What is it about?
In the mid- to late-2000s, administrators at craigslist.com (an online service that hosts classified advertisements) were under considerable pressure from government officials and various advocacy groups to reduce or eliminate ads for commercial sex activity on their website. Craigslist eventually responded to the pressure by implementing a range of screening procedures to filter ad content. In this study, I examined unique data collected from Craigslist ads in North Carolina in an observational pre–post research design to assess the impact of Craigslist’s enhanced ad screening policies on specific components of commercial sex ads, including their illicit facets.
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Why is it important?
In 2017, a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigation charged employees of backpage.com with manually editing at least some commercial sex ads on the website so that the ads would pass legal muster. Like Craigslist before it, Backpage has long been under pressure to implement improved procedures for screening postings for commercial sex on the site or to disallow the postings entirely. Government officials, along with anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking advocacy groups, argue that the ease with which these websites allow advertisers to post ads for commercial sex facilitates sex trafficking, including trafficking of minors, and related illegal acts. An improved understanding of the impact of Craigslist’s earlier efforts to monitor its ads can help inform the ongoing controversy over commercial sex ads on websites such as backpage.com.
Perspectives
This study demonstrated that Craigslist’s changes in ad screening procedures, in particular its switch to a manual review of prospective "adult services" ads, resulted in visible and significant changes in ad content. Thus, the pressure placed on Craigslist by government officials did inhibit commercial sex advertising to a certain extent, and possibly the underlying market as well. But I think the effectiveness of lawmakers' efforts against web-hosting companies such as Craigslist and Backpage may be limited by the ubiquity of new websites and by the unscreened sections of existing websites that readily accept ads with illicit content.
Shana M Judge
University of New Mexico
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Effect of Measures Taken by Craigslist to Screen Online Ads for Commercial Sex, Social Science Computer Review, July 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0894439317716911.
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