oppose prostitution because either they're worried that even if it's primarily voluntary, it'll lead to a rise in involuntary/coerced prostitution, or they have decided that *any* prostitution is involuntary. (See Andrea Dworkin's work, for instance, where she generalizes to claim that any heterosexual act is essentially coercive. I don't agree, but it's unquestionably an influence.) So while this group -- typically on the left/liberal side -- might consider voluntary prostitution okay, they're still uncomfortable with the whole idea.
A lot of European countries have legalized prostitution while making pimping illegal and heavily prosecuted, which would tend (on first inspection) to select for only voluntary prostitution: just business. The problem with this is two-fold. Prostitutes find they make more money, and are safer, when they have someone to back them up in the case of a dispute with a client. One work-around is collectives, or unions, where prostitutes work with each other, but there's a fine line between that and pimping.
So it's not as simple as just saying 'legalize it'.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
If you want to force people to make their participation in sex with hookers a matter of public record, you should force people to make a public record of all sex they've had. (Obligatory: Fixed that for you.)
Perhaps, but entanglements being such as they are, a female, sexual, roommate is not very far away from a wife, practically speaking.
Costs would likely attach that could be considered greater than those of prostitution. E.g. kids and jewelry.