Craigslist Murder Victim Might be Free Speech
Posted By jss on April 23, 2009
Yes, it was a horrible crime.
But it wasn’t the Internet’s fault. It wasn’t even Craigslist’s fault.
Sex workers worldwide are abused and murdered on a daily basis. Here’s a report from the 1990s … before there even was a Craigslist.
Craigslist has a history of cooperating with authorities; Craigslist also forbids prostitution ads; Craigslist does *more* than the law requires in the way of policing its site. Maybe they want to do more still, but there are many, many, many other Internet sites that won’t. And they don’t have to. Site providers aren’t liable for content on their sites which they don’t post.
Should they be? No. They should have to take user material down when it is pointed out to them that the material is illegal or libelous. Craigslist does this pretty efficiently.
Apparently, a lot of people hook up on craigslist without murdering anyone.
The first Internet serial killer is on death row in Kansas, by the way.
There were 63 non-craigslist murders in Boston in 2008.
Don’t shoot the messenger. Want to ban ads by outcall masseuses? A lot of people make a living that way, without having sex with clients. Do you think you have a way to keep sex workers and clients from communicating that doesn’t adversely affect a lot of other people? Let me know on that one, please.
"Into Temptation" is a usually-but-not-always safe-for-work forum about evolving social-sexual networks and how they have changed and are changing lives. It will also loosely chronicle the research, writing and publication, I hope in 2011, of a book by the same name.
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