Craigslist cuts off access to 'adult' ads

Craigslist, the popular website for classified ads, shut down its adult-services section Saturday and replaced it with a black bar that says "censored."

Law-enforcement officials and groups that oppose human trafficking have been highly critical of Craigslist, saying the adult ads helped facilitate prostitution and the selling of women against their will.

The controversy is one of the most prominent in the debate over free speech on the Web, where anyone can easily and anonymously post anything: Just how much responsibility does a website have for what is posted by its users, or for potential criminal activity that results from the posts?

It's not clear if the closure is permanent, and it appears to only affect ads in the United States.

Craigslist, based in San Francisco, did not respond to requests for comment, and it was unclear whether the block represented a temporary protest against the outside pressure on the company that has lasted several years.

Last month the attorneys general from 17 states sent a letter to Craigslist's chief executive, Jim Buckmaster, and its founder, Craig Newmark, asking the company to immediately remove the adult-services section.

The company, while promising to provide more rigorous oversight of the ads, has defended its right to run them and says it is protected under the federal Communications Decency Act — a position that judges and legal experts have generally backed.

M. Ryan Calo, a senior research fellow at the Stanford Law School's Center for Internet & Society, said, "What's happened here is the states' attorneys general, having failed to win in court and in litigation, have decided to revisit this in the court of public opinion, and in the court of public opinion, they have been much more successful."

Craigslist's adult section carried ads for services ranging from personal massages to a night's companionship, which critics say veered into prostitution.

Buckmaster said in a May blog posting that the company's ads were no worse than those published by the alternative newspaper chain Village Voice Media. He cited one explicit ad that included the phrase: "anything goes $90."

Craigslist has been caught for years in a murky legal fight that centers on how much responsibility the company bears for its ads, said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law and computer science at Harvard University.

Prosecutors can argue Craigslist is an "intermediary" to the crime of prostitution, Zittrain said, but such cases are hard to prove. He said prosecutors must essentially prove that Craigslist knew an ad was a solicitation for prostitution; ads on Craigslist are typically worded more vaguely.

Nonetheless, to avoid a legal showdown, the company has tried to keep "inappropriate activity" off its site by screening ads.

It's unclear if Craigslist thought the attorneys general had a good argument, or if it simply got tired of spending time on the issue. But saying adult services were "censored" rather than just removing them could be seen as a message to prosecutors, Zittrain said.

Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general who helped lead the effort against Craigslist, said Saturday that "these prostitution ads did not promote a victimless crime. There is human trafficking in children, assaults on women."

He said he was pleased that Craigslist appeared to be "doing the right thing voluntarily," but said his office would continue to monitor the site and was trying to determine if Craigslist was closing the section permanently.

The ads in the adult section, which cost $10 to post and $5 to repost, are a big revenue source, analysts say. Craigslist is private and does not report financial figures. But adult ads were expected to bring the company $36 million in revenue this year, according to the Advanced Interactive Media Group, an organization that analyzes Craigslist.

Some Internet-law analysts said Saturday that Craigslist could be sending more than one signal: that it was capitulating to law enforcement and thumbing its nose at it.

"There are multiple ways in which to censor speech; one is directly through the courts, and the other is through a form of protest that says, even if you can do this, stop doing it," said Thomas Burke, a lawyer at Davis Wright Tremaine in San Francisco who specializes in Internet law and is not involved with Craigslist. "Maybe their point in saying they were censored is that people need to understand the law better."

Malika Saada Saar, executive director of the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, a nonprofit that has urged Craigslist to shut the adult-services section and screen the entire site for such ads, said the company should be held responsible for what appears on its site. She said Craigslist "has the legal responsibility, as well as the moral responsibility" to close the section.

Craigslist has taken steps to appease critics before. In May 2009, it removed its "erotic-services" category and replaced it with "adult services," for "postings by legal adult-service providers," and had all adult-services ads screened by a lawyer before posting.

But criticism continues, fueled by prominent cases like that of Philip Markoff, a Boston medical student charged with murdering a woman he met on Craigslist. He pleaded not guilty, and died in jail last month in an apparent suicide.

The section in question appears not to have been blocked abroad. In France, visitors to the site have access to the Erotique link and can see material intended for adults.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.