Saturday, May 9, 2009

Showdown

...as South Carolina's Attorney General hates on Craigslist



South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster said May 6th that Craigslist must remove its Erotic Services from the South Carolina portions of its Web site in ten days or face prosecution for allowing the solicitation of prostitution and the dissemination and posting of graphic pornographic material.

Fortunately Craiglist isn't intimidated by the blustering threats of the censors. From their blog,
"...we see 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.

Craigslist has been working closely with law enforcement on these very issues, and by all objective measures has decreased misuse dramatically (approximately 90%) since Craigslist and 43 attorneys general entered into a joint statement less than 6 months ago."

Craigslist's very defensible position in a nut shell is... they tell people that they cannot use their site to engage in illegal activities, when people flag them for doing so they take their ads down, they can't be held responsible for the fact that they can't stop them completely. People use the phone to arrange prostitution engagements but the South Carolina AG isn't suing the cellphone carriers to stop them.

We will keep you posted on the way things play out.

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